Sharon Shoesmith lost her unfair dismissal case yesterday. Despite the “lost” reports and the seventeen amendments to the final Ofsted Report, it was deemed that the judge could not make a ruling in favour of the woman. The decision to sack her was not something that the courts could overturn.
Am I surprised? Not in the slightest.
As soon as they announced the fact that the decision was going to be announced prior to the election, it seemed to me that there was only going to be one outcome. Whilst those of us who work in the public sector are banned from breathing during a time of election, in case it influences a single person’s vote, I hardly felt that a positive decision for Ms. Shoesmith was going to take place this side of May 6th.
Think about the potential impact of such criticism on New Labour, Ballsup, Ofsted and their whole approach to education and social care inspections. Surely, a positive decision for Ms. Shoesmith would have brought all of this deeply into question at a time when partisan declarations in public is not allowed?
One could argue that a negative result for Ms. Shoesmith has done exactly the same – i.e. no criticism against the government condones their alleged actions and we can all move on and continue in the same manner.
Obviously, I am not suggesting that Judge Foskett was influenced in his decision. That would be unthinkable and make a mockery of the neutrality of the governors of the land.
But before Ballsup gets that smirk-like, vindicated look all over his Cheshire Cat face, let us remind ourselves that the judge had some serious reservations about what happened.
Whilst he upheld the decision to sack Shoesmith, he did so with some reservations.
Here is a quote from the Guardian today.
Was Shoesmith made a scapegoat for the Baby Peter tragedy? Some might think so, some may not, was the gist of Foskett's commentary. Was the Ofsted report "beefed up", as Shoesmith's lawyers alleged? Foskett declared it to be outside his remit.
Foskett did feel compelled to comment on aspects of this extraordinary story. He was appalled by some parts of the media's reporting of the case. He was dismayed by Balls's behaviour at the infamous press conference where he put pressure on Haringey to sack its director of children's services without compensation, and troubled by evidence that Ofsted head Christine Gilbert briefed nastily against Shoesmith just hours before Balls dismissed her. "I cannot think that any party will truly look back at how matters were handled in this case with complete satisfaction," the judge concluded.
I’m not sure whether he used the word “appalled” in relation to the media but it would have been a good one to use. Trial by media is a very, very dangerous thing. Shoesmith had to go because someone had to pay a price for this tragic child’s death and she was at the top of the firing line. However, the fact that the media lambasted this woman without knowing anything about her record or even her responsibility reiterates the concern that media bods essentially influence outcomes without there being consideration and time for the full facts to be taken into weighty consideration.
In saying this, I have to say that I am a fully signed up member of the right to the freedom of speech. I am just a little concerned about how the media can have such influence. Had she been in a criminal court, there would have been rules to prevent such commentary before a decision had been made.
Judge Foskett was “dismayed” by Balls’s behaviour.
I’ve been dismayed by Balls’s behaviour for quite a long time thank you very much.
He was reactionary in the extreme during the quoted press conference. As Minister for the Department of Children, Schools and Families, he may have the power to remove any Director of Children’s Services or certainly put pressure on those in charge but there are ways and means of doing this. Ballsup took the decision to make such a suggestion in a very public arena. He was responding to the media, to the Daily Mail and Sun readers. He wanted to show that he was the great man of action rather than doing the dignified and politic thing of going to Haringey to have meetings with the Chief Executive to discuss such issues without the glare of publicity that he so clearly craves.
The fact that he can put such pressure on individual authorities is in itself a concern.
He can pressurise people to sack a Director of Children’s Services (DCS). A DCS can put pressure on governing bodies to sack a head teacher. A head teacher can put pressure on individuals to lose their jobs etcetera, etcetera. This is all well and good where there are stringent and fair capability procedures but less positive when it is a whim, when it is reactive, when it set against unrealistic or inappropriate measures, when it is personal, when it is for ulterior motives.
That is when it becomes dangerous, immoral and open to the most unruly abuse.
If I were Ballsup today, I would be in apoplexy. Maybe that is because I still manage to have some sort of conscience. From what I have read and heard about the judge’s comments, I certainly wouldn’t be smug about the decision. Anyone with half a brain can see that, despite the decision, Mr. Ballsup does not come out of this with much grace or exoneration. He has been criticised, severely. I somehow doubt that he will see it in that light, and there are probably a multitude of spin doctors on the case as I write.
And what of Ofsted? Where does this decision leave that organisation?
The good judge was concerned about the changes to the report and the fact that so many emails went walkabout.
Is he really that naive? Foskett said he was “troubled” by the evidence that Christine Gilbert had had her bout of influence. How did the good judge think this had come about? Did he think that Ms. Gilbert had done this on a whim in response to the media? Did she have a quiet word with Mr. Balls? Did she have a conversation over dinner with her husband who just happened to mention NuLabour’s thinking on what should be done? Was she acting in this way because she knew that the system of which she was head was massively flawed in that they had recently given Haringey a clean bill of health, albeit without spectacular endorsement, and she was essentially covering her own back? Did she think that perhaps the inspection regime was not really getting to the nitty gritty of local authority happenings and there might be the possibility that local authorities could somehow veil the truth of their real practice?
It could be one, many or all of these reasons. To comment specifically on Ofsted, according to Judge Foskett, out of his domain, but he felt a need to comment nonetheless. That, in itself, is quite telling. Those who are prepared to read between the lines should look at his statements very carefully.
“You might very well think that; I couldn’t possibly comment” is a phrase, or near as damn it, that was used most successfully in Michael Dobb’s “House of Cards”. It was a phrase of irony, chosen for a reason.
Perhaps the judge, through this non-comment is trying to direct people to have a serious look at whether a)Ofsted really is independent (ha ha) and b) whether the inspection regime is actually doing the job it allegedly sets out to do.
I am a little dismayed that Foskett felt that the decision on whether the report was “beefed up” was “out of his domain”. Surely, if there were changes to that report, this had a serious impact on the accountability as to whether Shoesmith retained her job or not.
I am not suggesting that she should have retained her job. As I have said previously, someone had to be held accountable but if she lost her job because of the report, if the report was the only form of accountability then of course it must have an influence and be in the judges domain, or am I being naive?
Let us be very clear about this. The report was changed. There was no mention of the ability of the leader in the initial report. By the time the final version came out, there was a statement at the very top of the recommendations. What more evidence is required?
The judge went on to say that "the prospect of summary dismissal with no compensation and a good deal of public opprobrium is hardly likely to be an inducement for someone thinking of taking the job or, perhaps, in some circumstances, continuing in it."
Well, quite frankly, who in their right minds would take such a job in the first instance?
The current structure of Children’s Services is like a double whammy. If you’re not kicked for your attainment in schools, then you might be kicked for the social care offered (or not) to the young people in your charge. There are so many ways that you are culpable, according to this decision; an accountability that was always there, and Shoesmith, like her counterparts knew this.
There are some DCSs who are probably paid more than the Prime Minister and certainly more than his ministers and MPs to do this job. With such high public sector pay there has to be that ultimate accountability. But really, is it appropriate to put an educationalist in charge of social care and visa versa? Ensure that there is some joined up thinking and collaboration. Ensure that those who are actually in contact with children, i.e. in schools and other settings, don’t have to contact 73 different people, organisations and departments to get the much needed support for these poor kids and their families but complete joined up departments may not be the answer.
I haven’t seen a single comment about this in the election. Let us see what the reports of the Shoesmith outcome brings.
On that note, I return to the Guardian for my closing statement, taken from the gloriously amusing Malcolm Tucker commentary; not about this case of course, but it could apply.
I have a quotation to help you, from my soon to be released Little Book of Getting Your Shit Back Together After You've Broken Some Skinny Fuck's Nose for Bringing You News You Didn't Need to Hear Right Now: "It's not the despair that will kill you, it's the hope."
It’s not the despair that will leave us bereft, it is the hope. I’m pretty sure Sharon Shoesmith’s hope has vanished today. Not only that, it shows once more that the system is far greater than the individual.
Are there really no other cases of unfair dismissal or provocation to leaving a job than Shoesmith’s? Of course there are other cases but when you have given your life to education or social care, when you have committed yourself to the good of others sometimes at the expense of yourself and those nearest to you, there’s probably a sad dose of reality that the system is too damn big to take on.
It doesn’t mean that there is not injustice out there. It doesn’t mean that these people have lost the fight but perhaps they are realistic enough to know that the hope of vindication might be a hope too far and maybe the outcome of this case has reiterated that.
As for me, I’m a slow learner. I still hope and I still have the fight of others at the forefront of my hope. And one day, one day that hope will materialise into some sort of vindication when this whole flawed inspection system is looked at properly – for the good of people who have suffered from it, for the good of true and honest accountability, for the good of all children – you know the phrase – Every Child Matters??
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/apr/23/sharon-shoesmith-crisis-child-protection
Saturday, 24 April 2010
Wednesday, 21 April 2010
SATs
I have to say that on my way home from work this evening I was a little confused. Radio Four reiterated to me that the NUT and the NAHT had voted to boycott the Year 6 SATs this year.
Strange, I thought. I was convinced that this time last year there was a similar vote during conference season.
I searched on the Internet and found the following statement.
Britain's biggest teachers' union today unanimously backed moves to boycott next year's Sats in a major escalation of a campaign to force the government to drop the tests.
The National Union of Teachers (NUT) will now ballot members to take industrial action and refuse to administer the Sats in England in 2010, defying government warnings that to do so would be unlawful.
So the important phrase was “backed moves”. Last year the two education unions decided to back moves to ballot for a boycott rather than actually boycott the tests for 2009. Apparently, that wouldn’t have been very fair on the children who were due to take their tests the month after conference. After all, that is what they had been preparing for all year.
So they decided to have a ballot in 2010.
They have now done this and agreed that there is going to be a boycott this year.
The BBC reported on this earlier this evening.
Head teachers have announced plans to boycott next month's Sats tests for primary school pupils in England.
It throws into confusion the national tests due to be taken by hundreds of thousands of 10 and 11 year olds.
Mick Brookes, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, says the boycott is against a "flawed testing regime".
Schools Secretary Ed Balls urged heads to "think hard before disrupting children's learning".
Did everyone get that statement from Ballsup? “Think hard before disrupting children’s learning”.
Can someone please remind me what preparing for SATs has to do with children’s learning?
It’s taken rather a long time since conference season last year to the action taken this year. I am flummoxed as to why the NUT and the NAHT didn’t hold a ballot during the summer term of 2009. Had they done this, an entire Year 6 age group would not have to endure the teaching to test that some (!?) have had to cope with during their last year of primary education.
Personally, I would have held the ballot immediately after the conference to ensure that last year’s eleven year olds didn’t have to take the tests either. They’d already had their final months in primary school ruined. Would they really have felt disheartened and demoralised by not taking the tests? I am sure there could have been sensible conversations with these children explaining the moral injustice that had been placed upon them. Would they really have seen it as a double whammy if they had prepared and then been unable to ‘perform’?
The sad thing is that by not taking the ballot when I feel they ought to have, another cohort of children have had another year of teaching that has been directly relating to passing an examination that will be of no benefit to them or their school whatsoever.
I sat and spoke to my niece the other day. She is eleven and due to take her SATs this year, obviously now dependant on which union her teacher and head teacher are in.
She struggles with her maths and is currently having booster classes to get her to the required Level Four. Like her aunt, she will never have a natural flair for the subject and she will probably have to work with grit and determination to the get the required GCSE when the time comes. Whatever she has to do now, as far as these booster classes, will make no difference to the additional work that will be required when she is sixteen. There is also the possibility that if she does get the required Level Four, this will disguise her problem with maths and she may not receive the additional support in Year Seven and so on. If she attends a school that has streaming, she may be placed in a group that is beyond her natural ability. She will be further demoralised and will feel further inadequacy.
This is what we do to children when we falsely coach them to a level that is above their natural inclination.
This mathematics and booster classes is annoying but it pales into insignificance when one looks at the teaching and encouragement she has received for her writing.
She is an exceptionally creative young girl. Her drawing has both maturity and a real personal touch. One could say that she is gifted.
She has written stories since she has been able to write. She devours books and has frequently been told off by her mother for reading in bed with a small torch once she has been asked to sleep. Her stories are imaginative, flowing, beautifully constructed, eloquent and rather good to read.
Her teacher has made the following criticisms of her writing.
1. She is using too many elaborate words that complicate her sentence structure.
2. She should use more ‘ly’ words in her writing.
3. She should not start any story or sentence with a conjunctive.
4. She would be marked down if she used a start to a story such as the following sentence – “She had gone.”
My niece has therefore learned to ignore her true style of writing in order to get the Level Four, or actually Level Five that has been predicted. How ironic that she is allowed to use “wow” words if they have an ‘ly’ ending but cannot use the innovative words that she has learned to contextualise from her extensive reading.
And, she cannot use a conjunctive to start a sentence ; re-emphasising in the way so many writers do.
As for the start of a story, what precisely is wrong with, “She had gone.”
Where had she gone? Where was she? Why had she gone? What was she getting away from? Who is she with? These are just a few questions that spring to mind on reading such a sentence which makes this reader want to read on. Surely that is something that children should be encouraged to not deterred from writing?
What a sad indictment on our education system and the poor saps of teachers who are so convinced that this form of teaching is for the greater good of the pupils. Can this really be moral?
A few years ago my child was taking his Year 6 SATs. He had a vivid imagination and had a similar experience to his cousin. His unique and exciting writing was too quirky for the exam. It didn’t follow the rules. He used too many words that were allegedly above his comprehension despite the fact that he contextualised them perfectly.
At the end of Year Five, his teacher declared that he had actually shown clear evidence, through teacher assessment that had been verified by other tests, that he had achieved a Level Five in writing. I jokingly asked the head teacher what they were going to do with him for a year before he took his SATs. She haughtily responded that they took very good care of gifted and talented children in the school.
I spent months awaiting the sort of freedom to which I felt my child was entitled. I wanted him to be able to wander off using his imagination to the greatest of effects. Instead there was little differentiation between what he was asked to do and that of his friend who has moderate dyslexia and a Level 3C going into his final year.
I didn’t want special privileges for my child. I just wanted him to be taught and encouraged to develop his style, his originality, his skill. Instead, all I saw was reams and reams of photocopied sheets and boring exercises that he could almost do in his sleep.
Meanwhile, getting him to write a story of his own volition was now proving to be difficult.
It is now three years since I have seen him write for fun in the way he used to.
Now that is immoral, and going back to Ballsup glorious statement today, nobody thought about the interruption to my child’s education by making him endure an entire year of pathetic teaching. In fact, one can hardly use the word ‘teaching’. He was taught nothing.
The head teacher wondered if I wanted to enter him for the Level Six test.
I looked at her incredulously and reminded her that it was only loyalty to her and the school that was making me send him to school during the SATs week.
Had I had the support from others, I would have sent him into school with the option of sitting there and writing absolutely nothing. I wanted to subvert. I wanted him to sabotage his own paper, and I would have done this had I managed to speak to the head teacher of his secondary school to explain what we were doing.
Madness, sheer madness.
The last time I taught Year Six we had tests coming out of every orifice. At that time, they were playing with SATs and we had tests for DT as well as some optional tests for other subjects. I can say with hand on heart that I never taught those children to pass a test. Thankfully, I was given the freedom to teach them how I wanted and how they wanted to learn. We had fun and enjoyment. The focus was still very much on activities rather than the outcome of a standardised test. I never had the children in rows. I hardly had them in groups but I still managed to differentiate the work.
We had debates and discussions about contemporary issues. Entire days were spent scrutinising newspapers over their response to a particular subject. We made bridges and created all sorts of masterpieces of art. We listened to music together and watched extracts from films and television programmes. I taught them how to make notes and how to use these notes to paraphrase and create.
We had competitions in sports between the girls and the boys (their choice, not mine).
We had such fun, and I am sure that if you asked any of these children, who are now approaching thirty, they would say the same.
What was the difference between these children and my child and niece? They all had to do SATs but the difference was that there were no league tables for my Year Six group.
We had the test papers and sometimes, they had their uses to confirm that my own teacher assessment was correct. I would say that I was probably right in my predictions to the tune of 99%. I was not an exceptional teacher. I just knew my children and had the opportunity to use my knowledge to the greater good of the children themselves; their individuality, their skills, their needs.
Today, I congratulate the teachers unions for their decision but once more they have been too slow. Haste was of the essence to prevent another group of children enduring the horror not of the tests but of the teaching that accompanies them.
Each of the main parties are still clinging on to this notion that the SATs give us an indication of how well the children have been taught. Did the SATs a few years ago give any indication that my child had been taught well? On paper, one could argue that he was a success and therefore he had been taught well. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, he had the most appalling year of stagnation and a distinct lack of quality teaching.
SATs do not even tell the story that their damn statistics allegedly indicate and that is before you even get onto the debate about the teaching and learning that cannot be tested and the enjoyment and enthusiasm that should empower young people to want to learn – if only teachers were allowed to do this.
Mr Balls, please have a think before you open your mouth. Why didn’t you, your party and the previous government “think before disrupting children’s learning”? Why did none of you listen to experts? Why did none of you listen and look and see? Why did none of you make any correlation between the UNICEF wellbeing results and the fact that our stressed out children are feeling this pressure?
Why did no-one listen to what Robin Alexander was saying having actually spoken to children and sensed their fear, loathing and trepidation? Why did you not even listen to the government appointed yes-man of Jim Rose who also said that the curriculum was “open to abuse” of being too channelled because of the SATs? Well, dear Jim may not have said that but anyone with half an understanding of education can read between the lines and realise that is what he actually was saying, even it if was by default.
Let us hope that the teaching unions have finally found their voice and they are going to be prepared to use it over the next few months, whatever the outcome of the election.
Strange, I thought. I was convinced that this time last year there was a similar vote during conference season.
I searched on the Internet and found the following statement.
Britain's biggest teachers' union today unanimously backed moves to boycott next year's Sats in a major escalation of a campaign to force the government to drop the tests.
The National Union of Teachers (NUT) will now ballot members to take industrial action and refuse to administer the Sats in England in 2010, defying government warnings that to do so would be unlawful.
So the important phrase was “backed moves”. Last year the two education unions decided to back moves to ballot for a boycott rather than actually boycott the tests for 2009. Apparently, that wouldn’t have been very fair on the children who were due to take their tests the month after conference. After all, that is what they had been preparing for all year.
So they decided to have a ballot in 2010.
They have now done this and agreed that there is going to be a boycott this year.
The BBC reported on this earlier this evening.
Head teachers have announced plans to boycott next month's Sats tests for primary school pupils in England.
It throws into confusion the national tests due to be taken by hundreds of thousands of 10 and 11 year olds.
Mick Brookes, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, says the boycott is against a "flawed testing regime".
Schools Secretary Ed Balls urged heads to "think hard before disrupting children's learning".
Did everyone get that statement from Ballsup? “Think hard before disrupting children’s learning”.
Can someone please remind me what preparing for SATs has to do with children’s learning?
It’s taken rather a long time since conference season last year to the action taken this year. I am flummoxed as to why the NUT and the NAHT didn’t hold a ballot during the summer term of 2009. Had they done this, an entire Year 6 age group would not have to endure the teaching to test that some (!?) have had to cope with during their last year of primary education.
Personally, I would have held the ballot immediately after the conference to ensure that last year’s eleven year olds didn’t have to take the tests either. They’d already had their final months in primary school ruined. Would they really have felt disheartened and demoralised by not taking the tests? I am sure there could have been sensible conversations with these children explaining the moral injustice that had been placed upon them. Would they really have seen it as a double whammy if they had prepared and then been unable to ‘perform’?
The sad thing is that by not taking the ballot when I feel they ought to have, another cohort of children have had another year of teaching that has been directly relating to passing an examination that will be of no benefit to them or their school whatsoever.
I sat and spoke to my niece the other day. She is eleven and due to take her SATs this year, obviously now dependant on which union her teacher and head teacher are in.
She struggles with her maths and is currently having booster classes to get her to the required Level Four. Like her aunt, she will never have a natural flair for the subject and she will probably have to work with grit and determination to the get the required GCSE when the time comes. Whatever she has to do now, as far as these booster classes, will make no difference to the additional work that will be required when she is sixteen. There is also the possibility that if she does get the required Level Four, this will disguise her problem with maths and she may not receive the additional support in Year Seven and so on. If she attends a school that has streaming, she may be placed in a group that is beyond her natural ability. She will be further demoralised and will feel further inadequacy.
This is what we do to children when we falsely coach them to a level that is above their natural inclination.
This mathematics and booster classes is annoying but it pales into insignificance when one looks at the teaching and encouragement she has received for her writing.
She is an exceptionally creative young girl. Her drawing has both maturity and a real personal touch. One could say that she is gifted.
She has written stories since she has been able to write. She devours books and has frequently been told off by her mother for reading in bed with a small torch once she has been asked to sleep. Her stories are imaginative, flowing, beautifully constructed, eloquent and rather good to read.
Her teacher has made the following criticisms of her writing.
1. She is using too many elaborate words that complicate her sentence structure.
2. She should use more ‘ly’ words in her writing.
3. She should not start any story or sentence with a conjunctive.
4. She would be marked down if she used a start to a story such as the following sentence – “She had gone.”
My niece has therefore learned to ignore her true style of writing in order to get the Level Four, or actually Level Five that has been predicted. How ironic that she is allowed to use “wow” words if they have an ‘ly’ ending but cannot use the innovative words that she has learned to contextualise from her extensive reading.
And, she cannot use a conjunctive to start a sentence ; re-emphasising in the way so many writers do.
As for the start of a story, what precisely is wrong with, “She had gone.”
Where had she gone? Where was she? Why had she gone? What was she getting away from? Who is she with? These are just a few questions that spring to mind on reading such a sentence which makes this reader want to read on. Surely that is something that children should be encouraged to not deterred from writing?
What a sad indictment on our education system and the poor saps of teachers who are so convinced that this form of teaching is for the greater good of the pupils. Can this really be moral?
A few years ago my child was taking his Year 6 SATs. He had a vivid imagination and had a similar experience to his cousin. His unique and exciting writing was too quirky for the exam. It didn’t follow the rules. He used too many words that were allegedly above his comprehension despite the fact that he contextualised them perfectly.
At the end of Year Five, his teacher declared that he had actually shown clear evidence, through teacher assessment that had been verified by other tests, that he had achieved a Level Five in writing. I jokingly asked the head teacher what they were going to do with him for a year before he took his SATs. She haughtily responded that they took very good care of gifted and talented children in the school.
I spent months awaiting the sort of freedom to which I felt my child was entitled. I wanted him to be able to wander off using his imagination to the greatest of effects. Instead there was little differentiation between what he was asked to do and that of his friend who has moderate dyslexia and a Level 3C going into his final year.
I didn’t want special privileges for my child. I just wanted him to be taught and encouraged to develop his style, his originality, his skill. Instead, all I saw was reams and reams of photocopied sheets and boring exercises that he could almost do in his sleep.
Meanwhile, getting him to write a story of his own volition was now proving to be difficult.
It is now three years since I have seen him write for fun in the way he used to.
Now that is immoral, and going back to Ballsup glorious statement today, nobody thought about the interruption to my child’s education by making him endure an entire year of pathetic teaching. In fact, one can hardly use the word ‘teaching’. He was taught nothing.
The head teacher wondered if I wanted to enter him for the Level Six test.
I looked at her incredulously and reminded her that it was only loyalty to her and the school that was making me send him to school during the SATs week.
Had I had the support from others, I would have sent him into school with the option of sitting there and writing absolutely nothing. I wanted to subvert. I wanted him to sabotage his own paper, and I would have done this had I managed to speak to the head teacher of his secondary school to explain what we were doing.
Madness, sheer madness.
The last time I taught Year Six we had tests coming out of every orifice. At that time, they were playing with SATs and we had tests for DT as well as some optional tests for other subjects. I can say with hand on heart that I never taught those children to pass a test. Thankfully, I was given the freedom to teach them how I wanted and how they wanted to learn. We had fun and enjoyment. The focus was still very much on activities rather than the outcome of a standardised test. I never had the children in rows. I hardly had them in groups but I still managed to differentiate the work.
We had debates and discussions about contemporary issues. Entire days were spent scrutinising newspapers over their response to a particular subject. We made bridges and created all sorts of masterpieces of art. We listened to music together and watched extracts from films and television programmes. I taught them how to make notes and how to use these notes to paraphrase and create.
We had competitions in sports between the girls and the boys (their choice, not mine).
We had such fun, and I am sure that if you asked any of these children, who are now approaching thirty, they would say the same.
What was the difference between these children and my child and niece? They all had to do SATs but the difference was that there were no league tables for my Year Six group.
We had the test papers and sometimes, they had their uses to confirm that my own teacher assessment was correct. I would say that I was probably right in my predictions to the tune of 99%. I was not an exceptional teacher. I just knew my children and had the opportunity to use my knowledge to the greater good of the children themselves; their individuality, their skills, their needs.
Today, I congratulate the teachers unions for their decision but once more they have been too slow. Haste was of the essence to prevent another group of children enduring the horror not of the tests but of the teaching that accompanies them.
Each of the main parties are still clinging on to this notion that the SATs give us an indication of how well the children have been taught. Did the SATs a few years ago give any indication that my child had been taught well? On paper, one could argue that he was a success and therefore he had been taught well. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, he had the most appalling year of stagnation and a distinct lack of quality teaching.
SATs do not even tell the story that their damn statistics allegedly indicate and that is before you even get onto the debate about the teaching and learning that cannot be tested and the enjoyment and enthusiasm that should empower young people to want to learn – if only teachers were allowed to do this.
Mr Balls, please have a think before you open your mouth. Why didn’t you, your party and the previous government “think before disrupting children’s learning”? Why did none of you listen to experts? Why did none of you listen and look and see? Why did none of you make any correlation between the UNICEF wellbeing results and the fact that our stressed out children are feeling this pressure?
Why did no-one listen to what Robin Alexander was saying having actually spoken to children and sensed their fear, loathing and trepidation? Why did you not even listen to the government appointed yes-man of Jim Rose who also said that the curriculum was “open to abuse” of being too channelled because of the SATs? Well, dear Jim may not have said that but anyone with half an understanding of education can read between the lines and realise that is what he actually was saying, even it if was by default.
Let us hope that the teaching unions have finally found their voice and they are going to be prepared to use it over the next few months, whatever the outcome of the election.
Tuesday, 20 April 2010
Crossing the Channels
Well how bizarre is this!
Following on from yesterday’s report, I am currently sitting in the Club Lounge of the P&O Ferry Pride of Calais. I have not turned into a snob who prefers to travel in luxurious settings. The fact was that if I paid an extra £10 for this, I was guaranteed a full refund should there be any complications with the travel. As the French rail drivers were still deciding whether they were going to operate, or cooperate, it seemed a decent investment.
Meanwhile, I am sitting at a desk, sipping complementary fresh orange juice and eating complementary biscuits and looking at complementary toblerones. My lap top is plugged in and I have just been skyping my friend in Australia to complete a conversation that we started earlier today. Had I had my headphones with me I could have spoken to her too and shown her the view of the approaching French coast.
I am fascinated by technology. I don’t necessarily have a burning desire to know how it all works. I am merely grateful for the advances that means keeping in touch with important people is relatively easy.
When my friend first arrived in the UK from Australia in 1990, I don’t think any of my particular group of peers possessed a mobile phone. My friend J was the first one to get one and that was probably in the middle of the 90s. To think that I can now phone S in Australia via Skype at any time of the day totally free of charge with a full video call is simply astounding. If the greedy companies could get themselves sorted out to ensure that there is not this huge cost between the UK and the continent, I could continue talking to her for no money either. Surely, the time has come for us all to be able to access free internet at any point. I’m happy to pay for my dongle, which I bought a few months ago. It really ought to be useable as I transfer from one side of the Channel to the other.
Dongles, laptops, mobile phones, iPods, cameras, camcorders, satnavs – even taking a day trip or a half day trip across the Channel is full of equipment and chargers. That is one slight draw back but it is worth it. I can amuse myself for the next hour and not get agitated that I am in the middle of the ocean. I can see France approaching although it seems to have disappeared in the mist at present and I can take photos with my newly charged camera. I’m almost regretting the fact that I left the camcorder at home.
The mobile phone is an incredible resource and a wonderful invention. I would not be without mine for anything. I don’t really mind about what type it is though I do love the accessibility to emails and so forth as well as my photos and the information applications. I quite like the games too when I want to lose a few moments to insignificant activity.
I lost my first mobile phone in a service station in Devon. It was a great wad of a thing; cumbersome, black and you had to extend the antennae out to receive or make calls. The phone that I had before the iPhone was so small I constantly lost it in the depths of my bag. Yet for all the faults of always been accessible, they are so much a part of our lives now that you can hardly begin to imagine life without one. It wasn’t so long ago that people didn’t have landlines in homes. An amazing journey has taken place to where we are now.
So, I am waiting for a phone call from my sister to say that she has arrived in Calais. Without this technology, it would be far more difficult to rendezvous. Even if I get lost driving round Calais alone for the first time, I can simply phone her and keep in touch. Also, the Satnav is already set to ensure that I meet up without too many problems.
And yet for all the technological advancements, there are so many ways that our society is still resolutely in the dark ages of pre-mobile phone existence.
Spiritually we are pretty bereft and the revolution has yet to take place. Emotionally, there is no cohesion in truth apart from pockets here and there. As a society we are well and truly stuck in the Thatcherism of me, myself and I. That is going to take generations to overturn.
However, having read another blog this morning, with accompanying hyperlinks for me to view, I was filled with a sense of hope.
This is quite amazing considering some of what was written referred to the hopelessness of our hopes in 1997. One newspaper columnist stated that she thought she had been voting Labour in 1997 but it turned out that she had mistakenly voted Tory, not because she had ticked the wrong box but the “right box” had not even stopped at a shade of purple. It had gone all the way to True Blue.
The ceaseless list of New Labour policies that were adopted to placate the roaming voters and Middle England is quite astounding when you see it written down in black and white. Even the spending on education and health can be drawn to question when you look at it in the right context. Major’s government was hardly social democratic and yet even they didn’t go as far as certain Labour policies like student tuition fees to name but one that particular raises my hackles.
Yet, we are in a time of hope as one should always try to be immediately prior to an election. As the 6th May approaches, I may change my mind and become as despondent as I was on that infamous night of 9th April 1992 when all my hopes vanished in a haze of apoplexy.
The hope, for me, does not lie in the election of one party. Rather it lies in the election of no party. The vision and the social democracy that I believe in and value could happen. It would mean people disregarding their old, familiar ways and their set assumptions around party loyalty. These politicians, following on from the expenses fiasco, would have to do some more rethinking, and people would have to work together.
Let’s face facts, I, like other people who feel disenfranchised by this government have had to do some serious rethinking. As a lifelong supporter of the Labour Party, as someone who genuinely feels committed to social equality and the ending of all injustice and prejudice, I have had to rethink.
As it happens, this is pretty easy for me to do. I live in a Tory stronghold, or should I say stranglehold. There is never likely to be another colour of MP in this constituency even if proportional representation was in place.
However, if I was in a different type of constituency, I would have to really consider how I voted.
I cannot vote for a party who does not seem to believe in the things that I hold dear. Admittedly, my ideology may have more in common with Dennis Skinner than Simon Hughes but the policies and manifestos of these two parties veer me towards the yellow rather than the red.
I don’t think I can possibly explain in this short blog how much that pains me to say. It is actually heartbreaking. By even considering such a move, I feel as though I am betraying my truest love, my father and mother, my entire belief system. However, it is because I have a belief system and values that I have to say this.
I cannot vote Labour because to do so would give them the mandate to continue in this shoddy vein.
I remember having an argument with people in 1987 and again in 1992 about whether Labour should shift ever more central just to get elected. I vehemently refused such an idea. I was accused of being an idealist. Even my cousin, who has since rescinded his Red Card, said that there had to be some shift towards the centre in order for “us” to be elected.
Only at what cost? The cost of everything that you believe in? Free education for all who want it? Free health services where the rich or even the middle classes don’t have to jump the queue by paying a few bob or two? A fair and valued judicial system? A fair and honest approach to government that berids us of the second unelected chamber and the anachronism of a constitutional monarchy? An economy run for the good of the people rather than the good of the few? Brave decisions? Appeasement? Integrity?
And I haven’t even started on the war.
We sold out. Let’s face the facts. We sold out to the highest bidder for the sheer hopefulness of power and the final stampede against Thatcher, even though she had long since gone.
We sold out because it was apparently the only way to get elected and those of us who agreed, albeit subconsciously, to this trade off were anticipating a way back to socialism, at the very least with the second term.
We remain disappointed.
So why the hope?
Well, with Clegg doing so well last Thursday, there is a strong possibility that the Liberal Democrats are going to get a fair share of the vote. With the first past the post system that we currently have, even if they have the majority of people voting for them, they will not get elected into government unless something utterly sensational happens. However, the number of MPs that do get returned to parliament of the yellow variety could dramatically increase.
The projected hung parliament has taken on a completely different scene all of a sudden.
Prior to this major swing, either the Tories could have been reliant on UKIP and even Nick Griffin should he get elected, or Labour would have been in the hands of all sorts of Celtic arrangements with Alex Salmond and his Plaid Cymru counterpart.
With a workable number of Liberal Democrat MPs the power of Clegg and his party increases dramatically. Labour, if they want Liberal support will not be able to stop merely at promising electoral reform. They will have to fully consider Cable’s economic stability ideas. They will have to consider the costings and the philosophy behind the very sensible education package that is currently on offer from the Lib Dems. They will have to look again at the tax system, ensuring that those top 1%ers get taxed properly and fairly for the good of all.
Not only that, but those who hold power within the Labour Party are going to have to listen to the left. In order to secure their support, they are going to have to listen to their views and ideas. They are going to have to reconsider some of their policies and potentially move in a different direction.
This is no longer a two party state, we hope. This is no longer about a tiny minority of MPs holding the balance of power. This is something else entirely.
But what excites me most is the idea that people are going to have to look at policies properly without having to hide behind the party lines. There is a real hope for democracy being the real winner here.
I’m not sure what this has to do with mobile phones and communication, other than the fact that writing my thoughts down like this has eased the considerable stress of getting from Dover to Calais.
But of course, it has everything to do with communications and embracing technology and new ideas and change.
It is all about crossing the channels. Even a phobic like me has to do it at some point in their life.
Maintenant, le soliel est dans la ciel bleu et j’arrive en France a ce moment.
Time to go.
A bientot.
Following on from yesterday’s report, I am currently sitting in the Club Lounge of the P&O Ferry Pride of Calais. I have not turned into a snob who prefers to travel in luxurious settings. The fact was that if I paid an extra £10 for this, I was guaranteed a full refund should there be any complications with the travel. As the French rail drivers were still deciding whether they were going to operate, or cooperate, it seemed a decent investment.
Meanwhile, I am sitting at a desk, sipping complementary fresh orange juice and eating complementary biscuits and looking at complementary toblerones. My lap top is plugged in and I have just been skyping my friend in Australia to complete a conversation that we started earlier today. Had I had my headphones with me I could have spoken to her too and shown her the view of the approaching French coast.
I am fascinated by technology. I don’t necessarily have a burning desire to know how it all works. I am merely grateful for the advances that means keeping in touch with important people is relatively easy.
When my friend first arrived in the UK from Australia in 1990, I don’t think any of my particular group of peers possessed a mobile phone. My friend J was the first one to get one and that was probably in the middle of the 90s. To think that I can now phone S in Australia via Skype at any time of the day totally free of charge with a full video call is simply astounding. If the greedy companies could get themselves sorted out to ensure that there is not this huge cost between the UK and the continent, I could continue talking to her for no money either. Surely, the time has come for us all to be able to access free internet at any point. I’m happy to pay for my dongle, which I bought a few months ago. It really ought to be useable as I transfer from one side of the Channel to the other.
Dongles, laptops, mobile phones, iPods, cameras, camcorders, satnavs – even taking a day trip or a half day trip across the Channel is full of equipment and chargers. That is one slight draw back but it is worth it. I can amuse myself for the next hour and not get agitated that I am in the middle of the ocean. I can see France approaching although it seems to have disappeared in the mist at present and I can take photos with my newly charged camera. I’m almost regretting the fact that I left the camcorder at home.
The mobile phone is an incredible resource and a wonderful invention. I would not be without mine for anything. I don’t really mind about what type it is though I do love the accessibility to emails and so forth as well as my photos and the information applications. I quite like the games too when I want to lose a few moments to insignificant activity.
I lost my first mobile phone in a service station in Devon. It was a great wad of a thing; cumbersome, black and you had to extend the antennae out to receive or make calls. The phone that I had before the iPhone was so small I constantly lost it in the depths of my bag. Yet for all the faults of always been accessible, they are so much a part of our lives now that you can hardly begin to imagine life without one. It wasn’t so long ago that people didn’t have landlines in homes. An amazing journey has taken place to where we are now.
So, I am waiting for a phone call from my sister to say that she has arrived in Calais. Without this technology, it would be far more difficult to rendezvous. Even if I get lost driving round Calais alone for the first time, I can simply phone her and keep in touch. Also, the Satnav is already set to ensure that I meet up without too many problems.
And yet for all the technological advancements, there are so many ways that our society is still resolutely in the dark ages of pre-mobile phone existence.
Spiritually we are pretty bereft and the revolution has yet to take place. Emotionally, there is no cohesion in truth apart from pockets here and there. As a society we are well and truly stuck in the Thatcherism of me, myself and I. That is going to take generations to overturn.
However, having read another blog this morning, with accompanying hyperlinks for me to view, I was filled with a sense of hope.
This is quite amazing considering some of what was written referred to the hopelessness of our hopes in 1997. One newspaper columnist stated that she thought she had been voting Labour in 1997 but it turned out that she had mistakenly voted Tory, not because she had ticked the wrong box but the “right box” had not even stopped at a shade of purple. It had gone all the way to True Blue.
The ceaseless list of New Labour policies that were adopted to placate the roaming voters and Middle England is quite astounding when you see it written down in black and white. Even the spending on education and health can be drawn to question when you look at it in the right context. Major’s government was hardly social democratic and yet even they didn’t go as far as certain Labour policies like student tuition fees to name but one that particular raises my hackles.
Yet, we are in a time of hope as one should always try to be immediately prior to an election. As the 6th May approaches, I may change my mind and become as despondent as I was on that infamous night of 9th April 1992 when all my hopes vanished in a haze of apoplexy.
The hope, for me, does not lie in the election of one party. Rather it lies in the election of no party. The vision and the social democracy that I believe in and value could happen. It would mean people disregarding their old, familiar ways and their set assumptions around party loyalty. These politicians, following on from the expenses fiasco, would have to do some more rethinking, and people would have to work together.
Let’s face facts, I, like other people who feel disenfranchised by this government have had to do some serious rethinking. As a lifelong supporter of the Labour Party, as someone who genuinely feels committed to social equality and the ending of all injustice and prejudice, I have had to rethink.
As it happens, this is pretty easy for me to do. I live in a Tory stronghold, or should I say stranglehold. There is never likely to be another colour of MP in this constituency even if proportional representation was in place.
However, if I was in a different type of constituency, I would have to really consider how I voted.
I cannot vote for a party who does not seem to believe in the things that I hold dear. Admittedly, my ideology may have more in common with Dennis Skinner than Simon Hughes but the policies and manifestos of these two parties veer me towards the yellow rather than the red.
I don’t think I can possibly explain in this short blog how much that pains me to say. It is actually heartbreaking. By even considering such a move, I feel as though I am betraying my truest love, my father and mother, my entire belief system. However, it is because I have a belief system and values that I have to say this.
I cannot vote Labour because to do so would give them the mandate to continue in this shoddy vein.
I remember having an argument with people in 1987 and again in 1992 about whether Labour should shift ever more central just to get elected. I vehemently refused such an idea. I was accused of being an idealist. Even my cousin, who has since rescinded his Red Card, said that there had to be some shift towards the centre in order for “us” to be elected.
Only at what cost? The cost of everything that you believe in? Free education for all who want it? Free health services where the rich or even the middle classes don’t have to jump the queue by paying a few bob or two? A fair and valued judicial system? A fair and honest approach to government that berids us of the second unelected chamber and the anachronism of a constitutional monarchy? An economy run for the good of the people rather than the good of the few? Brave decisions? Appeasement? Integrity?
And I haven’t even started on the war.
We sold out. Let’s face the facts. We sold out to the highest bidder for the sheer hopefulness of power and the final stampede against Thatcher, even though she had long since gone.
We sold out because it was apparently the only way to get elected and those of us who agreed, albeit subconsciously, to this trade off were anticipating a way back to socialism, at the very least with the second term.
We remain disappointed.
So why the hope?
Well, with Clegg doing so well last Thursday, there is a strong possibility that the Liberal Democrats are going to get a fair share of the vote. With the first past the post system that we currently have, even if they have the majority of people voting for them, they will not get elected into government unless something utterly sensational happens. However, the number of MPs that do get returned to parliament of the yellow variety could dramatically increase.
The projected hung parliament has taken on a completely different scene all of a sudden.
Prior to this major swing, either the Tories could have been reliant on UKIP and even Nick Griffin should he get elected, or Labour would have been in the hands of all sorts of Celtic arrangements with Alex Salmond and his Plaid Cymru counterpart.
With a workable number of Liberal Democrat MPs the power of Clegg and his party increases dramatically. Labour, if they want Liberal support will not be able to stop merely at promising electoral reform. They will have to fully consider Cable’s economic stability ideas. They will have to consider the costings and the philosophy behind the very sensible education package that is currently on offer from the Lib Dems. They will have to look again at the tax system, ensuring that those top 1%ers get taxed properly and fairly for the good of all.
Not only that, but those who hold power within the Labour Party are going to have to listen to the left. In order to secure their support, they are going to have to listen to their views and ideas. They are going to have to reconsider some of their policies and potentially move in a different direction.
This is no longer a two party state, we hope. This is no longer about a tiny minority of MPs holding the balance of power. This is something else entirely.
But what excites me most is the idea that people are going to have to look at policies properly without having to hide behind the party lines. There is a real hope for democracy being the real winner here.
I’m not sure what this has to do with mobile phones and communication, other than the fact that writing my thoughts down like this has eased the considerable stress of getting from Dover to Calais.
But of course, it has everything to do with communications and embracing technology and new ideas and change.
It is all about crossing the channels. Even a phobic like me has to do it at some point in their life.
Maintenant, le soliel est dans la ciel bleu et j’arrive en France a ce moment.
Time to go.
A bientot.
Sunday, 18 April 2010
Clouds of Ash and Consideration
The Big Ash in the Sky and the Big Rip off back on Earth
Humanity defies belief sometimes. There is such ruthlessness and inflexibility in humankind that makes me cringe with embarrassment at the behaviour of some of our species.
Disasters either bring out the very best in people or the very worst. Admittedly being stranded in a foreign country can hardly be referred to as a disaster. It is a mere inconvenience in most cases, though there are growing concerns about medical aid and support should this no fly zone continue.
Currently, I have two siblings who are stranded abroad. My brother is in Gambia with no sign of any feasible return for the immediate future. The plane that is due to transport him home is currently stuck in Goa and has to return to Gatwick before it returns to Banjul to collect the stranded Brits. Despite a slight concern about malaria tablets and a begrudging acknowledgement that Premier football matches will continue without his presence, he is stoically sitting by the pool in heat beyond 35 degrees and just accepting that there is nothing that can be done.
Meanwhile, my sister is nearer to home with viable alternatives for a return home than the air service which got her to the South of France in the first place.
We have finally managed to get her and her family onto a train to Paris and a connection to Calais. From there I am going to have to collect her.
Apparently, you can book a vehicle on a ferry to and from Calais but you cannot book for foot passengers from Calais to Dover. I know – utterly bizarre!
So in all likelihood, I now have to travel to Calais tomorrow afternoon to pick her up assuming that she has managed to get to Calais.
However, this is not the end of the story. She phoned me early this morning to explain that she couldn’t get foot passenger bookings but I could book myself with car onto a ferry. She also explained that she was in the process of booking the train from Nice to Calais but did not want to do so until there was some assurance that I would be able to meet her.
Within a reasonable amount of time, I managed to contact the ferry service via the internet and assured her I would be able to book a crossing.
She then went on to book her train ticket at a grossly inflated price, only to discover that the French train drivers were still on strike and that only two out of three TGVs were going to be operating tomorrow.
Now being the good socialist that I am, I absolutely believe in the right to strike. It is an integral part of democracy and Thatcher’s legislation to prevent strikes and secondary striking was one of the most abhorrent things that she did. However, there are times when one would hope that people could set their differences aside for a while so that the excellent service that they provide can operate for the good of all. The unions would gain a huge amount of respect in doing so and may further their cause as a result.
Being a Francophile, I also respect and almost admire the French nonchalant attitude but once more, there is a time and a place. Being dogmatic, determined and utterly stubborn when there is an alternative possibility of helping fellow human beings doesn’t seem to me to be a very helpful way of dealing with things.
So we wait to see if the aforementioned TGV arrives and departs from St. Raphael as intended.
Meanwhile, it is with pleasure that I congratulate some organisations whilst spitting on the capitalist dross of others.
My sister booked her holiday with Thompson’s. She was staying at a campsite in one of these luxury caravans. On hearing that they were not going to be able to travel back on Friday, she approached Thompson’s and the camp site manager’s who were immediate in their response that they could remain in the accommodation without incurring additional costs. Good for them!
They then contacted the car hire people to see if they could extend the use of the car. They had been paying 40 euros per day. On receipt of the joy of further unexpected sales, this company decided to increase the daily rate for those in possession of their cars to 65 euros per day. Not only that, my brother in law had asked, due to the circumstances, if he could leave the car in St. Raphael rather than drive it back to Nice airport where they collected it. For this particular privilege, the car company was going to charge 390 euros despite the fact that it is a mere 65km from St. Raphael to Nice. Not exactly full of the joys of humankind really, is it?
Eurostar appear to have inflated their prices beyond the pockets of most people. When I looked on the site on Friday, it appeared that it was going to cost something around £900 for the three of them to return to Britain. By the time that my sister had tried to book with them yesterday, this had risen by a further amount – admittedly that could be due to the proximity to the day of travel but you would have thought there could be some thought and consideration at these times.
Meanwhile, once more, my sister had looked to see if there was any accommodation in Calais should there be a need to stay over there. Two hotels that she looked at had increased their prices from 40 euros per night to 160 euros. It’s immoral, it really is!
Back with the airlines, and there seems to be even less consideration. Some of the airlines like British Airways are being more helpful than others. Despite my sister scrutinizing the small print and finding a clause to state that a cancellation under any circumstances for longer than five hours requires the airline to provide either accommodation or accommodation costs, the company with which they were flying would not agree to this. The further suggestion that should people wish to choose alternative transport and have that reimbursed if the airline could not schedule flights also seems to have been rescinded. I expect that there is going to be a huge litigation process to go through should they wish to contest their actions.
You see, humans aren’t very nice, and the idea of getting a pretty easy buck out of the misery or inconvenience of others is a fairly sick way of living in my opinion. I know that it is naive of me to think any other way is feasible for capitalism rules ok but it doesn’t have to be like that.
Here’s some better news.
Once I had overcome the stupidity of having to travel with a large piece of metal to Calais to collect my sister rather than managing to get her on as a foot passenger and meeting her in Dover, I contacted P and O to book my ferry.
As a small aside, I think I dislike travelling on ferries almost as much as I dislike flying. The prospect of doing it on my own is not one I relish but needs must.
The first person that I spoke to this morning was exceptionally helpful and showed no malice when I told her I wanted to check out the availability of Eurotunnel as a preferred means of transport. The second person was equally as useful and charming despite the provocation of me having an additional phone call simultaneously with my brother in law. The third person, who I eventually booked my travel with, was absolutely brilliant. She explained the best deal and the fact that if I booked myself into the luxury suite even for one journey, this would mean that I have entitlement to a full refund should I not be required to travel. The cost of £40 was far less than the only alternative offered by Eurotunnel which currently stands at £102 per journey. They have apparently sold out of the £22 per journey slots yet have plenty of £102 slots despite the fact that those travelling in the more expensive slots may be travelling back on the same day and are travelling in the same booths as those paying a fraction of that price.
I was so impressed with the courtesy, consideration and all round human kindness that I insisted she give me the customer service email so that I could make a positive comment on the service. Not only that, P and O are not inflating their prices at all to accommodate the additional traffic that is coming their way, and I hope that they will benefit from this sensible and sensitive approach.
I am not a great fan of ferry travel, as I have stated, but I would seriously consider returning to this organisation for the mere fact that they have been so accommodating and have not had a fit of the hysterical capitalist. Good on them!
So there we have it – the good and the not so good of humanity in dealing with a little inconvenient cloud of dust that sits above our silent skies.
Looking out on a ceaseless blue sky today, I am rather enjoying the clarity of the day without the streams of exhaust from the aeroplanes. It makes such an amazing difference.
But like it or not, the world needs aeroplanes. I need aeroplanes if I am going to get on in life and travel to places that I dream of seeing but it is a lovely, quiet and beautiful interlude at present.
As for humanity, well hopefully lessons may be learned but I doubt it. There will always be those who have no scruples. Look at the looters in earthquake ridden places or the atrocities that happened in New Orleans after the hurricane. There is downright evil around every corner from top to bottom. There is a huge difference between looting for need and looting for profit. The same applies to our biggest organisations. Some costs have to be incurred due to certain situations. Other costs are placed on victims without rationality other than to make money. That is not a society that I want to be part of.
.................................................................
A footnote: I finally found out how to get a euro sign into my writing only for blogspot to be unable to recognise it. Any help in ensuring that this does not happen again would be gratefully received. Same with the ampersand!
Humanity defies belief sometimes. There is such ruthlessness and inflexibility in humankind that makes me cringe with embarrassment at the behaviour of some of our species.
Disasters either bring out the very best in people or the very worst. Admittedly being stranded in a foreign country can hardly be referred to as a disaster. It is a mere inconvenience in most cases, though there are growing concerns about medical aid and support should this no fly zone continue.
Currently, I have two siblings who are stranded abroad. My brother is in Gambia with no sign of any feasible return for the immediate future. The plane that is due to transport him home is currently stuck in Goa and has to return to Gatwick before it returns to Banjul to collect the stranded Brits. Despite a slight concern about malaria tablets and a begrudging acknowledgement that Premier football matches will continue without his presence, he is stoically sitting by the pool in heat beyond 35 degrees and just accepting that there is nothing that can be done.
Meanwhile, my sister is nearer to home with viable alternatives for a return home than the air service which got her to the South of France in the first place.
We have finally managed to get her and her family onto a train to Paris and a connection to Calais. From there I am going to have to collect her.
Apparently, you can book a vehicle on a ferry to and from Calais but you cannot book for foot passengers from Calais to Dover. I know – utterly bizarre!
So in all likelihood, I now have to travel to Calais tomorrow afternoon to pick her up assuming that she has managed to get to Calais.
However, this is not the end of the story. She phoned me early this morning to explain that she couldn’t get foot passenger bookings but I could book myself with car onto a ferry. She also explained that she was in the process of booking the train from Nice to Calais but did not want to do so until there was some assurance that I would be able to meet her.
Within a reasonable amount of time, I managed to contact the ferry service via the internet and assured her I would be able to book a crossing.
She then went on to book her train ticket at a grossly inflated price, only to discover that the French train drivers were still on strike and that only two out of three TGVs were going to be operating tomorrow.
Now being the good socialist that I am, I absolutely believe in the right to strike. It is an integral part of democracy and Thatcher’s legislation to prevent strikes and secondary striking was one of the most abhorrent things that she did. However, there are times when one would hope that people could set their differences aside for a while so that the excellent service that they provide can operate for the good of all. The unions would gain a huge amount of respect in doing so and may further their cause as a result.
Being a Francophile, I also respect and almost admire the French nonchalant attitude but once more, there is a time and a place. Being dogmatic, determined and utterly stubborn when there is an alternative possibility of helping fellow human beings doesn’t seem to me to be a very helpful way of dealing with things.
So we wait to see if the aforementioned TGV arrives and departs from St. Raphael as intended.
Meanwhile, it is with pleasure that I congratulate some organisations whilst spitting on the capitalist dross of others.
My sister booked her holiday with Thompson’s. She was staying at a campsite in one of these luxury caravans. On hearing that they were not going to be able to travel back on Friday, she approached Thompson’s and the camp site manager’s who were immediate in their response that they could remain in the accommodation without incurring additional costs. Good for them!
They then contacted the car hire people to see if they could extend the use of the car. They had been paying 40 euros per day. On receipt of the joy of further unexpected sales, this company decided to increase the daily rate for those in possession of their cars to 65 euros per day. Not only that, my brother in law had asked, due to the circumstances, if he could leave the car in St. Raphael rather than drive it back to Nice airport where they collected it. For this particular privilege, the car company was going to charge 390 euros despite the fact that it is a mere 65km from St. Raphael to Nice. Not exactly full of the joys of humankind really, is it?
Eurostar appear to have inflated their prices beyond the pockets of most people. When I looked on the site on Friday, it appeared that it was going to cost something around £900 for the three of them to return to Britain. By the time that my sister had tried to book with them yesterday, this had risen by a further amount – admittedly that could be due to the proximity to the day of travel but you would have thought there could be some thought and consideration at these times.
Meanwhile, once more, my sister had looked to see if there was any accommodation in Calais should there be a need to stay over there. Two hotels that she looked at had increased their prices from 40 euros per night to 160 euros. It’s immoral, it really is!
Back with the airlines, and there seems to be even less consideration. Some of the airlines like British Airways are being more helpful than others. Despite my sister scrutinizing the small print and finding a clause to state that a cancellation under any circumstances for longer than five hours requires the airline to provide either accommodation or accommodation costs, the company with which they were flying would not agree to this. The further suggestion that should people wish to choose alternative transport and have that reimbursed if the airline could not schedule flights also seems to have been rescinded. I expect that there is going to be a huge litigation process to go through should they wish to contest their actions.
You see, humans aren’t very nice, and the idea of getting a pretty easy buck out of the misery or inconvenience of others is a fairly sick way of living in my opinion. I know that it is naive of me to think any other way is feasible for capitalism rules ok but it doesn’t have to be like that.
Here’s some better news.
Once I had overcome the stupidity of having to travel with a large piece of metal to Calais to collect my sister rather than managing to get her on as a foot passenger and meeting her in Dover, I contacted P and O to book my ferry.
As a small aside, I think I dislike travelling on ferries almost as much as I dislike flying. The prospect of doing it on my own is not one I relish but needs must.
The first person that I spoke to this morning was exceptionally helpful and showed no malice when I told her I wanted to check out the availability of Eurotunnel as a preferred means of transport. The second person was equally as useful and charming despite the provocation of me having an additional phone call simultaneously with my brother in law. The third person, who I eventually booked my travel with, was absolutely brilliant. She explained the best deal and the fact that if I booked myself into the luxury suite even for one journey, this would mean that I have entitlement to a full refund should I not be required to travel. The cost of £40 was far less than the only alternative offered by Eurotunnel which currently stands at £102 per journey. They have apparently sold out of the £22 per journey slots yet have plenty of £102 slots despite the fact that those travelling in the more expensive slots may be travelling back on the same day and are travelling in the same booths as those paying a fraction of that price.
I was so impressed with the courtesy, consideration and all round human kindness that I insisted she give me the customer service email so that I could make a positive comment on the service. Not only that, P and O are not inflating their prices at all to accommodate the additional traffic that is coming their way, and I hope that they will benefit from this sensible and sensitive approach.
I am not a great fan of ferry travel, as I have stated, but I would seriously consider returning to this organisation for the mere fact that they have been so accommodating and have not had a fit of the hysterical capitalist. Good on them!
So there we have it – the good and the not so good of humanity in dealing with a little inconvenient cloud of dust that sits above our silent skies.
Looking out on a ceaseless blue sky today, I am rather enjoying the clarity of the day without the streams of exhaust from the aeroplanes. It makes such an amazing difference.
But like it or not, the world needs aeroplanes. I need aeroplanes if I am going to get on in life and travel to places that I dream of seeing but it is a lovely, quiet and beautiful interlude at present.
As for humanity, well hopefully lessons may be learned but I doubt it. There will always be those who have no scruples. Look at the looters in earthquake ridden places or the atrocities that happened in New Orleans after the hurricane. There is downright evil around every corner from top to bottom. There is a huge difference between looting for need and looting for profit. The same applies to our biggest organisations. Some costs have to be incurred due to certain situations. Other costs are placed on victims without rationality other than to make money. That is not a society that I want to be part of.
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A footnote: I finally found out how to get a euro sign into my writing only for blogspot to be unable to recognise it. Any help in ensuring that this does not happen again would be gratefully received. Same with the ampersand!
Tuesday, 13 April 2010
Elections and what it is all about.
Elections and what it is all about.
Every four years or so junkies get their hit. There’s the World Cup in South Africa for the football junkies and the Olympics to look forward to in two years time. Driving passed the site yesterday reminds me once more of the reality of this forthcoming event and it is fascinating to see the growth stage by stage, piece by piece.
Of course at the moment, it is the turn of the political junkies with the General Election looming ever nearer. Even those who feel disenfranchised by the lack of choice, there is still the need to read and consider and fume and reflect and hope, even if that hope is somewhat limited.
I have spent the morning browsing through the Labour party manifesto. I’ve only scanned it because I’ve read the summaries in the paper and, quite frankly, I have other things that I need to do. There is nothing very new in there. Anything that was allegedly contentious or innovative was leaked to the press prior to the launch of the manifesto, and I am currently trying to wrack my brains to remember anything that I have read in the last hour that has made me sit up and take interest in a positive way.
The predictable election call came at a time when I was out of the country. From the distant sun of Spain, I had to endure (and I do mean endure) the press coverage of the event via Sky News. There was a helicopter hovering over Downing Street to watch Gordy’s car drive the short distance from Whitehall to Buckingham Palace where he had to ask Brenda’s permission to dissolve parliament. It still amazes and riles me that we have this mockery of a monarchical constitution where Queenie has the nominal legality to override anything that the elected chamber and the non-elected one put through.
The fact that the Labour Party has a considerable chunk of the new manifesto committing themselves to the kind of electoral reform that some of us had anticipated in 1997 is yet another indication of what we had hoped for not coming to fruition thus far.
I still find it incredible that the Prime Minister of the moment has to spend over an hour of his (or her) valuable time talking to one woman who cannot have, for all her advisers, any clue what it is like living in the real world. The woman is as institutionalised as someone who was sectioned fifty years ago. It’s not necessarily her fault but the system makes her role certifiable!
My brother spent yesterday morning in the company of the great and good in Birmingham; all gathered together for the launch of the Manifesto. He had a decent chat with the author, Ed Miliband, before moving on to talk to Mandy and Gordon. It was all very positive, apparently; plenty of back-patting, eager hopefulness and a determination to succeed. Mandy said that the election was winnable and he wasn’t giving up yet, which in itself is a pretty ‘giving up’ statement. Obviously, from the last decade we know that Mandy doesn’t give up. Ever.
It’s going to be a long month.
..........................................................................................................................................................
A year ago, or possibly longer, I took my son down to his school in order that he could make his choices for GCSE. We talked to various teachers who suggested, by and large, that he had the potential to “succeed” in his chosen subjects but possibly needed more willingness. His Spanish teacher told him that he would not succeed and that it would require more effort to do so than he felt my son was capable of giving.
The teacher in question is a decent bloke. Some would say that he is an excellent teacher. When he goes for his TLR mark one, two or three, he will tick all the correct boxes. He can demonstrate his ability to increase the attainment of his pupils. His style is rigid and determined. He teaches instructionally from a text book. Grammatical construction is vital and taught before anything else. Even a child who did not like his teaching style still improved his grades, and it clearly bewildered Mr C as to why my child still managed to get these grades despite not doing his homework or cooperating with his formal methodology. I actually think it riled him that this child kept coming top in his tests in spite of his lack of conformity.
The Labour Party has said in its manifesto and as part of the Primary Curriculum changes that are either on hold or redundant, that it is committed to ensuring that every primary school child has an opportunity to learn a foreign language. It is even trying to increase the number of Mandarin teachers that can be available to teach peripatetically. (Now there’s a career – learn mandarin anyway and it should further any career you choose. Learn mandarin and teach in schools – a rare commodity indeed).
So after three years of formal Spanish teaching, my child goes to Spain for the first time. Could he hold a conversation with any Spaniard he met? Could he hell as like. Could he go into a shop or a restaurant and order anything other than “zumo de naranja por favor?” Nope. Could he use any of the sentence structuring that Mr C had painstakingly taught him? Afraid not.
The three years of Spanish teaching, high quality teaching at that, if you look at the criteria for quality, gave him no ability whatsoever to actually use the language in the country of its origin for any purpose whatsoever. My flawed and redundant knowledge of French was more useful in Spain than his recent lessons in Spanish, so I have to beg the question, what is the point?
On the same evening, we sat with another teacher; his history teacher who was also head of year. She looked at his CAT scores and his SAT predictions and his GCSE potential, full of A stars and brilliance. My complacent son sat there assuming that all he has to do is turn up for the exams and he will magically achieve these results. Both the teacher and I had to remind him that these were only predictions and dependent upon a certain amount of work on his part.
He looked at the scores and surmised that he was in the top 1% in his school and certainly within the top 5% in the country, reiterated by his teacher. This kid has potential.
However, she rightly pointed out that the top 5% in this country is going to have to compete with the top 5% in other countries and the top 5% in China outweighs the top 50% of this country.
Okay, maths was never my strongest point but the teacher was quite rightly stating that even the brightest child in this country cannot be complacent. For the brightest child in the UK there are hundreds and thousands of brighter children in China, and then there are other eastern countries too; Japan and India for starters.
This school is not the best school in the country. It has recently been classified as a good school with outstanding features, much to the disappointment of the head teacher who wanted to have the “outstanding” affirmation that he had received from the previous inspection.
I admire some of the things that the school is doing. The head teacher has been determined to resist pressure to teach in a certain way and apart from the delectable Mr C and his formalised approach to the teaching of Spanish, there is a more commendable methodology for teaching and learning apparent in the school, where the needs of the child are at the core, and the curriculum is innovative and challenging.
However, I have to return to this issue about China and the squillions of young people who are getting a form of education that will, in the future, set them aside from our children in UK schools.
This isn’t about knowledge. This isn’t about gaining points in an aggregated world.
What China appears to have done is to properly consider the individual need of every child. The education, as suggested in “The New Learning Revolution” advocates individual learning where the teacher acts as enabler and facilitator rather than director. The learning is in the 21st century with full access to high speed broadband where children and young people can direct their own learning. They are driven by their passion and hunger to learn. They can divert their thoughts and interest into studying things that are relevant to them. I assume they can learn languages, for instance, by talking to a computer generated pal, who will respond in the real language of the land, not necessarily grammatically correct polished construction.
The reason that Chinese children have a ‘leg-up’ has nothing to do with the amount of knowledge that they have amassed. It has everything to do with the way that they are enabled to learn and are enabled to want to learn.
Those who accuse the Chinese of being autocratic should have a look at this system. It’s very clever and very insightful.
The Chinese have recognised what businesses in this country and throughout the world are crying out for; a workforce that is enthusiastic, informed, innovative, capable of independent working and thought, creative and inspired. Whilst these things come naturally to a few, sometimes, this freedom has to be taught. Sometimes you have to learn to making learning instinctual, even though that sounds contradictory.
The Chinese seem to be doing this. They are concentrating as much on the pedagogy as the content, possibly more. They are not losing sight of the vitality of learning the basics of maths, reading and writing. That is done too. In order to access the world, they need that. Anyone who suggests anything contrary to this is clearly wrong.
It is actually rather socialist as well. Everyone starts on an even keel, possibly. Everyone has equal opportunity. There is recognition of the need of a range of skills and there is a commitment to enabling young people to be lifelong learners.
I am not completely naive. Obviously, there are constraints. The recent arguments over Google and the restrictions that we saw during the 2008 Olympics suggest that there is still an emphatic doctrine and lack of freedom within the country.
There are also possible ulterior motives to this new learning revolution. It could be that the Chinese are determined to have world domination but even if this is the case, they seem to have adopted an approach that means that this is feasible.
Here’s another quick anecdote. The aforementioned child, incapable of conversing in Spanish, is also a bit of a geek when it comes to history and European battles of centuries gone by. Whilst his friends are constantly on Facebook or mindless computer games, he is currently devouring history fiction in the form of Sharpe books about the Napoleonic wars. He plays computer games; almost too much but these days they tend not to be the Grand Theft Auto or Fifa football variety but ones associated with history and wars. He has recently invested in some complicated game about the Romans, where he has to set up communities and conquer new lands. His learning leads him back to his books and back to the computer to research what actually happened. This, in turn, helps him to dominate in the game and therefore succeed in his chosen path.
I am not suggesting that this is all positive. His commitment to these games keeps him away from other things that I deem to be important to him but I am impressed by his willingness to learn and his propensity to research around the subjects. His learning is apparent. He has a vast knowledge of Roman civilisation that has not been learned in the classroom nor ever could. The days are too short. He has used his knowledge of Roman civilisation to recognise the development of towns both here and in Spain, where he demonstrated his understanding of trade and rivers and natural geography to explain why certain towns had emerged in the places that they had.
His learning is vast, is self-directed and interesting for him. The fact that he can bore the rest of us to tears with accounts of his mastery is almost commendable.
What is clearly commendable is that he is doing this learning of his own volition and that he has control of what he wants to learn and how he does it. Not only that, because of other influences in his life, he has the ability to talk about this learning and direct it into the now, into appreciating what he can see for himself that is relevant to his world and his future.
If he was in a school in China where the New Learning Revolution has been adopted, this type of learning would be seen as a success. In this country, this learning, whilst recognised as important and interesting, is soon going to be seen as a diversion the things that he needs to do in order to attain the GCSEs both required and predicted.
I am grossly reluctant to “play the game”. I have been far from responsible regarding his homework or lack of it. I wanted him to want to do his homework rather than be dictatorial about it. I know that there is a certain amount of discipline that he has to learn. In life, one has to do some things that seem neither important nor interesting but I resent the fact that his learning is not always in tune with his interest and it is certainly not directed by him.
There was an interesting comment on “Start the Week” yesterday, where the contributors were talking about the English versus Maths debate. One person said that he was good at English but also good at maths. Because he was more interested in maths than English, he chose to continue those studies, eventually gaining a degree in mathematics but what he had wanted to do was to continue his English studies too. It had not been allowed. If he was in school today, it would probably not be allowed either. You either take a humanities or arts path, or you take and science and mathematics path and never the twain shall meet.
Isn’t that abhorrent? Isn’t this bizarre restrictive policy ultimately going to restrict our young people for the rest of their lives, especially when one considers what is happening in other more enlightened countries?
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So I return to the election, and I eagerly (naively) read through the Education section of the manifesto to see if I could see a glimmer of light.
Unsurprisingly, there is no mention of pedagogy. There is no mention of creativity or emotional intelligence. There is no mention of anything other than attainment and raising standards. This is the absolute. All children will have a workable command of the 3Rs before leaving primary school and although they don’t mention the actual words “Level Four”, that is what they mean. All pupils in secondary school will have a personal tutor to drive them to attain in the contrived and dictatorial way we have come to know over the last thirty years or more. Individualised education is not mentioned. Freedom for schools to teach in the way that they want to teach is not apparent.
Schools are to be federated, as many as possible. According to the newspaper today, there is clear circumstantial evidence that federations are a success. The ‘failing’ schools have raised their standards by being propped up by a local success story – allegedly. Has there been any research into the wellbeing of the pupils in these schools? Has there been any accountability other than the test scores? Has there been any probing into precisely whether these “failing” schools were actually failing?
Gordon Brown actually gave the game away yesterday. In his speech to the great and good in Birmingham yesterday, he said it. He wants everyone to be middle class. One way of being middle class is for all to achieve Level Four in maths and English by the time that they leave primary school.
The whole of the education policy is driven by this alleged middle class aspiration to attain. This is done without thought as to whether this aspiration is a valid and viable one in a world where China may sit thousands of miles away yet is reachable by the click of a button on your laptop.
Nobody seems to be asking the question as to whether this whole issue of attainment is deeply flawed in today’s world, despite the UNICEF surveys, despite what we know about emerging education systems in other more thoughtful countries.
The Chinese are not stupid and underestimating them is something that we do at our peril.
It is about economics. Education and this thoughtful approach to learning may sound exciting and revolutionary to those of us who have always committed ourselves to the education and development of each individual young person but that may not be what is driving the Chinese authorities. Their motive may purely be economical.
By giving a certain amount of freedom in developing learning and learning styles, the Chinese are placing themselves at the forefront of economic development. The free minded will want to move forward. With gratitude to their government and a healthy dose of Newspeak, the young people may want to give something back to those that have so well provided for them.
There is absolute logic in this way of developing education. Restricting young people to the study of three or four subjects at the age of 16 is anachronistic. Filling their minds with facts and figures without any thought been given to how they are actually going to use this knowledge and the skills involved in knowledge acquisition is short sighted.
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Despite everything, I remain a political junkie. Despite years of despondency that has driven me out of the classroom, I am still committed to encouraging change and working for the rest of my days until we adopt a fairer, more meaningful education system in this country.
What I want for the children that I bore, I want for the children of the children that I taught.
I challenge the restrictions of the system as it stands. I challenge each and every teacher to ask whether what they are actually teaching is a) relevant to their children b) enabling young people to have an interest in learning that will last them a life time.
I challenge the entire “middle class” ideology that attainment is the only way to measure success and that measures are the only way of identifying whether a school is successful or not.
I challenge this notion that everybody should want and have a university degree.
As I wander on through life, I want to be with people who are knowledgeable but are passionate about what they know. I want people to be able to talk about their passion. I want to feel that passion taking hold of me so that I too may become as passionate about their subject as they are. I want that passion to drive my own learning. I want people to have the ability to think out of the box, to be able to sit at a computer as I am today and jot their ideas down, however disjointed and dysfunctional they may be.
I want people to be interested in the outcome of a general election to the point that they feel there is injustice if we do not try and tackle the clear unjust and uncivil elements of our society.
But then, there have been plenty of times when I have been accused of idealism that is apparently well beyond the potential of those with whom I share a world.
So what am I going to do? How am I going to vote? Luckily, living where I do, under the current stupid electoral system, my little vote is meaningless. I can vote tactically and have my conscience cleared. It is a cop out. I am, to all extents, disenfranchised not once but twice. The ideology that I pertain to is not evident in any manifesto. My vote is null and void because I will not be voting for the party that gets elected in my constituency and my vote against is going to be a mere fraction in the final statistics. Essentially, my vote is meaningless which angers me beyond belief, exacerbated by the fact that the party I have always voted for have had thirteen years to right this very clear wrong.
As for the need to change education, I will continue to do my bit. I will, as I said, hold onto my aspiration and hope and let’s just see what happens.
As for the Labour Party, well, let’s just see what happens there too. Polly Toynbee yesterday said that there was still only one way to vote. However bad they have been, however dejected the party faithful may be, the alternative is apparently more frightening. But is that really enough to make you vote? It probably is, if you are in a constituency that means your vote is meaningful in preventing a Tory landslide but even then, can you really be happy to vote for more of the same? In doing so, doesn’t that give them the mandate to adopt the laissez faire attitude of keeping the Daily Mail readers as happy as possible? Hopes of hung parliaments are there in the hope that the left can re-emerge and barter for some of the key things that need to be done in this country.
Elections: what are they all about?
Well, they should be about everything and certainly about some of the things that I have mentioned in this blog. Ultimately though, I fight for politics in the same way that I fight for education, in the hope that there will be a fairer and more equitable society. The changes in education that I want are for a fairer, calmer and more contented society. The fact that they could potentially bring economic stability and viability is also something that I probably need to explore and demonstrate more carefully but that isn’t necessarily the driving force for me.
However, when one is voting, despite what the Thatcher woman says, it should absolutely be about the good of society and thinking past the end of your nose. Doing good for others will ultimately have its timely benefit for all, including the I’m alright Jack’s of this world.
Every four years or so junkies get their hit. There’s the World Cup in South Africa for the football junkies and the Olympics to look forward to in two years time. Driving passed the site yesterday reminds me once more of the reality of this forthcoming event and it is fascinating to see the growth stage by stage, piece by piece.
Of course at the moment, it is the turn of the political junkies with the General Election looming ever nearer. Even those who feel disenfranchised by the lack of choice, there is still the need to read and consider and fume and reflect and hope, even if that hope is somewhat limited.
I have spent the morning browsing through the Labour party manifesto. I’ve only scanned it because I’ve read the summaries in the paper and, quite frankly, I have other things that I need to do. There is nothing very new in there. Anything that was allegedly contentious or innovative was leaked to the press prior to the launch of the manifesto, and I am currently trying to wrack my brains to remember anything that I have read in the last hour that has made me sit up and take interest in a positive way.
The predictable election call came at a time when I was out of the country. From the distant sun of Spain, I had to endure (and I do mean endure) the press coverage of the event via Sky News. There was a helicopter hovering over Downing Street to watch Gordy’s car drive the short distance from Whitehall to Buckingham Palace where he had to ask Brenda’s permission to dissolve parliament. It still amazes and riles me that we have this mockery of a monarchical constitution where Queenie has the nominal legality to override anything that the elected chamber and the non-elected one put through.
The fact that the Labour Party has a considerable chunk of the new manifesto committing themselves to the kind of electoral reform that some of us had anticipated in 1997 is yet another indication of what we had hoped for not coming to fruition thus far.
I still find it incredible that the Prime Minister of the moment has to spend over an hour of his (or her) valuable time talking to one woman who cannot have, for all her advisers, any clue what it is like living in the real world. The woman is as institutionalised as someone who was sectioned fifty years ago. It’s not necessarily her fault but the system makes her role certifiable!
My brother spent yesterday morning in the company of the great and good in Birmingham; all gathered together for the launch of the Manifesto. He had a decent chat with the author, Ed Miliband, before moving on to talk to Mandy and Gordon. It was all very positive, apparently; plenty of back-patting, eager hopefulness and a determination to succeed. Mandy said that the election was winnable and he wasn’t giving up yet, which in itself is a pretty ‘giving up’ statement. Obviously, from the last decade we know that Mandy doesn’t give up. Ever.
It’s going to be a long month.
..........................................................................................................................................................
A year ago, or possibly longer, I took my son down to his school in order that he could make his choices for GCSE. We talked to various teachers who suggested, by and large, that he had the potential to “succeed” in his chosen subjects but possibly needed more willingness. His Spanish teacher told him that he would not succeed and that it would require more effort to do so than he felt my son was capable of giving.
The teacher in question is a decent bloke. Some would say that he is an excellent teacher. When he goes for his TLR mark one, two or three, he will tick all the correct boxes. He can demonstrate his ability to increase the attainment of his pupils. His style is rigid and determined. He teaches instructionally from a text book. Grammatical construction is vital and taught before anything else. Even a child who did not like his teaching style still improved his grades, and it clearly bewildered Mr C as to why my child still managed to get these grades despite not doing his homework or cooperating with his formal methodology. I actually think it riled him that this child kept coming top in his tests in spite of his lack of conformity.
The Labour Party has said in its manifesto and as part of the Primary Curriculum changes that are either on hold or redundant, that it is committed to ensuring that every primary school child has an opportunity to learn a foreign language. It is even trying to increase the number of Mandarin teachers that can be available to teach peripatetically. (Now there’s a career – learn mandarin anyway and it should further any career you choose. Learn mandarin and teach in schools – a rare commodity indeed).
So after three years of formal Spanish teaching, my child goes to Spain for the first time. Could he hold a conversation with any Spaniard he met? Could he hell as like. Could he go into a shop or a restaurant and order anything other than “zumo de naranja por favor?” Nope. Could he use any of the sentence structuring that Mr C had painstakingly taught him? Afraid not.
The three years of Spanish teaching, high quality teaching at that, if you look at the criteria for quality, gave him no ability whatsoever to actually use the language in the country of its origin for any purpose whatsoever. My flawed and redundant knowledge of French was more useful in Spain than his recent lessons in Spanish, so I have to beg the question, what is the point?
On the same evening, we sat with another teacher; his history teacher who was also head of year. She looked at his CAT scores and his SAT predictions and his GCSE potential, full of A stars and brilliance. My complacent son sat there assuming that all he has to do is turn up for the exams and he will magically achieve these results. Both the teacher and I had to remind him that these were only predictions and dependent upon a certain amount of work on his part.
He looked at the scores and surmised that he was in the top 1% in his school and certainly within the top 5% in the country, reiterated by his teacher. This kid has potential.
However, she rightly pointed out that the top 5% in this country is going to have to compete with the top 5% in other countries and the top 5% in China outweighs the top 50% of this country.
Okay, maths was never my strongest point but the teacher was quite rightly stating that even the brightest child in this country cannot be complacent. For the brightest child in the UK there are hundreds and thousands of brighter children in China, and then there are other eastern countries too; Japan and India for starters.
This school is not the best school in the country. It has recently been classified as a good school with outstanding features, much to the disappointment of the head teacher who wanted to have the “outstanding” affirmation that he had received from the previous inspection.
I admire some of the things that the school is doing. The head teacher has been determined to resist pressure to teach in a certain way and apart from the delectable Mr C and his formalised approach to the teaching of Spanish, there is a more commendable methodology for teaching and learning apparent in the school, where the needs of the child are at the core, and the curriculum is innovative and challenging.
However, I have to return to this issue about China and the squillions of young people who are getting a form of education that will, in the future, set them aside from our children in UK schools.
This isn’t about knowledge. This isn’t about gaining points in an aggregated world.
What China appears to have done is to properly consider the individual need of every child. The education, as suggested in “The New Learning Revolution” advocates individual learning where the teacher acts as enabler and facilitator rather than director. The learning is in the 21st century with full access to high speed broadband where children and young people can direct their own learning. They are driven by their passion and hunger to learn. They can divert their thoughts and interest into studying things that are relevant to them. I assume they can learn languages, for instance, by talking to a computer generated pal, who will respond in the real language of the land, not necessarily grammatically correct polished construction.
The reason that Chinese children have a ‘leg-up’ has nothing to do with the amount of knowledge that they have amassed. It has everything to do with the way that they are enabled to learn and are enabled to want to learn.
Those who accuse the Chinese of being autocratic should have a look at this system. It’s very clever and very insightful.
The Chinese have recognised what businesses in this country and throughout the world are crying out for; a workforce that is enthusiastic, informed, innovative, capable of independent working and thought, creative and inspired. Whilst these things come naturally to a few, sometimes, this freedom has to be taught. Sometimes you have to learn to making learning instinctual, even though that sounds contradictory.
The Chinese seem to be doing this. They are concentrating as much on the pedagogy as the content, possibly more. They are not losing sight of the vitality of learning the basics of maths, reading and writing. That is done too. In order to access the world, they need that. Anyone who suggests anything contrary to this is clearly wrong.
It is actually rather socialist as well. Everyone starts on an even keel, possibly. Everyone has equal opportunity. There is recognition of the need of a range of skills and there is a commitment to enabling young people to be lifelong learners.
I am not completely naive. Obviously, there are constraints. The recent arguments over Google and the restrictions that we saw during the 2008 Olympics suggest that there is still an emphatic doctrine and lack of freedom within the country.
There are also possible ulterior motives to this new learning revolution. It could be that the Chinese are determined to have world domination but even if this is the case, they seem to have adopted an approach that means that this is feasible.
Here’s another quick anecdote. The aforementioned child, incapable of conversing in Spanish, is also a bit of a geek when it comes to history and European battles of centuries gone by. Whilst his friends are constantly on Facebook or mindless computer games, he is currently devouring history fiction in the form of Sharpe books about the Napoleonic wars. He plays computer games; almost too much but these days they tend not to be the Grand Theft Auto or Fifa football variety but ones associated with history and wars. He has recently invested in some complicated game about the Romans, where he has to set up communities and conquer new lands. His learning leads him back to his books and back to the computer to research what actually happened. This, in turn, helps him to dominate in the game and therefore succeed in his chosen path.
I am not suggesting that this is all positive. His commitment to these games keeps him away from other things that I deem to be important to him but I am impressed by his willingness to learn and his propensity to research around the subjects. His learning is apparent. He has a vast knowledge of Roman civilisation that has not been learned in the classroom nor ever could. The days are too short. He has used his knowledge of Roman civilisation to recognise the development of towns both here and in Spain, where he demonstrated his understanding of trade and rivers and natural geography to explain why certain towns had emerged in the places that they had.
His learning is vast, is self-directed and interesting for him. The fact that he can bore the rest of us to tears with accounts of his mastery is almost commendable.
What is clearly commendable is that he is doing this learning of his own volition and that he has control of what he wants to learn and how he does it. Not only that, because of other influences in his life, he has the ability to talk about this learning and direct it into the now, into appreciating what he can see for himself that is relevant to his world and his future.
If he was in a school in China where the New Learning Revolution has been adopted, this type of learning would be seen as a success. In this country, this learning, whilst recognised as important and interesting, is soon going to be seen as a diversion the things that he needs to do in order to attain the GCSEs both required and predicted.
I am grossly reluctant to “play the game”. I have been far from responsible regarding his homework or lack of it. I wanted him to want to do his homework rather than be dictatorial about it. I know that there is a certain amount of discipline that he has to learn. In life, one has to do some things that seem neither important nor interesting but I resent the fact that his learning is not always in tune with his interest and it is certainly not directed by him.
There was an interesting comment on “Start the Week” yesterday, where the contributors were talking about the English versus Maths debate. One person said that he was good at English but also good at maths. Because he was more interested in maths than English, he chose to continue those studies, eventually gaining a degree in mathematics but what he had wanted to do was to continue his English studies too. It had not been allowed. If he was in school today, it would probably not be allowed either. You either take a humanities or arts path, or you take and science and mathematics path and never the twain shall meet.
Isn’t that abhorrent? Isn’t this bizarre restrictive policy ultimately going to restrict our young people for the rest of their lives, especially when one considers what is happening in other more enlightened countries?
................................................................................................................................................................
So I return to the election, and I eagerly (naively) read through the Education section of the manifesto to see if I could see a glimmer of light.
Unsurprisingly, there is no mention of pedagogy. There is no mention of creativity or emotional intelligence. There is no mention of anything other than attainment and raising standards. This is the absolute. All children will have a workable command of the 3Rs before leaving primary school and although they don’t mention the actual words “Level Four”, that is what they mean. All pupils in secondary school will have a personal tutor to drive them to attain in the contrived and dictatorial way we have come to know over the last thirty years or more. Individualised education is not mentioned. Freedom for schools to teach in the way that they want to teach is not apparent.
Schools are to be federated, as many as possible. According to the newspaper today, there is clear circumstantial evidence that federations are a success. The ‘failing’ schools have raised their standards by being propped up by a local success story – allegedly. Has there been any research into the wellbeing of the pupils in these schools? Has there been any accountability other than the test scores? Has there been any probing into precisely whether these “failing” schools were actually failing?
Gordon Brown actually gave the game away yesterday. In his speech to the great and good in Birmingham yesterday, he said it. He wants everyone to be middle class. One way of being middle class is for all to achieve Level Four in maths and English by the time that they leave primary school.
The whole of the education policy is driven by this alleged middle class aspiration to attain. This is done without thought as to whether this aspiration is a valid and viable one in a world where China may sit thousands of miles away yet is reachable by the click of a button on your laptop.
Nobody seems to be asking the question as to whether this whole issue of attainment is deeply flawed in today’s world, despite the UNICEF surveys, despite what we know about emerging education systems in other more thoughtful countries.
The Chinese are not stupid and underestimating them is something that we do at our peril.
It is about economics. Education and this thoughtful approach to learning may sound exciting and revolutionary to those of us who have always committed ourselves to the education and development of each individual young person but that may not be what is driving the Chinese authorities. Their motive may purely be economical.
By giving a certain amount of freedom in developing learning and learning styles, the Chinese are placing themselves at the forefront of economic development. The free minded will want to move forward. With gratitude to their government and a healthy dose of Newspeak, the young people may want to give something back to those that have so well provided for them.
There is absolute logic in this way of developing education. Restricting young people to the study of three or four subjects at the age of 16 is anachronistic. Filling their minds with facts and figures without any thought been given to how they are actually going to use this knowledge and the skills involved in knowledge acquisition is short sighted.
..............................................................................................................................................................
Despite everything, I remain a political junkie. Despite years of despondency that has driven me out of the classroom, I am still committed to encouraging change and working for the rest of my days until we adopt a fairer, more meaningful education system in this country.
What I want for the children that I bore, I want for the children of the children that I taught.
I challenge the restrictions of the system as it stands. I challenge each and every teacher to ask whether what they are actually teaching is a) relevant to their children b) enabling young people to have an interest in learning that will last them a life time.
I challenge the entire “middle class” ideology that attainment is the only way to measure success and that measures are the only way of identifying whether a school is successful or not.
I challenge this notion that everybody should want and have a university degree.
As I wander on through life, I want to be with people who are knowledgeable but are passionate about what they know. I want people to be able to talk about their passion. I want to feel that passion taking hold of me so that I too may become as passionate about their subject as they are. I want that passion to drive my own learning. I want people to have the ability to think out of the box, to be able to sit at a computer as I am today and jot their ideas down, however disjointed and dysfunctional they may be.
I want people to be interested in the outcome of a general election to the point that they feel there is injustice if we do not try and tackle the clear unjust and uncivil elements of our society.
But then, there have been plenty of times when I have been accused of idealism that is apparently well beyond the potential of those with whom I share a world.
So what am I going to do? How am I going to vote? Luckily, living where I do, under the current stupid electoral system, my little vote is meaningless. I can vote tactically and have my conscience cleared. It is a cop out. I am, to all extents, disenfranchised not once but twice. The ideology that I pertain to is not evident in any manifesto. My vote is null and void because I will not be voting for the party that gets elected in my constituency and my vote against is going to be a mere fraction in the final statistics. Essentially, my vote is meaningless which angers me beyond belief, exacerbated by the fact that the party I have always voted for have had thirteen years to right this very clear wrong.
As for the need to change education, I will continue to do my bit. I will, as I said, hold onto my aspiration and hope and let’s just see what happens.
As for the Labour Party, well, let’s just see what happens there too. Polly Toynbee yesterday said that there was still only one way to vote. However bad they have been, however dejected the party faithful may be, the alternative is apparently more frightening. But is that really enough to make you vote? It probably is, if you are in a constituency that means your vote is meaningful in preventing a Tory landslide but even then, can you really be happy to vote for more of the same? In doing so, doesn’t that give them the mandate to adopt the laissez faire attitude of keeping the Daily Mail readers as happy as possible? Hopes of hung parliaments are there in the hope that the left can re-emerge and barter for some of the key things that need to be done in this country.
Elections: what are they all about?
Well, they should be about everything and certainly about some of the things that I have mentioned in this blog. Ultimately though, I fight for politics in the same way that I fight for education, in the hope that there will be a fairer and more equitable society. The changes in education that I want are for a fairer, calmer and more contented society. The fact that they could potentially bring economic stability and viability is also something that I probably need to explore and demonstrate more carefully but that isn’t necessarily the driving force for me.
However, when one is voting, despite what the Thatcher woman says, it should absolutely be about the good of society and thinking past the end of your nose. Doing good for others will ultimately have its timely benefit for all, including the I’m alright Jack’s of this world.
Friday, 2 April 2010
Sharon Shoesmith and what happens next
Am I surprised?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8599616.stm
No.
Am I bothered? Definitely a huge dirty great big whacking YES!
The report in the link above suggests that Ofsted altered the report into Haringey to strengthen the case against Ms Shoesmith. It implied that the judgments made about her competence were included in the final statement rather than the initial one.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/01_04_2010_report.pdf
This amendment, it has been argued, came about because of the direct intervention of government or even Mr. Ballsup himself. Of course, the government are sticking resolutely to the conviction that Ofsted is independent and cannot be influenced by a phone call or email from elsewhere.
Am I particularly bothered about Sharon Shoesmith herself? Not personally, no. I think that there is a certain amount of complacency from some of these people in the so-called high echelons of governance that makes them feel invincible irrespective of the incompetence that they or their teams inflict upon child after child after child.
People are paid a phenomenal amount of money to hold these positions and therefore, to some extent, should be prepared to take the ultimate responsibility for the inaction or incompetence of those within their organisation. However, there is another argument that could ask why should the likes of Shoesmith be directly responsible for the errors of one or two, or in this case, many professionals who should no better? Can a leader really be responsible for all of the flaws in the system and the people who imply that they are one thing and in reality are far below expectation?
In a way, that is irrelevant. However many people they sack from Haringey is not going to bring the child back to life. There is nothing that can compensate for that loss, the incomprehensible suffering and the perpetual neglect and incompetence that took place. Sacking the head of service may make some people feel as though they have done the right thing but where does it stop? Should it stop with Shoesmith? Who was her line manager and who was her line manager reporting to? If you take it to its logical conclusion, it may lie at the feet of Ed Balls – and then who line manages him? Maybe it should have been Gordy who took the brunt, even though he cannot possibly be held to account for something that happened beyond his control.
No, Shoesmith should have looked at what was happening. The control and understanding of the service that was being provided was not there. Expecting a person with an education background to fully comprehend the working of social services as part of an integrated children’s service is quite insane, and visa versa. So, we are back to blaming the government then for implementing this seemingly impossible programme of working.
But what of Ofsted in this name and blame society? Should the individual inspectors who allegedly doctored the reports have their heads on the chopping block, or like Shoesmith, should it be the bod at the top? Should Ms. Gilbert be contemplating her position over her chocolate Easter eggs in whatever house her husband has chosen to flip in?
And what of the potential other Ofsted reports that have been ‘managed’ to ensure that they state things that the original report did not say?
What of the Ofsted reports that graded certain areas of a school as good that were altered to make them read as inadequate in order to comply with the predestined course of action that everyone in authority wanted to take?
What of the phone calls that are carefully taken to ensure there is no prospect of tracking?
What of the deleted emails and the secret meetings that happen prior to and during normal school inspections?
Where the hell is there a possibility of independence when there are so many surreptitious and underlying twists and turns that would need a mighty proficient detective to find?
Call me a cynic if you like but the single reason that I am interested in what happens to Ms. Shoesmith is what it means for the accountability of organisations that thrust accountability on others without having the foresight to consider what they should actually be accountable for.
Call me a cynic if you like but the reason that I want Ms. Shoesmith to succeed in her appeal against this sacking is to expose the sham of independence that Ofsted consistently suggest is in place.
Before I go any further, I do want to mention the fact that there is a legitimate process of redrafting that takes place in any Ofsted report. The initial report, whether it be on a department, a subject or a school, is given to the recipient to read and ensure that there are no inaccuracies. The main ‘flavour’ and judgment of the report usually remains the same but at least there is the opportunity to disagree and comment, even if there is potentially a futility in doing so.
But looking at this case, like I am sure there are many more, there is a complete difference in the statements of recommendation that would vindicate some for the course of action they took in the sacking of this woman. These are fundamental changes that cannot be ignored and would not come about in the general redrafting of a final report.
In the first report there was hardly a mention about the management competencies of the leader of the Children’s Services in Haringey. In the second ‘final report’ it was the first statement at the top of the recommendations, thus giving the Minister for Education the ammunition with which to fire the shots.
Have these people so much affront that they cannot contemplate people questioning such actions?
How dare they!
Where the hell is our democracy right now?
The other issue, as I said, is about what this case means to others who have found themselves in similar positions.
There must be more than one case. Ms. Shoesmith, without necessarily realising it, is highlighting the potential for other similar cases to be exposed. If she had some nous about her, when it comes to the final ruling and if, by present appearance, she wins her case for unfair dismissal, then should publicly announce the fact that she suspects that she is just one high profile case where this injustice has taken place and maybe it is time for others to come forward and state their case against the unfairness of their own dismissal.
Even if she doesn’t say this, then perhaps these people should come forward and declare themselves. I know of more than one or two head teachers, for instance, who have felt a need to resign because of the pressure placed upon them to remove themselves from a school deemed as unsatisfactory because the wrong measures are in place. I know a head teacher or two who have received Ofsted reports that do not reflect the true nature of their school and have found inexplicable pressure to conform to a way of working that defies their very belief in education, all because of the so-called independence of an organisation established to affirm the politicisation of the educational system.
I’d be happy to place myself forward to collate and enquire and to gather the evidence of many injustices that have taken place since the implementation of the inspection routine.
And that is just the head teachers. What about the hundreds of teaching staff whose confidence and even ability to teach have been undermined because of mistruths and factual inaccuracies about their competence? What about the teachers who dogmatically refused to succumb to a pedagogy that was utterly contemptible and in direct contrast to all that they knew was right for children, and for that refusal they were graded as ‘unsatisfactory’? What of those who are not in the classrooms right now, in their rightful place, where they ought to be, imparting the type of learning that our children deserve, thrilling, enthralling and challenging these young people to be inquisitive, to sparkle and to enjoy?
Am I bothered? You bloody well bet I am.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8599616.stm
No.
Am I bothered? Definitely a huge dirty great big whacking YES!
The report in the link above suggests that Ofsted altered the report into Haringey to strengthen the case against Ms Shoesmith. It implied that the judgments made about her competence were included in the final statement rather than the initial one.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/01_04_2010_report.pdf
This amendment, it has been argued, came about because of the direct intervention of government or even Mr. Ballsup himself. Of course, the government are sticking resolutely to the conviction that Ofsted is independent and cannot be influenced by a phone call or email from elsewhere.
Am I particularly bothered about Sharon Shoesmith herself? Not personally, no. I think that there is a certain amount of complacency from some of these people in the so-called high echelons of governance that makes them feel invincible irrespective of the incompetence that they or their teams inflict upon child after child after child.
People are paid a phenomenal amount of money to hold these positions and therefore, to some extent, should be prepared to take the ultimate responsibility for the inaction or incompetence of those within their organisation. However, there is another argument that could ask why should the likes of Shoesmith be directly responsible for the errors of one or two, or in this case, many professionals who should no better? Can a leader really be responsible for all of the flaws in the system and the people who imply that they are one thing and in reality are far below expectation?
In a way, that is irrelevant. However many people they sack from Haringey is not going to bring the child back to life. There is nothing that can compensate for that loss, the incomprehensible suffering and the perpetual neglect and incompetence that took place. Sacking the head of service may make some people feel as though they have done the right thing but where does it stop? Should it stop with Shoesmith? Who was her line manager and who was her line manager reporting to? If you take it to its logical conclusion, it may lie at the feet of Ed Balls – and then who line manages him? Maybe it should have been Gordy who took the brunt, even though he cannot possibly be held to account for something that happened beyond his control.
No, Shoesmith should have looked at what was happening. The control and understanding of the service that was being provided was not there. Expecting a person with an education background to fully comprehend the working of social services as part of an integrated children’s service is quite insane, and visa versa. So, we are back to blaming the government then for implementing this seemingly impossible programme of working.
But what of Ofsted in this name and blame society? Should the individual inspectors who allegedly doctored the reports have their heads on the chopping block, or like Shoesmith, should it be the bod at the top? Should Ms. Gilbert be contemplating her position over her chocolate Easter eggs in whatever house her husband has chosen to flip in?
And what of the potential other Ofsted reports that have been ‘managed’ to ensure that they state things that the original report did not say?
What of the Ofsted reports that graded certain areas of a school as good that were altered to make them read as inadequate in order to comply with the predestined course of action that everyone in authority wanted to take?
What of the phone calls that are carefully taken to ensure there is no prospect of tracking?
What of the deleted emails and the secret meetings that happen prior to and during normal school inspections?
Where the hell is there a possibility of independence when there are so many surreptitious and underlying twists and turns that would need a mighty proficient detective to find?
Call me a cynic if you like but the single reason that I am interested in what happens to Ms. Shoesmith is what it means for the accountability of organisations that thrust accountability on others without having the foresight to consider what they should actually be accountable for.
Call me a cynic if you like but the reason that I want Ms. Shoesmith to succeed in her appeal against this sacking is to expose the sham of independence that Ofsted consistently suggest is in place.
Before I go any further, I do want to mention the fact that there is a legitimate process of redrafting that takes place in any Ofsted report. The initial report, whether it be on a department, a subject or a school, is given to the recipient to read and ensure that there are no inaccuracies. The main ‘flavour’ and judgment of the report usually remains the same but at least there is the opportunity to disagree and comment, even if there is potentially a futility in doing so.
But looking at this case, like I am sure there are many more, there is a complete difference in the statements of recommendation that would vindicate some for the course of action they took in the sacking of this woman. These are fundamental changes that cannot be ignored and would not come about in the general redrafting of a final report.
In the first report there was hardly a mention about the management competencies of the leader of the Children’s Services in Haringey. In the second ‘final report’ it was the first statement at the top of the recommendations, thus giving the Minister for Education the ammunition with which to fire the shots.
Have these people so much affront that they cannot contemplate people questioning such actions?
How dare they!
Where the hell is our democracy right now?
The other issue, as I said, is about what this case means to others who have found themselves in similar positions.
There must be more than one case. Ms. Shoesmith, without necessarily realising it, is highlighting the potential for other similar cases to be exposed. If she had some nous about her, when it comes to the final ruling and if, by present appearance, she wins her case for unfair dismissal, then should publicly announce the fact that she suspects that she is just one high profile case where this injustice has taken place and maybe it is time for others to come forward and state their case against the unfairness of their own dismissal.
Even if she doesn’t say this, then perhaps these people should come forward and declare themselves. I know of more than one or two head teachers, for instance, who have felt a need to resign because of the pressure placed upon them to remove themselves from a school deemed as unsatisfactory because the wrong measures are in place. I know a head teacher or two who have received Ofsted reports that do not reflect the true nature of their school and have found inexplicable pressure to conform to a way of working that defies their very belief in education, all because of the so-called independence of an organisation established to affirm the politicisation of the educational system.
I’d be happy to place myself forward to collate and enquire and to gather the evidence of many injustices that have taken place since the implementation of the inspection routine.
And that is just the head teachers. What about the hundreds of teaching staff whose confidence and even ability to teach have been undermined because of mistruths and factual inaccuracies about their competence? What about the teachers who dogmatically refused to succumb to a pedagogy that was utterly contemptible and in direct contrast to all that they knew was right for children, and for that refusal they were graded as ‘unsatisfactory’? What of those who are not in the classrooms right now, in their rightful place, where they ought to be, imparting the type of learning that our children deserve, thrilling, enthralling and challenging these young people to be inquisitive, to sparkle and to enjoy?
Am I bothered? You bloody well bet I am.
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