Measures of Success?

Measuring Achievement?

It's been a bit hard to blog anything for the last few days as my heart's really not been in it, or anything else for that matter. The rip roaring excitement of the Lib Dem leadership election wasn't quite enough to snap me out of it, actually as it happened that particular bit of breaking news wasn't even enough to snap me out of a very light post-luncheon snooze this afternoon.

Luckily for me, though probably not for future generations of school children, some later news on the government's highly suspect plans for 'Advanced Diplomas' has at least partially roused me from my slumber.

According to a BBC report, the University Admissions service, UCAS, has decided that the proposed new diplomas should be worth more than three 'A' levels on their points system. Fortunately, the BBC manages to summarise the salient bit of information in just one line in one of its information boxes:

Advanced - takes broadly the same time to do as three A-levels, worth 3.5 A-levels

Source: BBC News

Where the article is a little light though is on where this 17% increase in pupils natural ability and effort or teaching efficiency is going to come from, however I can already envisage the government of whatever political colour it may be at the time, crowing over such a radical success, however illusory it may actually be.

I'm not sure what the nature of UCAS is, whether for example it falls under the somewhat overused term of 'quango', but to an extent it hardly matters. It must deal with primarily with public institutions and examination systems whose basic structure is dictated by the government and will know that any suggestion of anything other than continuing success, at least as far as statistics are concerned, will simply not be tolerated.

Already, as the BBC report reminds us, only four in 10 university admissions officers in a survey stated that the Diploma would be a "good alternative" to A-levels and the Russell Group of leading universities has expressed qualms over the scheme. Little good though will it do either group, so addicted now have successive education secretaries become to suspect statistics over the real world experiences of the likes of the universities and employers.

Sadly I suspect that when the scheme extends to more traditional academic areas, limiting choices to broad brush stroke subjects such as 'Humanities', 'Science' and so forth, the voices of the achievement hating 'anti-elitists' will further entrench the worrying drift of the upper end of the secondary education system towards the type of model inflicted on the same pupils earlier in their school career.

December Fool

Ambulance attends scene of
LEGO drive-by shooting

No, not Brown. For once.

Sometimes you see a story and seriously wonder if you have done a Rip van Winkle after a few too many pints of the black stuff and have woken up on April 1st.

This tale from Sky News is a typical example. Mercifully it now seems to be filed under their 'Strange Stories' category rather than in the main news section where I first read it this morning. It concerns a book entitled 'Forbidden LEGO' and, shock horror, it contains details of how to build a LEGO gun capable of firing, erm, LEGO bricks, worse still for some it looks set to become a best seller.

The response from the unnamed, but I suspect familiar quarters, is all too familiar:

But in Britain, there has been concern about the effect the book may have on children.

Source: Sky News

At least Sky have not had the sense of humour failure that those who are 'concerned' have had, as I'm sure their reporting of a commenter worrying that it was a slippery slope leading to the first LEGO nuclear weapon was as tongue-in-cheek as the comment.

From the video clip at sky the gun looks great fun and I'm sure the 'candy catapult' and 'continuous fire ping-pong ball launcher' the book promises are great too.

Without a doubt the most inspired bit of teaching I ever saw in my time at the local comprehensive was a series of lessons in Craft, Design and Technology, one of the few completely mixed ability lessons I did. In the spirit of 'Scrapheap Challenge' and 'The Great Egg Race' teams of two were given 4 lessons to build a machine to propel a ping-pong ball as far as possible, using all the offcuts of wood and metal we could scavenge and with all the tools and resources of the CDT department at our disposal, before the grand test session out on sports pitches.

For once, the whole class was keen to participate and took every detail seriously. I was seriously annoyed that by beautiful but complex mangonel type contraption came second to a machine that consisted of little more than a few strips of springy plywood laminated together. Even in that though there was a genuine lesson in design.

I only did CDT for the couple of years before selecting 'O' level options, but I do remember several people actually discovering that there was at least one subject at school that they actually enjoyed and thought was worth working at.

I'm pretty sure that if it had not involved the firing of projectiles or something equally non-politically correct, like a powered vehicle, the whole exercise would not have gone down quite so well. In a similar way, pre-Xmas chemistry lessons that produced bangs and flashes got everyone's attention without anyone going to suggest terrorism as a choice to a careers advisor.

As for the LEGO book, I shall admit that I succumbed to the temptation of a grown-up Meccano set a few years ago. I fear that once again I may have to nip out to buy a Xmas present for my fictitious nephew.

Unlearned Lessons

More Failed Experients

One of the drawbacks of the daily developments in the HMCE data fiasco stories and the even more rapidly snowballing Labour funding scandal is the number of equally serious stories that haven't had quite the full prominence they should have as especially the TV media focuses on the more immediately politically gory.

The recent sorry tale of how far the country has fallen down international league tables for educational attainment in key areas highlights a scandal in comparison to which lost HMCE disks and dodgy donations pale into insignificance.

It is true that some of the statistics need to carry some limited health warning, but the scale of the slide is to vast to ignore, and it's also damn certain that the government will avoid any fully objective exercise in measuring our relative educational performance against our near neighbours like the plague. There are various fairly straightforward exercises that could be performed to properly and scientificually squash the idea that GSCEs are getting easiser and that A levels may be heading the same way, but it's a cast iron certainty that the government will fight to the last ditch to avoid any such investigation.

Their bleating response has been everything that we have come to expect from this increasingly discredited rudderless government. First prattle on about the inputs , that they've spent X billion and so forth, ignore how such spending may or may not have filtered through the system and move straight on to outputs, based on bare statistics on exam results fewer and fewer have any real faith in. At outouts, the story ends, the outcomes are ignored.

That we have high levels of illiteracy and innumeracy and that employers and universities complain that young people coming to them lack the skills of their predecessors, are dismissed as some form of false conciousness or due to other factors beyond the control of any government.

Look at issues like crime, and it's the same script. Say that the government has spent an extra X billion, talk about selective crime statistics, dismiss people's very real feelings, based on their real experiences, that the streets are less civil and probably less safe places than in the past.

The international comparison tables at least did get some degree of airtime over a couple of days, but it's only one of a number of equally significant stories in the same vein in recent months, that should taken together should shake the confidence of those with the most unquestioning of naive beliefs that massive public spending is the sole or most important route to progress.

One that shocked, but did not surprise this time last week was from The Guardian, linking poor levels of participation in science in the state sector to the decline in support for individual science subjects rather than a single integrated science course. This common sense, pure and simple. It shows an understanding of the mindset of children at that age that this government is only just acquiring after they have done the damage.

I did physics and chemistry at 'O' level, but had no interest in biology as it is taught in school whatsoever, despite later going on to study biochemistry and genetics at university. Only the lowest of the four de facto streams studied combined science. Had I been forced to take combined science I would not only have performed poorly at the biology elements in which I was not interested, but would have been likely to be sufficiently demotivated to perform as well at the other two. It's been hard to find exact numbers taking different options in the current state sector, but the tone of nearly everything I've found on the Internet points to a sorry state of affairs. The 'theme based approach' seems to dominate too, in other words an excuse to make guiding students in their writing essay on climate change take the place of serious scientific education.

Giving kids as much choice as possible has to be a key to motivation, and motivation is a key to real performance. Society has a right to expect people to leave school literate and numerate otherwise they may become a burden on that society, for everything else people will, given a chance, tend to make the decisions that are right for them and find their own niche.

I was given pretty much a free hand on my 'O' level options, and I only really made one mistake, and on that I think I was conned. I took geography instead of history, and was horrified to find that the interesting physical geography with field trips to see ox-bow lakes and the like was to be replaced by worthy human geography focusing on the dilemmas facing Indian subsistence farmers in their choice of how to use cow dung, and some bloke called Mr Yagi who was having a tough time selling Tatami mats in modern Tokyo. Other than that though I came out pretty well from my experience of state education to that level.

I'm sure the money spent has had some positive effects in the last few years, but it's hard not to wonder how much of this benefit has been expended in order to compensate for poorly conceived educational theories that ignore the most important stakeholders in that education, the children themselves.

So it Begins?

Cambridge, Elitist?
Yes, but in the right way

Yesterday was not a good day. Not only did it see a very poor performance by England against the Boks (fair effort forwards, did we have any backs?*), but we also saw the possible beginning of something I've feared since the announcement of Broon's first cabinet.

Yesterday, John Denham, the Universities Secretary addressed the Universities UK annual conference in Leicester. He should, of course, have delivered a humble apology for the piss poor performance of a succession of NuLab Education secretaries who have delivered a debased examination system, and a stream of state educated eighteen year-olds many of which are less prepared for a top-flight academic career than any in living memory.

Of course though, honesty, integrity and basic decency have never been the hallmark of the NuLab project, so instead:

John Denham, the Universities Secretary, said some of the "most sought-after" institutions were shunning bright children from poor homes.

In a veiled attack on universities such as Oxford and Cambridge, which have the fewest students from state schools, Mr Denham said academics should do more to "identify and nurture the young students of the future".

Source: Daily Telegraph

It's hardly surprising that the attack was 'veiled', without this thinnest of defences I believe that the institutions at the heart his assault could have, and should have, taken legal action against Denham, as what he said, not to put too fine a point on it, was a lie.

The concept that Oxbridge, or any top flight educational institutions would 'shun' anybody on account of a 'poor' background is offensive and wrong. The truth, as I witnessed it, was the reverse. From what I saw at Cambridge, and I can't believe that for all its many faults, that Cowley Poly was any worse, the University bent over backwards to encourage state school applicants from underrepresented areas, and delighted in selecting those that made the grade. The only thing they will not do is compromise on their goal of achieving the highest possible degree of excellence in the output of their system.

Given that it is impossible to prove any inherent prejudice against those from less privileged backgrounds, as simply it does not exist, the only conclusion we can draw from government thinking is that Team Broon must believe that the institutions should accept a lowering of their standards in favour of some ephemeral concept of social justice.

It's the wobbly table leg principle. We've gone for an 'all shall have prizes' approach to secondary education, which leaves state school pupils at a disadvantage. No longer do they compete head to head with those with of more privileged background on tough but fair examinations at 16 and 18, but now all shine superficially with those with the means having more chance to demonstrate excellence through higher level examinations and better preparation for interviews. Does the government do anything to address this underlying problem? No, let's tinker with the one globally respected part of the UK educational system to cope with the situation we have created.

Denham needs to take a look at the broader picture. Leading Universities are doing all they can, and genuinely want to attract the type of student he claims to champion. If, despite this, the numbers look unacceptable to him, he really needs to focus his attack on his colleagues responsible for the remainder of the British educational system, not on institutions whose one real commitment is to an excellence (myself not included!) that is an asset to the country.

Thunder Dragon raises another salient point on the same story when he points out that no numbers were quoted for the number of applicants from different types of school. As so often the case where social injustices are alleged, they are conspicuous by their absence. It doesn't matter whether it is the number of women in Parliament, ethnic minorities in the police force, or 'poor' students at Oxbridge. If you want to land the problem at the door of the institution in question you must at least first demonstrate that those who apply do have a lower chance of success, and if this can be shown, that such statistics are unfair against objective criteria. Looking simply at the numbers of those who get over the finishing line may mask a catalogue of failures whose roots lie far beyond the control of the institution in question.

Of course though, the story is nothing to do with the prospects of poorer state educated students in the university system. It is simply another sign that behind the marketing facade, the good old fashioned envies and hatreds that have always been the driving force behind the labour movement are alive and well. They always have been, and always will be the real 'nasty party'.


* If is the end...bad luck Jason Robinson and thanks for all you have done, you've been a class act in the white shirt.

Congratulations and Concerns

Another bumper crop of A's and A*
according to the Ministry

First of all, congratulations to anyone who has got the GCSE results they were hoping for today, or perhaps more likely to the parents of any such student. I'm convinced that as a species we are getting brighter and that other than a few problems sectors pupils today are working harder than they ever have done, aware of the tough competition out there in the real world.

I mean it but, even if I didn't, it's something you have to say anyway, lest you be accused of disrespecting the efforts of those sitting the exams. It's the 20-somethingth year of rising numbers of A and A* grades, and also the 20-somethingth year in which the same tired old line has been trotted out to attack anyone who has the temerity to ask whether the exams are as challenging as they used to be.

Yet these questions have to be asked. Just like a currency, the strength of an examination system is underpinned by the general confidence in its integrity.

There are clear concerns which do need to be addressed, otherwise, regardless of the merits of the case, the system will become tainted. Simply using moral blackmail to try to close down the debate does everyone a disservice.

Of the concerns raised there are three that I feel deserving of fuller consideration than a Minister and a representative of the examination boards simply saying 'there is no problem'; neither have the objective neutrality for their assurances to carry much weight.

Firstly there are the simple numbers. If the persistent growth in top level grades year on year is indeed entirely down to improvements in the educational system, educators the world over would be beating a path to our door to emulate our success. As it happens they do come, but they tend to opt for the old style O-level examinations which are still offered outside the UK.

The consistent inflation in success on all measures would be enough to make any scientist suspicious, especially in the absence of causative factors to explain them; a massive school building programme is unlikely to explain a growth in success before the plans have reached the drawing boards, but this won't stop a government claiming success. It all seems a little bit too much like someone points being plotted on a graph where the line showing the desired results has already been drawn.

Secondly there is the testimony of those who next encounter the successful examinees, and have done so over a longer period than any government hold power; the employers or in the case of A levels, the universities. The opinion of neither of these key stakeholders accords with the opinion the government.

Finally there is operation of the marked. Even as a committed free-marketer I can see problems in a system where any head of department who wished success for his school and his pupils would inevitably seek to opt for an examination from a board where his pupils are most likely to achieve success, and where, I suspect, the financial success of the examination boards must in some way be tied to the number of pupils sitting its exams.

There is of course a degree of regulation to prevent the worst excesses such a dysfunctional market could produce, but what I see is a regulatory function that sits far too close to the government, which has its own interest in seeing ever growing pass rates. What I don't see is hard research - when was the last time today's pupils were asked to sit, for example, the 1995 JMB Maths O level paper I sat, as a research exercise so that results across generations could be properly normalised, and who knows…perhaps the annual accusations could be put to bed once and for all.

I don't know if there is a problem. Unfortunately because of the way successive governments have handled the issue I certainly don't know that there isn't, and such a situation breeds a distrust which is unfair to kids who have probably worked as hard as I did, and probably more so.

Another Ill-Educated Proposal

Government plans a recipe for resentment

I've come across an interesting new blog, Educational Conscription, featuring some damn good contributors like those behind Devil's Kitchen and the Thunder Dragon, and whose focus in on criticism of government plans to force all to remain in some form of education until the age of 18. I don't really have a great deal to add to the general thrust of the various analyses found on this blog, agreeing as I do with the most of the arguments, in particular, the fundamental argument that trying to force a thankfully small group down this route can only breed resentment and produce results that are limited at best.

It's not actually a subject I had given a great deal of thought to, but in reading Educational Conscription I was struck with the parallels with an education topic on which I do have a strong view, that of the foolishness of some of the government's tinkering with the education offered to those who do stay on until eighteen. It doesn't seem to matter whether governments plan and scheme for those who want to leave school at the earliest opportunity, or for those who want to stay on until eighteen; in each case they seem to wholly ignore the instincts and aspirations of people at that age.

The latest government proposals do seem to be part of a pattern of decisions by governments of all persuasions over the course of my adult life, that seem to show that nearly all politicians have either forgotten what it is like to be young, or that they had very atypical childhoods which they wrongly believe gives them the answers to the problems of all.

Anyone who has been a normal sixteen year old, and remembers what it was like would be able to see why such measures are in all probability likely to be counterproductive. It's an age where you, rightly, want to be given the chance to make at least some of your own decisions; to narrow down the options is not something that many will react well to.

I never seriously contemplated leaving school at sixteen but I do remember so clearly the change in attitude that took place between fifth and sixth forms at my school, back in the 'bad old days' of 'narrow' old style A-levels (you know the kind, took two years to do, rigorous syllabus, big exam at the end). The relief at being able to dump long hated bugbear subjects was palpable, and those subjects that remained on individuals agendas were tackled with something that at times even approached enthusiasm.

Beyond the academic aspect of things, subtle changes to the uniform rules made it something that, even if you didn't exactly like it, you could live with and wasn't far of the dress rules in the more formal offices I work in today. We got a coffee shop style common room, and best of all a pool table, thought the dart board eventually was (probably rightly) deemed a safety hazard and removed. These privileges were much more effective than the collections of enamel 'Prefect', 'House Captain' type badges, in the battle to make the sixth form something to aspire too. They even gave the fifth form a much more Spartan common room of their own, next to ours, from where they could observe the privileges of their elders and betters to give those on the borderline a pause for thought on the decisions they faced.

You were treated in a subtly more adult way, even on the academic side. For a start, unlike the decisions over 'O' levels, as they still were for me, it was a question asked of the pupil, and answered by the pupil, not one made in a consultation between teachers and parents who may or may not have involved their offspring. There were rules, but they were reasonable.

Most notably, anyone with particularly poor performance in mathematics or English language would have to have another attempt in addition to, or in place of one of their higher level courses. This has always seemed reasonable to me. If your performance in these areas falls below a certain point you can become a burden on society, and society has a right with the young, the costs of whose education society as a whole bears, to ask for them to reach some basic functional standards to equip them for life. Having a broader post-sixteen education certainly is a worthy aim in an abstract sense, but frankly people do not become unemployable just because they cannot speak a bit of basic school boy French, nor is it the lack of a humanity in their education that means they cannot read the letter from their credit card provider explaining how poor their understanding of compound interest was.

Overall though, the ethos was all about giving the pupil as much control over their own education as possible, and in the greater part people responded to this. Attempts to force everyone to stay in education until 18 and the tinkering with post-16 education, almost always on the grounds of 'broadening' it are two sides of the same coin; the result in each case is the same, a narrowing of the options available to people in that crucial age range.

I can imagine not only the resentment of those whose sole wish is to leave education and go into a job at that age, and how this will manifest itself either in school or their more vocational education centres, but also of those who would have stayed on into sixth form anyway, but find the same choices I was offered, denied to them.

I have an old school friend, who is a truly brilliant mathematician, who last I heard was back in academia as a lecturer. Like me he found sciences and maths easy going, but for him English and Modern Languages were little short of torture, which he endured just enough to get reasonable passes. The relief when he could finally put these behind him was obvious as he burnt his English set books in his father's garden. He went on to get a good first at university in Maths, and is hardly illiterate. If he'd faced the prospect of something like the baccalaureate type system that much of the educational establishment drools over, the torture would have continued, and he would almost certainly have left school at sixteen.

By all means have some terms and conditions on leaving school at sixteen, perhaps even require a job to be found first, but for God's sake think twice before you try to restrict and constrain peoples choices too far, just at the point when they are rightly expecting to be given a little more trust. Over the last two decades successive governments have inflicted incredible harm on 11-16 education with the same kind of well-meaning but counter-productive initiatives; don't wreak the same havoc on a different bit that still just about works. Sure, we have problems with school leaver illiteracy and innumeracy; that's the fault of what's been done to the kids in earlier years. Go back and fix that, at the moment it all seems a bit like the perpetual shortening of the wobbly coffee table legs, as initiative after initiative is launched to fix the ills of their predecessors.

To the same politicians, before you do any of this, try and put yourself in the minds of those children, the normal ones; it will be hard, because you probably never were one, but, if you can, you might just start to understand why everything you touch turns to shit.