Temperama

Peter Hyman On Secondary School Skills

The best comments yet on the reorganised secondary school curriculum, announced today, have come on the Today programme (7.09) from Peter Hyam, the former Blair advisor who now teaches history in a North London secondary school (and wrote a book about it). Like everyone else he welcomes the new flexibility the slimmed-down curriculum will allow, which is in keeping with the government's pledge to personalise education to individual pupils' needs. He also enthused about the potential for school departments to work together on local history projects, which strikes me as a brilliant idea. The thing that really rang my bell, though, was his quoting the saying that "primary school teachers teach children, secondary school teachers teach subjects". We need to think more about the sort of people we want to emerge at the end of secondary school and build the curriculum to meet that goal, he said.

I agree. And it brings me back to a problem many parents have when our children make the great secondary transfer leap. It is, simply, that our children disappear. Secondary schools are such large, impenetrable bureaucracies. It can be near-impossibe to find out particular things about your child's progress because teachers struggle to find the time or the gaps in the school day to see you or to return your calls. Parents' evenings can't even begin to make up the shortfall. Meanwhile, school reports have been reduced to rows of figures requiring three pages of explanatory notes. This gap between parents and their childrens' secondary schools surely needs to be closed, especially in respect of children who are struggling or misbehaving. Whole family approaches often work well with tackling social problems in other contexts. Why not in the realm secondary education too?

Salvaging NEETS

In a rather distracted way I've been researching a small article about teenage binge-drinkers and other lost young souls in the place where I grew up. In that connection I was very struck by an article by Mary Riddell in Sunday's Observer:

"Up a flooded track, high in the Berkshire Downs, 60 teenagers are driving motorbikes through terrain as thick as porridge. There's a tea tent and a few mums with pushchairs. It looks much like any other event in the minor sporting calendar. It is also a tableau of Britain at the end of the Blair era. These competitors represent his children, or at least the cohort offered New Deals, convicted of new crimes and rebranded under a new label. They are the Neets - a lost generation of a million young Britons who are Not in Education, Employment or Training - and who cost the taxpayer £3.6bn a year...More accurately, these are Neets-in-waiting. Some are too young to qualify as members of a 16-24 age group that has swelled by 15 per cent in a decade."

She continues:

"An average annual budget for a scheme teaching 200 bikers is £220,000, or little more than the £172,300 it costs to keep one child in the secure training centre in which Adam Rickwood, whose inquest ended last week, hanged himself with his shoelace, aged 14...Some day, there may be the universal provision that criminologists such as Richard Garside rightly recommend as the route to a better society. There may be state-sector Etons, fine vocational training and glittering apprentice programmes not featuring Alan Sugar. But, for now, 45,000 16-year-olds leave school each year unable to read or write properly. Myth says they are everywhere, menacing your neighbourhood and rifling your car, but mostly they are nowhere. Pinned below the waterline of one of the richest countries on earth, they are allowed, scandalously, to keep on sinking until some disaster floats them to the surface."

Why aren't there more schemes of this kind? There are several reasons, but one that springs to mind is that the government would be scared to fund them for fear of the relentless littlejohning that would ensure: my beer money being spent on motorbike holidays for young thugs, and so on. Just goes to prove yet again that the mouthiest patriots are usually those least interested in finding serious solutions to the worst social problems faced by our country. Read the whole article here.

Sociological Revival

I did sociology at university - I use the word "did" loosely here - which may be why I know a little about many things but not all that much about anything specific. However, it may be the main reason why I'm interested in the way different things fit together defined by politics, power, economics, culture and so on rather than ordained by, say, genes. This makes me deeply unfashionable, of course. But a review of a new book book sociology considers how I might become trendy again:

"One reason why sociology may be in trouble--the most serious reason, come to think of it--is that it lacks both an agreed-upon subject matter and a distinctive methodology. Economists study things involving money, and even those who apply their skills to non-economic subjects, including faith and family, are linked to their disciplinary colleagues by the commitment to a common method. Political scientists have a pretty good idea of what politics is, and while they study power in many locations, including the international arena, they typically agree that power involves, in Harold Lasswell's pithy formulation, who gets what, when, and how. But what is sociology's proper area of study? It once was society,' a broad term that includes both economics and politics; but sociologists, given their current troubles, would be hard-pressed to be so confident and imperialistic today. Yet if not society, what? Unless sociologists can define with some precision a subject and a method unique to them, they will never recover the intellectual prestige that they once enjoyed."

The suggest of The Civil Sphere by Jeffrey C. Alexander is that the subject should be civil society. The review I've quoted from is here.

Primary School Exclusions

From the Guardian:

"Last year 1,090 primary school children in England were permanently excluded (expelled) from school - 60 of them aged five or under, said the Department for Education and Skills. The lesser penalty of suspension - 'fixed-term exclusions' - was used in the case of 43,720 children under 11 in 2004/05, a rise on the previous year, with 10 times as many boys as girls involved. Racist abuse was the reason 330 children were suspended, 310 were sent home for sexual misconduct, while 150 children were given suspensions for drug and alcohol-related incidents."

Read the whole article and find the DfES pointing out that these numbers represent a 'miniscule proportion' of the 3.5 million children at primary school. That may be so. But might it not also be the case that some among that 'miniscule proportion' will grow up to become part of that small minority at the centre of our most chronic social ills? And, if so, what are we doing to prevent that happening?

The Legacy Thing: Education

Interesting piece by the head of a Nottingham Catholic secondary school on the impact of ten years of Blair - interesting, because in several ways his views are not quite what I was expecting. Read it for yourselves.

Home Ed, Texas Style

There are home educators and there are home educators:

"'We don't want people teaching our children that they come from monkeys,' says Michelle McKissick, 40, from Houston, who teaches her four children at home. What happens in biology classrooms is 'a lie', she says, before instructing me in the 'correct' view: Genesis 1.11 – not a metaphor, or a story, but fact. She firmly believes that the world is only 6,000 years old and that, consequently, man and dinosaurs (created on Day Six, along with Adam and Eve) once lived together quite happily – the creationist view of the universe. 'Dinosaurs weren't all these great big huge monstrosities,' she smiles, 'and they weren't all ferocious. Probably most of them were, in fact, plant-eaters.' It is Noah's flood, she points out patiently, that is responsible for the existence of fossils. And as for the vexing question of how Noah got a brachiosaurus, an animal that could have weighed up to 33 tons and eaten 3,000lb of green plants a day on to the Ark – 'He took the young ones. That would make the most sense.'"

That's Bible Belt America, of course. But the story there does concentrate the mind on the range of possible outcomes of the state having less control over what and where children are taught. Tricky issue. Food for thought.

Truancy: Why Am I Not Surprised?

New DfES figures show that the truancy rate in England's secondary schools is 18% higher than previously thought with the true picture likely to be even worse. The data reveals that children from poor families were three times more like than others to bunk off, and that the largest rises were revealed as having been at the government's flagship academies and city technology colleges. Something hasn't been working. Has this fellow noticed?

Education, Education, Education...

You may or may not agree with philanthropist Sir Peter Lampl's prospectus for helping disadvantaged children. But the research he has funded through his charity the Sutton Trust tells a sobering tale. Peter Wilby summarises:

"Are the commanding heights of British society, such as the media, the law and politics, still dominated by a public school, Oxbridge mafia? Answer: yes. Three-quarters of judges and two-thirds of the barristers in top chambers went to fee-charging schools, as did over half the country's top journalists. 'Nothing's changed in 20 years,' says Lampl. 'There's a bit more private school, a bit less Oxbridge. That's all.' Do state school pupils stand a fair chance of getting into the top universities, such as Oxford and Cambridge? Answer: no. Only a quarter of state school pupils with an A and two Bs get to a top university, against 45% of independent school pupils with the same qualifications. Are state schools - posh comprehensives, as well as surviving grammar schools - socially selective? Answer: yes. If those schools recruited only from their immediate localities, they'd have at least twice as many pupils from poor homes. Do independent schools add further 'value' to the already privileged children they recruit? Answer: yes. "They spend so much money, it stands to reason," says Lampl. 'Their A-level results are high because they have the best teachers. More than half of all the Oxbridge graduates in teaching are in the private sector.'"

Read the whole profile if you're intrigued.