Surveillance of school applicants

What is this country coming to? It's hard to open the newspapers these days without reading that some ancient liberty has been infringed by the government, and today's no exception:

A council yesterday admitted using laws designed to track serious criminals to spy on a family for nearly three weeks to find out if they were lying about living in a school catchment area.

And is the government outraged?

The Home Office said the RIPA legislation did not appear to have been used inappropriately.

Dear God, is it time to get out? 

Update:

I wondered why so many blogs are silent on this issue (libertarians apart). Ah, I see. Labour legislation, used by Conservative council. That would explain it. 

Mission creep

The government's trust schools policy has its latest outing today with the news that a further 115 trust schools are to be launched with sponsors from both the private sector and charities.

The government yesterday announced 115 new trust schools, including the first co-operative trust school where pupils, parents and teachers will have a say in how it is run. Trust schools are paired with businesses or charities giving them powers to appoint staff, own their buildings and set their admissions policies. Sponsors announced today include the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, Barnardo's, Microsoft and Unilever.

We know that the whole trust schools thing is a bit of sham - it's a manifestation of the wrong-headed idea that the problems with UK schools are a failure of management; that all we need to do is get the right people steering the boat and it will be miraculously transformed from a leaking tub to a sleek ship-of-the-line. But it will take many more years of failure before people realise this, and only then might they deduce that the problem is lack of competition rather than lack of management.

The eye-catching thing about this announcement is the identity of some of the sponsors. I mean, the RSPB? Money is going to be diverted from twitchers to teachers? One wonders what the members will make of that. You thought you were handing over your membership fee to run nature reserves and twitching courses, but actually you were paying for a futile attempt to address education policy failures. You've paid your taxes, you've made your contribution to state education, and now you can pay all over again. Charity becomes a voluntary tax.

We can see where this will lead. If people see their charitable contributions being diverted to fund state activity, they will quickly stop giving to charity at all. That would be sad, but I can't help feeling a certain sense of inevitability about it. 

More fun at the schools ministry

Apropos of the last-but one posting on the new logo for the Department for Children, Schools and Families, some readers may have thought that the picture of a paint-bespattered Ed Balls was a crudely photoshopped fraud. I present below further recent evidence of activities in Mr Balls' department.

 

What are schools for?

Robert X Cringely writes a provocative piece on what schools are for in the age of Google. Or rather, he wonders whether there is actually a need for them at all. Well worth a look.

Women's studies

Via Croziervision, this story at Laban Tall's:

Women's Studies as a distinct undergraduate discipline will disappear this October, when the last institution offering first degrees, London Metropolitan University (formerly Hoxton Working Men's Club) stops taking undergrads. According to this Today report (RealAudio, 15 mins in) it's down to lack of demand.

There are very few things that the government have got right in the last ten years. Independence for the Bank of England was one. The other (and I can only think of the two) was the imposition of fees for university education. Suddenly, doing the student bit is no longer a matter of "an amusingly tipsy way of spending three years" or "a lifestyle choice", but a matter of finding a way to do something that is useful to society - which is to say, something that people are willing to pay for. It's small wonder that people are now avoiding mickey mouse degrees in favour of something which might actually give them a living at the end of it.

The counter-argument to my hypothesis is that a university education is not vocational - it's about interacting with clever people, broadening ones mind, having the time to think, blah, blah, rhubarb. To which I would respond that we've got the internet now.  You want mind broadening? Find a decent chatroom.

I enjoyed this

I'm not desperately inspired at the moment. So instead of writing something useful here's some things that other people have written. I enjoyed this post from Brian Micklethwait's Education Blog

I am more than ever convinced that if the entire state education system were to drop dead tomorrow morning, that would be a great improvement for some people immediately, for many people in a few weeks, for most people in a few months, and for almost everyone in a few years.  After a decade, the results would be miraculous.

And also this rather amusing primer on the US Sub-prime mortgage debacle, which I found on the Volokh Conspiracy. You need to click the screen to go through the slides.

Homework is rubbish

The Association of Teachers and Lecturers, a trade union, has called for homework to be scrapped.

The cynics among us would probably assume that they just didn't want to do the marking. The extremely cynical might point out that they don't anyway. 

I'm cynical on many things, but actually this is not such a bad idea. Certainly the baby Bishops are knackered when they get home from school and we tend to have great crises over getting anything done. I'd rather they were out playing in the garden.

Interestingly, one book I've seen on helping children with their studies said quite plainly that homework was a waste of time and that you should just do it for them. I certainly can't see much point in "make up a sentence including the word "today" (or "yesterday" or "birthday"). Is this useful?

The downside I would see in the plan would be that I would have absolutely no way of gauging my children's progress. Seeing their homework is as much information as I get. But I'd certainly be willing to trade regular reports for no homework. 

Good news

There's good news today, with the government's announcement that it's going to build twenty new university campuses around the UK.  You've got to hand it to Labour, they know what's worrying us middle class parents. With a campus on every street corner, a university education will become a ticket to a lifetime on the tills at McDonalds.

Which means I'm not going to have to pay for three kids to get a university education. I can retire after all! 

Decision day

So, it's decision day for parents today. The day when thousands of worried mums and dads find out if they've got their children into their preferred school. The day when the hopes of many are dashed. The day when careers are remapped, and expectations for the future are downgraded in the light of decisions to go private or home-ed.

The educational establishment meanwhile has got its retaliation in first, with a press release:

School leaders are calling on politicians to end what they call "the misleading rhetoric" of school choice - which, they say, cannot be delivered.

and there's a strong hint that it's not just the rhetoric they want to see the back of:

The admissions regulator, chief schools adjudicator Philip Hunter, has said that the present system of admissions and "parental choice" is fuelling social and racial divisions.

He has said that options that will be unpopular with many parents, such as having local lotteries for places, might be necessary.

It's probably true that school choice can't be delivered at the moment, but this is mainly because of all the silly rules which the government has set up. My children's school, which is about five miles away, is very rural and struggles to keep numbers up, although it's generally held to be very good.  Last year it lost a teacher because of the falling roll and one of the classes is now a composite of two years' intake.

Meanwhile the school in the village where I live is again very good, but has had a surge in numbers. It is now hugely overcrowded, with classes held in corridors and cloakrooms.

In a sane world, parents from an overcrowded school would be offered places at the non-overcrowded one. But an absurd rule stops this from happening. To take the overflow, the school with space would need to take on a teacher, to replace the one it lost last time round. The rules say they can't do this. They can only offer out-of-catchment places up to their existing staffing levels.

I just can't imagine the levels of stupidity that would be required to think that a rule like this was a good idea.

Posh kids in rough schools

Earlier in the week, the Times carried an article about a report on the research findings of Professor David James of the University of the West of England.

Middle-class parents obsessed with getting their children into the best schools may be wasting their time and money, academics say today.

They found that children from privileged backgrounds excelled when they were deliberately sent to inner-city comprehensives by parents opposed to private schooling.

Most of the children “performed brilliantly” at GCSE and A level and 15 per cent of those who went on to university took places at Oxford or Cambridge.

My alarm bells were set ringing by the claim that 15 percent of those who went on to university took places at Oxbridge. Why was this good performance limited to Oxbridge? Were the results for other universities similarly impressive? A classic way of lying with statistics is to subdivide your sample population until you get the answer you're looking for.

Later in the article we read that the sample population was 124 families. This would suggest no more than a couple of hundred children were assessed, so concerns about the statistical significance of the results appear to be fully justified.

The article on which the Times piece is based hasn't been published yet, but in the style so typical of modern "academics" the UWE has chosen to issue a press release and a short report on the projects findings before official publication. It's here.

From this we discover that the families and children assessed covered a range of ages. This significance of this is that only a fraction of those assessed will have actually reached university entrance age. Let's say that this was forty children.  That would mean that six went on to Oxbridge. If it had have been five then it would only have been 12%.

The idea that one could make any claims based on results of this kind is a joke. That the Professor is issuing such a misleading report is really rather reprehensible. It looks more like a piece of political propaganda than real research. 

Scraping the barrel

Do I hear the sound of the bottom of the barrel being scraped?

The educational authorities have excelled themselves today. For sheer fatuousness, it's hard to beat the initiatives they've come up with today.

First up is the idea of retraining ex-soldiers as teachers. Now don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with soliders per se, but you can't help feeling that the mindset of the military man and the pedagogue may be ever so slightly different. I mean, aren't soldiers meant to, you know, kill people who disagree with them? Or at the very least punch their lights out.

Mind you, unarmed combat skills could be useful in some schools.

Secondly is the bizarre idea to make children sit "creativity tests". Needless to say, a whole bunch of quangos (QCA, Ofsted, Creative Partnerships etc, if you must ask) have been running amok in schools throughout the land, and are now breathlessly reciting all the ways they have dreamt up to further pad their already grossly enlarged budgets. The latest wheeze, worthy of a PhD in creativity at least, is that somebody needs to measure children's creativity. Because creativity, like motherhood, is a good thing. So if you're in school, there's a whole lot more testing coming your way soon.

Just remember folks, if you can't measure it, it doesn't exist.

I do just wonder though whether they think (a) this will make any difference to anything and (b) whether anyone is paying any attention anyway. 

Social exclusivity

I was listening to Andrew Dilnot the head of St Hugh's College, Oxbridge on the radio this afternoon. Most of the time the BBC interviewer wanted to know what the colleges were going to do to get more people from state schools in. I did wonder why Dilnot didn't tell them that it's more a case of the state needing to try a bit harder to educate its charges, but perhaps he's too polite.

Now I see that a report commissioned by the government has concluded that grammar and religious schools should be scrapped, again because they are socially exclusive.

And then the thought struck me. How many public school ponces are there at the Football Association's centres of excellence? I mean they are both selective and socially exclusive.

I think we should probably be scrapping them too shouldn't we?  

Tonight is an unusual night...

....because I think I'm going to sit down and watch television, something I've managed not to do for weeks now. I'm going to be watching this:

 

If you've never heard of it, Summerhill is a school in Sussex which is famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) for not making its pupils attend lessons. In fact they don't make the kids do anything. This would have been fine but for the fact that their exam results were rather above the national averages. One can imagine the horror with which this was greeted by the bureaucracy. The result of all this was that the schools inspectorate tried to have them closed down, a battle from which the school has only recently emerged the victor.

Worth a look, I would have thought. 

Update:

Well, that was rather fun. It came across to me as one of the most subversive pieces of television I've seen in a long time. (This may not be saying much, I suppose, given how little time I spend in front of the goggle-box, but you get my drift). I might even go so far as to call it libertarian in outlook.

I wonder if the Beeb knew what they were getting when they bought it? 

Because of the unique way it is funded....

...the BBC will mot bother to check its facts.

Auntie Beeb has excelled herself today, with a rather unsubtle attempt to libel the entire home education community as child molestors. They've done a stealth edit to cover their tracks, but via the Google cache, here is the original piece.

 

 The key section is this:

Judith Gillespie, of the Scottish Parent Teacher Council, was worried that there was not register of youngsters withdrawn from school.

She cited a case involving five-year-old Danielle Reid, who was murdered by her mother's partner in Inverness in 2002.

A report into the case found the authorities had lost track of the youngster when her mother withdrew her from school.

As far as this goes these statements are true, but there is no connection with home education whatsoever. According to the independent report into Danielle's death, her mother claimed that the family were moving to Manchester. This is why Danielle was taken out of school. Quite how Judith Gillespie can attempt to make make a link with HE is beyond me. It looks like a rather transparent attempt to smear a lot of innocent people.

Still startling

I'd actually read this before, but it's still pretty startling. In Scottish schools, sex education lessons are mandated, but contraception may not be mentioned.

I keep thinking that there ought to be a website to collate all the truly jaw-dropping examples of the way the state "looks after" us. If only there were more hours in the day.

(Via DK - sweary alert)