The Education and Skills Bill had its Third Reading last week - and a Lib Dem amendment was accepted by the Government: schools must, "seek and take account of pupils’ views on policies on the delivery of the curriculum, behaviour, the uniform, school food, health and safety, equalities and sustainability " according to Children’s Minister Baroness Morgan.

When 150,000 school children were asked by Ofsted last year how much they felt that their views were taken into account when decisions were made, 34% replied "not much" or "not at all." So, in response, legislation will be submitted for Royal Assent "within the current Parliamentary Session" to ensure that children are consulted.

Meanwhile, senior teaching staff and LEA officials have a perfect right to ride roughshod over the views of the rest of the education professionals in their schools - better still, they are provided with professional training in "overcoming resistance to change" and "managing dissent in the staffroom" as part of the NPQH.

It’s nice to know that the Government values the skills, abilities and opinions of junior teachers so highly.

Christine Gilbert, head of the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted), said teaching rated as “satisfactory” was not good enough (BBC report .)

Which means that “satisfactory” actually means “unsatisfactory.”

So glad she cleared that up for us.

**Edited to add**

This rendered me speechless for almost thirty seconds: you can now get a degree from Butlins. A two year foundation degree in being a prat in a red jacket at a holiday concentration camp.

I am slowly coming round to the conclusion that it is actually me who lives in cloud cuckoo land.

If you got your A’ Level results today, congratulations. (I hope that there is no need for commiserations.)

However, let’s try to avoid jumping onto one of the many bandwagons associated with the ever-rising pass rate of the old-fashioned ‘Gold Standard’ of British education.

First, let’s look at the difference between modern A’ Levels and the ones that far grumpier people than me took in the “good old days.’

In the “good old days,” A’ Levels were marked on a bell curve every year and within each board, so only the top 10% of people taking a paper would get the top grade regardless of how many questions everyone answered correctly . This meant that there was no way of knowing if Joe Bloggs, who took UCLES A’ Level English Literature and got an A, had done as well as Bert Philpott, who took JMB English Lit and got the same grade. In effect, they weren’t the same grade and there was no way of measuring them against each other. The exams weren’t even looking for the same skills.

Worse still, if Joe & Bert’s little sisters took the same exams a year later, their grades couldn’t even be compared within the same boards because, as any fule kno, the bell curve changes with every cohort.

So in the middle of the 1980s (and just in time for me to take A’ Levels) the Uniform Mark Scheme was introduced. This meant that the mark boundaries between exam grades became fixed.

Fixed? Well, according to the Curriculum, Evaluation and Management Centre at Durham University, not precisely fixed - because while a 50% mark in one of my A Level papers would have got me a grade C when I took my A’ Levels in 1987, in 2006 it would have got me an A.

But crucially, that doesn’t mean that it’s easier to get a grade A in the 21st Century - because a valid interpretation of the data we have seen so far could be that it is proportionally harder to get 50%.

So we are still left with the question, has so-called “grade inflation” actually happened?

Here’s a few factors to consider when making that judgement:

1. Modern A’ Levels require a consistently high level of effort throughout the two years of study, as students have to complete exams at the end of the first year, at Christmas and again the end of the second year, and coursework throughout both years. Compare this with my own course in which all I needed was to collect a full set of notes for all my subjects, memorise them in time for the exams, and then sit nine three-hour papers in five days. In effect, I attended lessons and completed homework (an estimated 24 hours per week ) for 20 months, revised like fury for 4 weeks, and collected my certificates. As a measure of employable skills, my A’ Levels are useless - whereas modern A’ Levels are much, much more relevant because they measure how students perform under steady pressure over two years, meeting continual deadlines.
2. The curriculum and syllabus for modern exams are far more specific than they were in the “good old days.” My favourite anecdote is to point out that in the 1980s, I explained how nuclear power stations work for a Physics exam. My answer explained how fissile material heated water, which turned a turbine, which was used to generate electricity. I even explained how Fleming’s right hand rule dictated the assembly of a generator. Meanwhile, a couple of years ago the same level physics exam asked students about the ethics of nuclear power. But this is a glib comparison: I had a choice of topics to answer, and a variety of ways to answer them, so I didn’t actually need to know anything about nuclear power stations - I could have concentrated on another topic and made the choice in the exam. Modern students do not have that choice. And anyway, just because the ethics of carbon capture versus nuclear waste isn’t as precise a Fleming’s right hand rule, it doesn’t follow that it is easier to learn, less relevant, or easier to answer questions about.
3. Teaching standards. Yes, I had to comment on them sooner or later. While it is absolutely true that there are no demonstrable or even implied links between the standards that the government demands that teachers meet and pupil performance in exams , there is no doubt that teaching standards have improved over the last two decades. However, Ofsted doesn’t deserve the credit for this. Neither does the ridiculous testing regime imposed by national & local government as well as individual schools (I once counted up the amount of time that a secondary school I taught in spent assessing 14-18-year-old children - it was 25% of their time in school.) The reason for the improvement in standards is the unintended consequence of all the scrutiny that teachers have been under: teachers are now teaching to the test.

It doesn’t matter how complex a problem appears to be, the correct answer is quite often the simplest.

For all the pressure on the education system, for all the debate about skills, standards and professionalism, the truth is that education in this country is delivered by about half a million teachers, all of whom have been told that their job security and their next pay rise depends upon how well their students perform in their next examinations.

First, enlightenment is defined thus:

“if you have ice-cream, I will give it to you; if you do not have ice-cream, I will take it away.”

Anyway, enough of the Zen crap. Ofsted announced today that “schools narrow the curriculum by “teaching to the test”.”

Well, no shit, Sherlock.

I don’t want to be smug and say I-told-you-so (well, I do, actually) but back in October 2004 I wrote this:

A little investigation of the history of education in England brings us to the 1862 Revised Code of Practice, which introduced these very same principles into British schools.

Matthew Arnold (poet and school inspector of the 1890s) said that the system of school inspection was, “a game of mechanical contrivance in which the teachers will and must more and more learn to beat us.” Wade Nelson (professor of educational leadership at Winona State University) said more recently that, “Identifying specific teaching processes as the causal component of student success by any credible measure is so difficult that it’s practically impossible.” Prof. Nelson has one advantage over the UK Government: he has bothered to read history, and discovered the lessons learned in this country by 1897 when the system was abolished (last time.)

It was in place for 35 years last time. For history to repeat itself, we should be heading back towards sanity by 2023. And I plan to retire in 2025.

Meanwhile, the BBC has reported that “Schools Secretary Ed Balls said teaching to the test was wrong.”

Is there room on the naughty step for all of England’s teachers? I mean, how naif can you get? It’s wrong to speed, but the last time I did 70mph on the motorway I was the slowest moving vehicle between Leeds and Perth.

It is a matter of common sense: politicians can talk about ideals and principles and professionalism until the cows come home - but salaries and school budgets depend upon exam results.

And it doesn’t matter how clever the politicians, inspectors and LEA officials think they are. They will always be one step behind the teachers.

My school is being painted.

The council work crew painting it were complaining, apparently, that they had nothing to do, and were delighted when my school allocated a budget to paint the whole place. “Great ,” they thought, “something to fill the time .”

So last week a team of three painters spent two days painting a twelve foot square reprographics office, and three days painting a thirty feet long corridor. They have spent three days this week painting a classroom (not a large classroom, either - it is only just large enough for a class of 15 pupils ) and they still haven’t finished.

Schools don’t get painted very often because it is too expensive. I can see why.

I am also suffering from crushing envy and incandescent fury that there is another branch of employment by the government that is completely immune from performance targets, cost cutting exercises and those f***ing management consultants and inspectors who watch everything they do, tick boxes on clipboards, and then make them do it in a different way.

Bastards.

BBC report on the Institute for Policy Research recommendation.

In the best traditions of Yes, Minister, I think I see an opportunity for a quid pro quo.

Yes, the government may abolish my six week summer holiday, if it can compensate me for the loss of the one perk that makes my job tolerable in the following ways:

1. If my students don’t make progress, I face disciplinary action and potentially the sack - so I would like the power to remove those students who deliberately jeopardise the education of their classmates and defy their teachers.
2. If the government must set targets, could it please consult someone who knows a little bit about education first? For example, a basic grasp of the difference between “insure” and “ensure” would help. An understanding of the difference between information and knowledge would be even better.
3. Please stop retraining me five times a year. If the government can’t do this, please could it stop using materials and philosophies that it told me to forget five years ago.
4. Just once, I would like to be able to introduce and pursue a new initiative, stick with it for long enough to give it a fair chance, and then review it to see if it worked. I’m getting tired of watching them all fizzle out while we all jump aboard the bandwagon for the latest idea. And frankly, it makes the government look like it has the attention span of a blonde teenage goldfish.
5. If the government wants to blame me (and my colleagues) for juvenile delinquency, then I would appreciate the powers to do something about it.
6. Grade inflation. It happens. It happens because the government made it happen. Simple example: Physics O Level 1985: “Explain how nuclear power stations generate electricity.” Physics GCSE 2005: “Are nuclear power stations an ethical way to tackle global warming?” If you can’t see the problem with that, then you are part of the problem.
7. Would someone like to explain how English, maths, science, religious education, citizenship, PE and PSHE can all have at least 20% of curriculum time each?
8. I’d like my weekends off, thanks.
9. If you want to overwork teaching staff so much that 1/3 of teachers are trying to find alternative employment and 1/10 are off sick in the last weeks before the summer holiday, then put your hands up and accept that you are doing something wrong.

The education system encourages schools to deny the problems that they are facing, rather than deal with them.

Of course, these headteachers aren’t going to accept that they should have listened to the rest of us fifteen years ago when we said that this would happen. Not after they spent those fifteen years hitching a ride to the top of the pay scale…

But now the workload is starting to make them suffer, they want something to be done about it.

Funny, that.

Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, has decided that the 14-19 qualifications system is far too complicated.

He has a point. At the moment you can get GCSEs, A Levels, Applied GCSEs, Applied A Levels, NVQs, GNVQs, BTecs, Apprenticeships (with or without NVQs and GNVQs) and the International Baccalaureate.

So he wants to simplify and streamline the whole system. His new vision is much less complex, including GCSEs and A Levels, Apprenticeships (with or without NVQs and GNVQs) and Diplomas (again with or without NVQs and GNVQs) the International Baccalaureate (although in the newer, simpler system this won’t be an “entitlement” but an “option”) and a brand new “Pre-U” exam to rival A Levels.

Isn’t that so much simpler, clearer and well thought out?

Listening to the Chancellor yesterday prompted me to look up a few things, just to see if New Labour’s promise to improve our education system has been delivered.

It hasn’t.

First, thanks to the New Labour changes to the education system, schools are getting away with selection by the most invidious, unfair and unreasonable methods including requests for cash donations prior to awarding places. Even my own children’s fee-paying public school doesn’t do that!

This is not because New Labour has introduced any policies that permitted these illegal practices, but because they have removed all of the checks and balances from LEA and school administration - all in the name of reform.

Second, according to OFSTED, 49% of schools are inadequate. For that to be the case after ten years of New Labour education ministers claiming triumph after triumph kind of makes a mockery of their announcements, doesn’t it? Just to put this into perspective, in the 1995 Annual Report OFSTED said that 10% of secondary schools were inadequate.

Finally, and most damning of all for a “Labour” government, according to a recent report from the LSE social mobility is moving backwards, too. Not only are pupils from poorer families less likely to get out of the poverty trap than they were when New Labour came to power, they are less likely than they were when we had grammar schools. Less likely than at any time since just after World War II.

That’s right: the grammar school system gave Britain’s poor people a better chance of escaping poverty than our education system does today.

Overall, I can only give New Labour an “F.” Their performance has been unacceptably poor, made worse by their repeated insistence that things have been getting constantly better.

In response to a request by a teaching union for a Royal Commission to investigate why some children are not happy in school, a spokesman for the Department of Children, Families and Schools said today:

“Research shows that for most children, 2008 is a great time to be a child. Most children are happy, most are achieving to a higher level than ever before, enjoying better health, more opportunities to travel, to engage in sport or cultural activities than was the case for any previous generation.”

So that’s alright, then. So glad the government is in charge.