Danish bacon!!!!

A couple of weeks ago I tweeted about my 12 year old son having been told by his science teacher that the homework he had handed in was good, but that he would have got more marks if he found out more stuff from the internet.

The next day he came home with the prohibition notice pictured above. ‘DISQUALIFICATION’ if caught in exams with mobile phones, ipods, MP3/MP4 players or any products with an electronics communication/storage device or digital facility.

So if students use certain digital tools to gather information in the first place, as they are encouraged to do, they are disqualified from using them in an exam situation. All of which highlights one of the big problems with exams. If you happen not to be able to remember stuff you won’t do well. This is nothing to do with understanding. It’s simply memory testing, which isn’t real knowledge.

How refreshing then that in Denmark they are considering allowing wired computers with internet access to be used during exams ( http://tinyurl.com/otvrhw). This is to allow students to look up relevant facts during the exam.

Of course, it is immediately pointed out that:

“There are a number of potential pitfalls, however, not least protecting against plagiarism and the problem of students lifting information from online sources to pad out work”.

It seems that in Denmark, as well as here in the UK we assume young people will want to cheat, so guarding against this becomes an overriding concern. How trusting of our young people is that? There are all sorts of ways of guarding against this, and I do hope that these concerns don’t get in the way of this enlightened initiative.

Can’t see it happening in the UK though, not for many light years anyway. Apart from the fact that our mistrust of young people is very deep rooted, we just love exams, labouring as we do under the misapprehension that somehow exam results indicate something of a child’s understanding or abilities and can be used as a means of perpetuating a two tier system of haves and have nots.

Ditch the acronyms (DtA)!

So holidays have faded into the background, kids are back at school grinding their way through a new term, I’m trying to make sense of the ‘system’.

To do this I thought it might be useful to review the current state of the various government schemes for education that have been developed over the last few years. As a specialist in digital media for education I consider that I have a reasonable grasp of these.

As a starting point I made a list of acronyms of these schemes with their actual definitions with the intention of reviewing the current state of play with each one. Initially I came up with about a dozen or so of these including things like bsf (Building Schools for the Future), ECM (Ever Child Matters), AfL (Assessment for Learning), HTG (Harnessing Technology Grants) etc..

Then I read the ‘National Strategies Annual Plan Summary’ for 2009-2010 which at 45 pages is a helluva summary and lists in an annex 65 acronyms that are used within it. This makes the ‘summary’ virtually incomprehensible. Here is a typical example:

‘A significant number of LA’s are struggling to mainstream NPSLBA within their school improvement services and their CPD offer and need to target recruitment of priority schools and with PRU leaders and staff to NPSLBA.’

Even when you decode this it doesn’t make any sense. It is little wonder that our education system is in a state of apparent disarray when such a plethora of acronyms abound.

One of the difficulties, I think, is the attempt to force uniformity on an education system that actually needs diversity if it is to be appropriate for the 21^st century. As a useful report about barriers to innovation in education produced by Futurelab puts it:

“…(education policy) should be committed to promoting, encouraging, archiving and sharing the development of widely diverse educational responses in order to ensure that there is diversity in the system to allow adaptation whatever changes emerge, rather than seeking out and disseminating universal and uniform solutions.”

The attempt to impose uniformity, and the failure of that attempt, can be aptly illustrated with the framework of Personal Learning and Thinking Skills (PLTS). This framework neatly divides the essential skills ‘that will enable young people to enter work and adult life as confident and capable individuals’, into the six categories of, independent enquirers, creative thinkers, reflective learners, team workers, self-managers, and effective participators. Having made these divisions the framework then helpfully points out that:

“The groups are interconnected. Young people are likely to encounter skills from several groups in any one learning experience.”

In other words every child is an individual. Any teacher worth their salt already knows this and, within the constraints of class numbers, will respond to each child appropriately. Unfortunately the PLTS framework simply panders to the misconceived desire to package every child according to a single set of rules, ‘universal and uniform solutions’.

I do understand the temptation to think this way. With an average class of 30 kids it seems to make things so much more manageable but it does not allow individual talents and aspirations to flourish.

Back in the dark industrialist days there didn’t seem any other way to manage things. But now in the 21^st century we have different aspirations and we have technology to help us.

So we don’t actually need to try and package things in a neat ‘PLTS’ way. We just have to loosen up a bit, ditch the acronyms, trust the kids, support them, and let them get on with it. That is true personalised learning.

Education! We just gotta get radical.

This is a rather long blog post, after some absence from posting to this blog due to pressures of work, (filling a senior sales position at Vivid) and as you will read, a great holiday in the USA. After this it will be back to ‘business as usual’ with more regular and shorter posts to come. Thanks for sticking with it.

Holidays are often a time of reflection and the gaining of new perspectives. No more so for me following my family holiday in California with my partner and two children (aged 14 and 12). This was a touring holiday taking in the diversities of San Francisco and Los Angeles, Death Valley and Las Vegas (in the same day), the wonders of the Grand Canyon, snow in the boiling heat of Mammoth Lakes, chilling in Santa Cruz.

Aside from the time we all spent in the car (we covered around 2,500 miles in just under 3 weeks) we also all lived in one room in different motels around the place. So this was quite intense. Mum, Dad, and the teenage kids in such close proximity 24/7. Although Diane and I had been to various places in the US prior to this visit, many of the places we visited on this occasion were as new to us as they were to the kids. So for much of the time there was a shared sense of discovery in all the places we visited and experienced.

For example, nothing prepared any of us for the 118 F heat or the eeriness we experienced in Death Valley, or the contrasting glitch and glamour and madness of the Luxor hotel in Las Vegas when we first walked through the doors, the breathtaking first sight of the Grand Canyon, the sheer vastness of the Redwood trees in Yosemite, being at the centre of simulated flash floods at Universal Studios, discovering a tarantula as big as a fist sidling up to us at a restaurant in Seligman (on Route 66).

And all of these experiences excited the curiosities of the kids, sparked myriad questions across a rich variety of disciplines – the origin of language,  weather systems (naturally, being brits), the solar system, politics, history, geography, and so much more.

We also all kept daily diaries (mine a series of tweets).

There were some tremendously evocative moments, like when we all surveyed the scene at Badwater Basin (in Death Valley and the lowest point in the USA at 182 feet below sea level), the salt flats stretching into the distance in the intense heat, and imagined the gold rush pioneers trudging along, no shade for miles, tired and despairing. A hugely compelling image and one that grabbed the imagination of our kids sparking loads of questions. Of course we were unable to answer all the questions they had but had wide ranging discussions in which we all explored the issues raised.

If this is not education I do not know what is. Yet, the rules are that family holidays within school terms are not allowed, or only allowed on a limited basis with the express permission of the school head. This means that because everything is much more expensive during the school holiday periods hundreds and thousands of children from families who simply cannot afford to holiday at the inflated prices demanded are excluded from the wonderful experiential and enlightening educational opportunities thus afforded.

I used to think that an answer to this is that legislation should forbid the holiday companies from inflating prices during school holidays. Or that families are allowed to take their kids out of school for holidays if they can demonstrate the educational benefits of doing so. But I now think differently because these propositions simply pander to the view, and our obsession with the idea, that education is something that is wholly controllable and measurable and can be contained within constraints established by government.

As 16 year old Michael Jones in a Teachers TV video puts it (http://www.teachers.tv/video/17058 – start at 56.00), ‘I learn loads of stuff on the streets, learning is everywhere’. And so it is. From the streets of New Delhi where Sugata Mitra first conducted his ‘Hole in the Wall’ experiments, to middle class holidays in the US, to messing on the streets, learning is taking place.

Change is occurring in our education system, politicians messing with stuff they know little about, but as David Warlick in his recent blog post on ‘2¢ worth’ says:

‘it seems that every time we sit down and talk about education reform, there seems to be something in the way, preventing us from what we want to do right now.  We can’t move that tile in the puzzle, until the one next to it is out of the way, which we can’t move until another one has been shifted, etc. etc.’

OK this is a blog from USA but the issue is the same. This is just messing around the edges of a system that is clearly failing with the unfortunate effect, actually, of making life increasingly more difficult for those on the ground, those who are delivering education, our teachers. And in the process the voice of the young people for whom the system is designed is completely ignored.

A new Ofsted report on progress with the new diploma system has just been published. The conclusions are that ‘teaching of functional skills, maths, English and IT, must improve’.

This, of course should come as no surprise to anyone who knew from the start that the diploma debacle was wholly misconceived. It explains why resultant qualifications from the diploma are not ‘A’ levels, truly on a par with the more ‘academic’ qualifications. This is because excellence in the so called ‘vocational’ skills is simply not valued. Just as the arts are similarly undervalued (see Ken Robinson on this), placed at the bottom of the existing hierarchy.

So it’s back to square 1. The diplomas appear to have been conceived with the crazy notion that offering more vocational subjects within a new structure to the less ‘academic’ will somehow magically make these people more academic, say in subjects like English, Maths and IT! It won’t. They will continue to struggle and will continue to be treated as second class because they are seen as struggling with these subjects.

And this will continue to happen until a new approach, a pupil led approach, to learning is developed and until we rid ourselves of the elitist view that academic prowess is the route to fulfilment.

When the worlds financial systems went into meltdown last year a great opportunity emerged to rethink the whole of that structure and to make radical changes accordingly. Unfortunately it looks like that opportunity is lost and the signs are that the financial institutions, propped up as they are by government, are simply reverting to the old greedy ways and habits, bonuses are back!!

There is a danger that a similar thing will happen with education. It would be great if holiday prices were not inflated during school holidays so more people could afford to go away, it would be great if parents were encouraged to take their children on holiday during term times with the wide educational benefits that that offers but in the end that’s just tinkering around the edges, simply moving the tiles around.

With technology there is the real potential of delivering an education environment that is truly personalised, is aimed at self fulfilment, and is pupil led.

Yet this potential will come to nought unless we have the courage to remove the barriers to learning, to knock down the walls around the classrooms, to trust our young people, to listen to what they have to say, and to radically rethink the whole purpose of education, and deliver for the 21^st century.

Adding layers of discontent

So all unemployed young people are going to be offered training, a work placement, or a job. If they refuse they will have their benefit cut.

Great stuff eh! This will help with the rising problems of youth unemployment – a growing number of disaffected youth forced into doing jobs, training or work placements they don’t want to do.

30 years ago I ran a similar government scheme (shows my age), intended to deal with the problems of rising youth unemployment, called the ‘Youth Opportunities Scheme’ or YOP.

The scheme I ran was in the Black Country and with 2 other colleagues we ran three coordinated schemes in creative writing, photography and magazine design and production. Each scheme fed the others and resulted in the publication of a monthly young people’s topical magazine called ‘The first real headache’.

The content of the magazine included topical articles, interviews with famous people and others in the community, cartoons, photographs, competitions, reviews etc. and was produced wholly by the young people themselves with guidance from us.

These were 16 year olds and in order to gather the materials for the magazine they had to go out into community to conduct interviews, get photographs etc. for the publication. We trusted them to do this responsibly and allowed them to undertake these activities without supervision. Without exception they returned our trust and did a fantastic job. It was a really good magazine.

Then the day arrived when the men in suits arrived to make a spot inspection. It happened that a number of the young people were out in the community undertaking various tasks for the magazine. The suits were appalled that we allowed them to go out there without close and constant supervision.

They were not in the least bit interested in the quality of the magazine the young people were producing, or that they had always shown themselves to be wholly responsible. All they were interested in was that the kids should be ‘contained’.

(In 1983 the Youth Opportunities Schemes were renamed Youth Training Schemes presumably in recognition of the fact that they offered no opportunities at all).

And it’s happening again. This is a containment policy, a pretence that something real is being done for young people. Actually the opposite is happening. By requiring young people to do things that they may not want to at all they are they are ensuring that these kids move further away from their own natural inclinations and aspirations the development of which the education system is supposed to deliver.

Michelangelo said that his statue of David was not created by him, but already existed in the stone. His task was merely to remove those parts of the stone that were not David. This awful containment policy being introduced will simply have the effect of adding more layers of discontent leaving young people further from their essence than ever. It’s a disgrace.

Let’s not wait until the iceberg melts

Last night my 11 year old son told me that he had gone from hating history at school to loving it. When I asked him why, he said that he now had a good teacher. I haven’t yet quizzed him, as I will, on his perceptions of what was bad about the previous teaching and what is now good, but it is interesting that he makes that distinction. In my view teaching in a way that is interesting and motivating is not just desirable, but should be required of every teacher. I admire and respect teachers for undertaking a difficult job and when it is right in enhancing a child’s life. But I abhor bad teaching because of the serious harm it can do.

If we want to know what is good teaching or bad teaching we just have to talk to the young people who are being taught. They know what they like and don’t like, they know what switches them on and what turns them off. And we should listen to what they have to tell us about this and do something about it, even when we hear stuff outside our comfort zones.

As parents we celebrate each child’s individuality even if it’s only to extent of ‘he’s got his fathers eyes, but his mother’s nose’. Yet we force them to endure an education that expects uniformity, that expects an 11 year old to achieve the same standards in the same subjects as their 12 year old mates, or a class of 30 to express equal interest in all things.

We do this not because of any considered philosophy of education, but purely through means of practicality. How else can we ‘control’ a class of 30, a year of 120, but by imposing strict criteria on required outcomes.

My son also recently had a science test coming up and was told by his teacher to revise for it. That’s all. Not any guidance of how to revise, what to revise, even where to look for advice. Just ‘go away and revise’. Oh yes. There was some advice to try BBC bitesize, but not to do everything there because it was not all relevant.

That evening I caught him in our front room aimlessly flicking through the various folders of the work he had undertaken during the year not really knowing where to start, which things to concentrate on.

And then he asked me if I would test him so he could get an idea of what he knew best and importantly what he knew least. This is ‘assessment for learning’, a concept that he arrived at of his own volition, understanding that finding out the gaps in his own understanding could give him a structure for revision.

Unfortunately his teacher had not had the foresight to arm his pupils with some past tests in order that they could test their understanding in this way, but we were able to find some appropriate stuff online. In fact BBC bitesize was not the most helpful or structured. Many more structured resources were to be found on other sites simply by Googling ‘Year 7 science tests’.

Why do I say all this? Two reasons. Firstly on the question of practicality we do have the opportunity to really, seriously deliver (or I prefer to say ‘allow’) ‘personalised learning’ by appropriate use of digital technology. Going online to find appropriate revision materials is just the tip of an enormous iceberg.

Secondly, young people are wholly capable of being properly engaged in the debate about their own learning. So let’s ask them, listen to them, trust them, believe them, and act on what we hear.

And instead of just fiddling around the edges let’s do it now before they lose interest and before the global warmed digital iceberg disappears.

Play the ‘Mock the week’ Ofsted exam game

In their wisdom Ofsted have decided they are going to make it harder for schools to achieve an ‘outstanding’ rating by placing greater emphasis on raw exam results.

What a great idea. Just when we are being lulled into some sense of hope that the general exam regime is being relaxed in favour of other forms of assessment Ofsted chief inspector Christine Gilbert takes a significant step backwards.

“Our focus is on getting a better deal for children and young people,” Ms Gilbert said. I don’t suppose the young people themselves will see it that way. I don’t suppose anyone has bothered to ask them!

Anyone who watches ‘Mock the week’ on BBC 1 (and Dave) will know that there is a section of the programme where the stand up comedians come up with ‘things you are unlikely to hear’ in certain situations. Here is my version:

Things you are unlikely to hear young people say when asked whether they would like exam results to be even more important than they are considered now.

‘It’s a great idea. I don’t think I suffer anything like enough stress at school at the moment’

‘It’s a great idea. It will help teachers just focus on the things we need to do for the exams.’

‘It’s a great idea. I’m enjoying school far too much at the moment’

‘It’s a great idea. Confirms that people who aren’t good at exams are failures’

‘It’s a great idea. Means that schools will do less creative stuff.’

‘It’s a great idea. Means I’ll do much less of the stuff at school that I really enjoy’

‘It’s a great idea. I get very nervous about exams and am not very good at them. This will help me to pull myself together’.

‘It’s a great idea. I burst into tears before my last exam. Hopefully this will mean more people will join me and burst into tears also.’

Why not add yours, either in reply to this post, or @MickLandmann on Twitter, and I will compile them all and do my best to get them to Ms Gilbert.

‘Stories out of school’ misses the point

I attended an event called ‘Stories out of school’ in London yesterday, organised by Futurelab and presented by Martin Hughes, professor of education at the University of Bristol. This was based on an ESRC funded research project run by Martin that looked into ways young people learn outside the school environment. The event was, I think, put on as part of the research remit to disseminate the findings widely.

The conclusions of the research itself as presented at the event, that young people want adults to listen to them, to respect them, to not label them, and to recognise that their lives can be tough, presented no revelations. Any parent of teenage kids could tell you this, simply from observation. There was also a general conclusion that kids don’t like school. Hmmm.

The research followed specific young people in their involvement in a chess club, in a rock band, in drama sessions, in sport, in poetry and there were displays of the ‘outcomes’ at the event. Martin Hughes also presented the general findings and showed two DVD’s of dramatic work some of the young people had undertaken and presented.

Whilst I don’t doubt the veracity of this research, I don’t think it went anything like far enough. In particular conspicuous by its absence was any study of the out of school use of technology by young people, i.e. gaming, social networking, etc. or as someone pointed out any study of out of school activities that didn’t involve organised activity as such but rather ‘hanging out’.  These were, in my view, serious omissions given the amount of time young people spend with technology and their love of hanging out.

A clue as to why technology was omitted perhaps is in the fact that Martin Hughes clearly was desperately uncomfortable with technology himself. His PowerPoint slides were awful, he was unable to get a link to a website he wanted to show and after much fiddling he did eventually manage to show DVD’s of some drama activities, but had the volume up intrusively too loud. Clearly he hadn’t bothered to set these things up in advance.

And this was my greatest problem with the whole event. The presentation was appalling, including the scrappy presentation of the young peoples work and conclusions on display panels around the room.

This meant a disappointing afternoon for, I suspect, all attendees, but more significantly showed disrespect for the young people who figured in the study. It is my view that young people are not shown the respect they deserve and are certainly not trusted with any real responsibility for their own learning through the education system. To simply not bother to make the effort to present their views in any sort of reasonable fashion through a study that presumably is intended to fight their corner simply serves to exacerbate that situation.

Try leading by example!

To a question I raised on Twitter, ‘Can we persuade parents to be radical with their kids education?’ I received the reply, ‘Try leading by example’. The question arose from my previous blog item, ‘Education. It’s a risky business’ in which I raise the issue of the innate conservatism us parents tend towards when it comes to our kids education.

Yet we have an education system that is out of step with the times, an education system that was made for the needs of industrialism, not for the current needs of information based digital society.

And we do, right now, have a unique opportunity to change that, by invoking digital technology to allow truly personalised learning. However, for this to happen, radical changes to the current system will be required.

For example, we must move away from a classroom model to a more fluid model, we must move away from a 9-3, 3 term, September to September model to one that recognises that learning can and does take place 24/7, we must find ways of  replacing exams with other means of assessment (ideally self assessment), we must value creativity as a lynchpin for all learning and most important of all we must value and trust our young people and give them control of their own learning.

These are radical changes which depend for their implementation on winning the hearts and souls of governments, teachers, parents, and pupils alike.

There is no panacea. I cannot do something with my kids that somehow ‘leads by example’. This would be a misunderstanding of the issue. What I want to see changed is the system itself such that my kids and everybody’s kids can satisfy their natural curiosities and become self fulfilled. I want to see a system that delivers on the promise of the 1967 Plowden report that:

The school sets out … to devise the right environment for children, to allow them to be themselves and to develop in the way and at the pace appropriate to them……… It lays special stress on individual discovery, on first-hand experience and on opportunities for creative work. It insists that knowledge does not fall into neatly separate compartments and that work and play are not opposite but complementary.

The example I can lead with is one of raising the issues, producing evidence, working with the players towards the desired end just as I did in my campaigning efforts that led to a fairer admissions system in Brighton and Hove.

I can also, of course, lead by example by myself being kind, giving, caring, compassionate, all the virtues we would like of our children. In this I do my best.

Education. It’s a risky business!

The TES recently undertook a survey of over 2200 parents on the issue of the potential boycott of SATS by the NUT and NAHT which showed that the unions do not have the support of majority of parents over this issue. This is in strong contrast to the findings of research carried out by NAHT and the  Department for Children, Schools and Families which found that 85% of their survey of 10,400 parents wanted league tables and national testing scrapped.

Whoever you may choose to believe this does raise interesting issues about where parents do stand in relation to education system changes. In fact parents have very little influence but I am interested in what they think because if the education system is to change radically, and I believe it must, this must happen with the agreement and crucially, involvement, of parents. They must be on side.

And I think this is problematic because mostly parents do not want to take risks with their children’s education. And a reason we do not want to do this (I am a parent also) is that is we place such high emotional value on getting their education right. 3 Years ago my daughter was allocated a secondary school that we felt was wholly wrong for her and had not been one of our original choices. Although it was not our fault on hearing this news we felt we had badly let her down, kind of neglected her welfare somehow.

The next few weeks of preparing an appeal case took over our lives completely and felt like the most important thing we had ever done, literally. Thankfully we won the appeal and the relief and joy was equal in measure to the opposite feelings we had experienced.

I then continued at the forefront of the campaign that led to the establishment of the so called’ lottery’ (I prefer ballot) admissions system in Brighton which judging by the vilification of me and some of my colleagues in the local press was testament to the strength of feeling over these issues.

Whether or not getting our kids to the right secondary school should take on such an elevated sense of importance is another matter. The fact is it does. And as long as it does I wonder what it will take to persuade parents to do anything vaguely radical when it comes to their kid’s education.

I recently attended an event about the future of education at the British Academy in London at which a parent, who is also a teacher, told us that he had sent his young teenage daughter to study in France for a whole term in order to enhance her experience, broaden her outlook etc.. He told us that it had been a great success and that his daughter came back more fulfilled as a result.

He then made the following, very interesting point. He said that although he and his wife believed their actions would be of great benefit to their daughter, they couldn’t actually guarantee that. They were trying something out so there was an element of risk involved. He then said that whilst he felt it OK to take that risk in respect of his own daughter, he didn’t feel he could take the same risk in respect of the pupils he taught.

I get his point, and therein lays a particular problem in respect of the progress of the radical changes that we must undertake.

Ask the experts ??

During the past week I attended two events in London, both on the theme of the future of education. The first was at the British Academy and was a discussion day about the future of education organised by Futurelab, the second was at The Purcell Rooms on Southbank and was an event to mark the 10^th anniversary of the ‘All our futures’ programme, which is chaired by Sir Ken Robinson.

The first was around general issues about the future if education fuelled by Futurlab’s research in this area. The second was about ‘creativity’ (or lack of it) in education. Across both these events, which were worthwhile attending, there was a common, and unfortunately not unusual, lack of young people’s voices in any significant way.

When I raised the issue at the Futurelab event it was met with the usual comment that there is so much information to gather that it is not always, unfortunately, possible to represent everything in their research. This is a common response (I raise this question on a regular basis at different events I attend). What I would like to know is that if it is hard to represent all views why is it always young people’s views that are left out.  And also, if not everything is represented, is the research actually relevant.

Another interesting issue that arose was about creativity in schools. When Sir Ken Robinson talks about creativity in schools he means as an integral part of the whole of schooling, and not just an adjunct (e.g. creativity hour).  At the Futurelab event I raised the issue of the ‘freeze frame’ technique (the technique of getting young people to enact an event, freeze at a certain point, and describe how the character they are portraying thinks and feels at that moment) and its value as a teaching/learning technique.

It was my 14 year old daughter who introduced me to this technique (something she had come across in drama classes) and her who suggested that it might have a role across the whole curriculum.

I introduced this at the Futurelab event as an example of why it is valuable to seek young peoples views (I would never have found out about it had we not been chatting over dinner), how such teaching and learning possibilities may themselves inform building and space requirements (such techniques require space), and how creativity could be integrated across all subjects.

Unfortunately, the ‘expert’ panel to whom I addressed this didn’t really ‘get’ it. They understood the value of this having come from my daughter (pupil voice) but didn’t, I felt, get the fact that I was referring to the technique being used across all subjects, not just as a good technique for drama. Nor did they get the implications this would have on school, building design (vis a vis the BSF debacle).

This was disappointing. My difficulty is that if the so called experts whom I would expect to be ‘on side’ don’t understand these issues the great hopes for the future as I see them are very distant indeed.