GERM - Global Education Reform Movement

GERM - is it losing momentum? 

http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/news-and-media/blogs/warwick-mansell/does-goves-demotion-show-education-reform-has-a-popularity-problem/

The NAHT has a long way to go to prove to teachers that they feel GERM is detrimental to our education system and personally I think it is too much to hope for at present but I am delighted it is even being discussed. 

Pasi Sahlberg - newly added to the web links below, and well worth exploring, shares some thoughts on GERM & PISA and the Finnish approach to education (as shared by Kevin Courtney (NUT) via twitter recently). Something appears to be being lost in translation:

So why do head teachers in the UK appear to be getting it so wrong when converting the OECD/PISA data and expectations into school policy? Any thoughts or answers would be appreciated as I am currently constructing an essay on this topic and reader input - via any good web links or your own thoughts would be appreciated. The essay will appear in chunks on The Unlesson Manifesto over the next couple of months. 

Through a glass darkly....

The tech utopia nobody wants: why the world nerds are creating will be awful http://gu.com/p/4v54g

Spot the Statistical Anomaly

Something struck me the other day with greater clarity than normal. I was teaching a class of GCSE students and helping one girl in particular. On this occasion she smelt so badly that I could not physically inhale without choking. I worked closely to her for approximately 5 minutes trying very hard to inhale as minimally as possible and only breathe through my mouth. As I moved away I stood and watched my class and observed the following things:

One student had asked if she could sleep during my lesson as she had been up all night dealing with her new born sister as her mother was unable to attend the baby. She had her head on the table. Another had a TA (teaching assistant) working closely with them as they have a learning age of an 8 year old.

The lesson was interrupted by a younger girl who had walked out of a maths lesson as she had had enough and she came to find her sister. Both girls live practically on their own as mother is such a complete alcoholic who does not function in any capacity. She politely asked to stay and as 'on call' were aware of her movements I happily let her sit down and join in.

Another student, who had failed to do any work for the past 2 hours was now working quietly - she is on the police aware terror suspect list and often makes threats of bomb making and suicide.

Two other students were drawing on their arms. One has a lot of scars from self harming. It was the first lesson back for her due to being kept in 'inclusion' for 7 weeks due to refusal to change hair colour. The other was possibly abused as a child, the investigation is ongoing. The content of the conversation was graphically sexual in nature.

Yet another student had headphones in their ears and was talking loudly about becoming a DJ. There are significant drug references in the conversation and often drugs have been taken before attending school.

One other always arrives and sits doing nothing, for every lesson. Never once producing a single piece of work in the whole year.

These are tiny snippets of only 10 students from one class of 22. It is quite an abnormal class for my school but not for hundreds of others. Five different classes of kids will pass through my classroom in a day. Each one of the children in every class will have a story; they may not have eaten properly that day or they may have had a problem in a previous lesson resulting in them feeling disengaged. One's mother may be dying from cancer whilst another's father passed away in a car accident the previous year. Another one might have seen a promising sports career go up in smoke as they have just had to have serious knee reconstruction surgery. Others still might just find growing up a little bit tough and despite all the love and support from a good family unit they just don't care enough about school.

Whatever the story (all true and plenty, plenty more) it is my job to engage them, motivate them, make them laugh, encourage them to learn, discipline them, listen to them and support them.

Regardless of the statistical data, the measurements of progress every 7 weeks, the amount of marks and feedback I give them or what I tell their parents or carers, in the end some of them will surpass their predicted grades, others will not attain it. I will do my best to help them, I will try and encourage them to do their best as they work with me.

But they are human beings, individuals with problems, baggage, self-confidence issues, pressures and passions. The only thing they have in common is that not one of them is a statistic.

Data works, it's extremely useful sometimes. It works particularly well on a large scale. It works rather less well when reduced to a class size or an individual. I'm not only a teacher, I'm a manager. I use data every day. I often question the arbitrary data that comes in telling me that young Samantha attained level 5 in ks2 (key stage 2) numeracy so therefore she should secure a grade B in GCSE Art but I keep it, monitor it and add it to my own data. I just don't treat it as more important than any of the individuals I teach in any of my classes. I never will.

Education Reform Summit, London 10th July 2014

https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/michael-gove-speaks-about-the-future-of-education-reform

The Education Secretary spoke to the members of the Education Reform Summit as teachers and other public workers marched in strike action nearby. It's a very interesting speech and worth a read. It does underline the intention of aligning educational reform with economic globalisation where measurement across nations, in the form of PISA, is pressurising our managers to conform to the multi-national framework of performance - despite the illusion of increased autonomy spoken about throughout the speech, but below are several excerpts of other issues raised that I want to touch on in this short blog:

'In the past, great teachers - and indeed education ministers - have operated in isolation from any systematic and rigorous analysis of which of their interventions worked. Views on pedagogy or funding had to be taken on trust.

But in the last decade there has been a much more rigorous and scientific approach to learning. Instead of a faddish adherence to quack theories about multiple intelligences or kinaesthetic learners, we have had the solidly grounded research into how children actually learn of leading academics such as E.D. Hirsch or Daniel T. Willingham....

...Underperforming schools taken into the academies programme and placed under the leadership of great heads are improving more rapidly than those schools which remain in the hands of local politicians.

A stunning example of what’s happened under this programme is the progress made by a school in London which used to be called Downhills Primary and which has been reborn as Harris Primary Academy Philip Lane. [Please view Academies & Lies film linked below on the right]

When Downhills was under the control of local politicians, it failed its pupils year after year.

...The unions, in the past, have claimed to ‘stand up for education’. Today they’re standing up for their own pay and pensions.

I urge them to join all of us in this hall, all of us who are really standing up for education - putting education first and foremost - and the education of our most deprived children most of all.'

This rhetoric, which is the promotion of 'new' policies spun out of attacks on 'old' ideas, is an example of the marketplace in which the contemporary global education model has been placed aimed at furthering economic interests in the 'knowledge-based economy'. Or as Stephen Ball puts it in Big Policies/Small World:

'[O]ne key facet of the policy process and the formulation of new orthodoxies is critique. New policies feed off and gain legitimacy from the deriding and demolition of previous policies (see Ball, 1990) which are thus rendered `unthinkable’. The `new’ are marked out by and gain credence from their qualities of difference and contrast. In education in particular, part of the attraction of a new policy often rests on the specific allocation of `blame’ from which its logic derives. Blame may either be located in the malfunctions or heresies embedded in the policies it replaces and/or is redistributed by the new policy within the education system itself and is often personified - currently in the UK in the `incompetent teacher’ and `failing school’ (see Thrupp (1998) on the politics of blame).'

The speech may promote the current neoliberal agenda with a naturally positive spin but as Ken Jones writes in The Politics of Austerity:

'In terms of education, England is experiencing a less severe austerity than Spain or Greece. Cuts in spending, pay and pensions rights are significant, but are not at Greek levels, Youth unemployment is high, but has reached less than half the height of Spain - and so on, indicator by indicator. Nevertheless, in many respects, the programme of restructuring that accompanies austerity is more sweeping than that of other countries: the complete withdrawal of state funding for undergraduate arts, humanities and social science courses; the cutting of financial support for 16-18 year olds; the loading up of university graduates with as much as £45,000 of debt; the transfer of more than half of England's secondary schools to private management; revisions in curriculum and assessment that most experts think will increase educational failure'

In this instance I am seeing very little evidence of the 'celebratory, ambitious, inspiring day for all of us' that Mr. Gove shared with the Education Reform Summit.

The Subordination of Public Interest to Private Interest...

One of the best banners I came across at the London rally today. There is a lot of good content and compelling research over at the blog linked below on the right entitled 'Disgruntled Teacher'. Do spend some time looking at this valuable commentary. 

Marching Again

Dear friends in education,

I am travelling into London as I write this. Another strike, another march. Another attempt to tell this government and this education secretary that their policy to align education to global economic demands and outcomes is not the right way to engage learners. Education is not about measuring progress and diminishing a breadth and depth of experience to a selective few subjects where learners will continue to regurgitate 'knowledge' to secure grades. It is not about securing quotas of students into a higher education system where this attack is further along the line than we currently see in secondary and primary schooling. It is not about offering up a free system of learning to corporate practices that carry both political and economic agendas. Education remains about instilling a love of learning for life. My own educational measurement is reasonably poor - 8 Scottish standard grades (only 4 of which were graded 3 or higher) and 2 Scottish highers (1 graded B and the other a D). Hardly earth shattering. Yet I am in the classroom teaching the next generations. Why? Simply because I was encouraged to love learning, both inside school (despite reasonably poor academic attainment) and at home. This love of learning sat dormant until I turned 20 when I decided to return to college, apply for university to study Fine Art and then practice secondary pedagogy in Art & Design. I am now half way through an MA (and doing considerably better at academic attainment!) At 35 years old my desire for knowledge - real knowledge, is still increasing and my daily job is to instill this life long love of learning in others. I strike again today not to break a child's education or to cause their families disruption. I strike for exactly the opposite reason; to warn children and their families that without teachers who care so passionately for their children's quality of education they are walking blindly into an education model that is, at a fierce rate, destroying their educational chances to become life long learners who love to be educated and want to educate others. Sometimes you have to fight in this life. This is one of these times.