Free school offering 'cross-subject' learning approved by Michael Gove
Secondary school that promises to do away with traditional classroom lessons is among new tranche to open next year
An unorthodox secondary school offering "cross-subject projects" rather than traditional classroom lessons, is among the latest tranche of free schools to be approved.
XP school in Doncaster is one of the 102 new free schools given the go-ahead to open next year by Michael Gove, the education secretary, a slight decrease on the 109 schools opening this year.
XP's prospective headteacher, Gwyn ap Harri – a former computer science teacher who went on to start a company selling educational software – says the school's teaching method is based on how learning takes places in the "real world", rather than sitting behind desks.
"We'll be still be teaching the national curriculum, the kids will still be doing GCSEs and A-levels. But the way we deliver the curriculum will be totally different," Harri said.
"If you want, for instance, an investigation into the wildlife in your back garden, there are loads and loads of different subjects you can cover within that. You can do maths in terms of the size of the garden, how many samples you can find, what percentage that is," he said. "Then there's the history of the place, the geography, biology, that sort of thing. So you can learn through a really wide project or expedition."
XP will be unorthodox in other ways too. Admission will be by city-wide lottery, while class sizes will be kept to a tiny 25 pupils, with teachers expected to multitask across subjects. "Teachers want to teach this way," said Harri. "They don't want to just teach GCSE music, they also want to teach art or PE or whatever their passion is."
Announcing the names of the majority of the 102 approved schools, Gove said: "There are many innovators in local communities set on raising standards of education for their children. I am delighted to approve so many of their high-quality plans to open a free school."
Of the 102 new free schools, more than half are in London (46) and the south-east (11). XP will be one of just nine in Yorkshire and Humber, with 13 in the Midlands and three in the south-west of England.
Kevin Brennan, Labour's shadow schools minister, accused the government of "ignoring the crisis in primary places" and setting up schools where there was already a surplus of places.
"Their damaging focus on their own pet projects is failing to put our children first," Brennan said.
The National Union of Teachers general secretary, Christine Blower, said the free schools risked squandering resources. The NUT's analysis claims that the department for education (DfE) has already spent more than £200m on free schools.
"It is time for the government to change tack and allow local authorities to open new schools in areas where there is a genuine need for new places," she said.
According to the DfE's figures, the new schools will eventually offer 130,000 places. Fifteen of them will be designated faith schools, able to select a maximum of 50% of pupils on the basis of religion. One will be the Seva school in Coventry, a co-educational Sikh school for four- to 16-year-olds.
Among the new schools will be the Family school in London, for children with complex psychological, family and mental-health problems, and two schools under the aegis of the National Autistic Society, in east Cheshire and Lambeth.
In Doncaster, the response from prospective parents for XP's unorthodox teaching style has been "really good" according to Harri, with expressions of interest far outstripping its initial intake.
"When you sit down and explain to parents what we are doing, it sounds straightforward, it sounds like common sense. And it makes traditional schools sound a bit crazy," Harri said.
"You won't just learn about bees and why bees are disappearing. You'll make beehives and install them in a local park. We'll have a really strong connection to the community. A massive part of the motivation for the kids to succeed [is that] they will exhibit to the authentic audience, to adults in the real world, rather than doing work that goes into a folder and never gets seen again."
Now XP has been approved, the Education Funding Authority will begin looking for a suitable site. Because it will use a lottery for admissions, Harri said his only concern was that the new school has good transport links.
Harri said he was inspired by a visit to a school in San Diego, High Tech High, which teaches using similar methods, and schools in New England.
After becoming frustrated as a teacher Harri said he created some software to improve teaching – sold through a company named realsmart, which offers licenses for £4,995 – and then thought the technology needed a school to model the techniques. XP will use realsmart's software. "It's the only way we can do it," said Harri.
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Headteachers told: choose highly paid staff or smaller classes in your schools
Principals must be prepared to make difficult trade-offs, says Sir Michael Wilshaw, Ofsted's chief inspector of schools
Headteachers may face a difficult balancing act between improved wages for their staff or smaller classes for their pupils, Ofsted's chief inspector of schools said on Tuesday.
Sir Michael Wilshaw, speaking at a seminar in London, said tight budgets and performance-related pay meant heads would have to make difficult trade-offs.
"You can't have both – you can't have small classes, small groups and a highly-paid staff," Wilshaw told a seminar hosted by Reform, a rightwing thinktank.
Wilshaw referred to his experience when headteacher of Mossbourne Community Academy in Hackney, east London.
He said he told his own staff room: "I want to reward those of you who are prepared to commit yourself to the school and do a good job in the classroom. To do that might mean we have larger classes."
Wilshaw said headteachers could win staff over by offering improved pay while arguing that "we are going to have to reorganise the way we organise our curriculum, and our group sizes within the school".
The comments came as the Department for Education (DfE) prepares to rewrite state school teachers' terms and conditions in England, scrapping annual increases and giving headteachers the power to award performance-related pay rises.
"The good heads know they have got these additional freedoms and will reorganise," Wilshaw said.
In response, a DfE spokesman said it expected headteachers to be able to judge what was best for their pupils.
"It is vital that schools can recruit and reward the best teachers. We are reforming pay so schools can attract and retain the best teachers who have the greatest impact on their pupils' achievements," he said.
Recent research suggests that the quality of teachers in schools has a greater impact on performance than smaller class sizes.
Reform earlier this week published a study, Must do Better, arguing that education spending budgets could sustain an 18% cut without hurting classroom standards.
Wilshaw – who has long been a vocal supporter of rewarding teachers on merit – agreed classroom performance should be linked to pay.
"It's a nonsense that we see failing schools where most [teachers] are at the top of the scale – and that's something that inspectors comment on," he said.
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My best history lesson: teaching Northern Ireland and the Troubles
To immerse his students, James Cannon pulled out the PE bibs and created a classroom divide
I have always found teaching about Northern Ireland and the Troubles difficult. An intensely complicated back story makes it a fairly sticky subject. Others; the Battle of Hastings, the Gunpowder Plot or the outbreak of the first world war, do not require as heavy a discussion to understand the pretext of why events unfolded as they did. Cue the football bibs.
Period five dawned, always a joy with year 9, but I knew they would be unable to resist getting involved in what was planned. The room was split into four sections to replicate the four provinces, and students were placed in what would be their "homeland" for that part of the lesson. Each province was allocated a different colour bib depending on what religion they were, and were then given examples of how people were forced to live in Ireland in the early 20th century. Feedback was instantly given as students voiced their displeasure about being forced into different types of work based on their religion, and animosity grew towards the Ulster section of the room who enjoyed the luxuries that British rule brought.
Along came the Home Rule Bill of 1920 which pleased some of our groups, and bibs were then swapped as we all became part of the Ulster province. We were well into the lesson at this point, and there had been no mention of copying learning objectives or underlining titles; two of the drier aspects of learning and teaching that we too often get caught up in. Students were engaged, focused, and well in the mindset of their Irish counterparts. Learning was in the air.
As we now focused on the Ulster province, most of the class donned a yellow Protestant bib, while a few others were given green Catholic bibs. Who was happy with the new arrangement and partition of Ireland, and who was not? More scenarios were discussed and the greens got more and more frustrated. "Why can't they just move into the south?" said one yellow. "Would you move?" I asked. The silence was deafening.
The class then started to look at how some may respond to the situation. The difference between peaceful and violent protest, the impact it could have on others and the virtues of both were shared. Students even brought examples from other subjects to the table. "In RE, we looked at how Martin Luther King insisted on peaceful protest, but Malcolm X did not," said Mollie.
We then got back into groups and each student was given a character card, showing their religion and where they lived. Each had a to write a short diary extract about their lives in Ireland and then share it with a friend; the views, needless to say, often conflicted. We finished off with some tweets that might have been following the Home Rule Bill of 1920; which were most amusing especially when accompanied by the hashtags. Here are a few examples:
"Hmmm so the Brits have just renamed our beautiful country ..." #northernireland
"Not sure this will have the required impact ..."#theremaybetroubleahead
@irishcatholic_official "I live in ulster, consider myself irish, but am still ruled by the brits???" #notfair #selfgovernment
@northernprotestant: "woop woop loving this new rule" #iLOVElloydgeorge
Having been around the class and talked to the students, I gauged that their understanding was good, but I guess you can never really be sure until they are actually required to apply the knowledge. It was then – when I posed questions in the next lesson about the motives behind the IRA – that students were able to recall what they had done the week before to help them answer.
"Oh yeah, my character last week was a young, Northern Irish Catholic and I can see why a resistance movement became popular in some quarters," said Kieran. Great stuff, I thought.
By trying to develop empathy with my year 9s too, I found they engaged far more effectively with the topic. Northern Ireland is a highly sensitive subject, and during the weeks that followed countless students arrived with tales from home about their parents' and grandparents' opinions on the subject. This is what history at secondary school is about for me; it's not textbooks, or learning objectives, or endless PowerPoints. It's making it relevant to our students, it's making them think for themselves, and it's about getting them to engage.
So next time you're struggling, head for the PE bibs.
James Cannon is the special educational needs co-ordinator at Woodrush High School, Worcestershire. He is interested in creativity and ICT in history. Follow him on Twitter @mrcannonwhs.
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George Gray obituary
Leading authority on the chemistry of liquid crystals whose work led to the development of the ubiquitous LCD
The public gauges scientists by how their research affects everyday lives. The legacy of Professor George Gray, the world's leading authority on the chemistry of liquid crystals, could be measured by the quality of televisions, mobile phones and MP3 players and, at a deeper level, how we communicate with each other, whether through Twitter, Facebook or Skype. George, who has died aged 86, invented stable liquid crystal materials and in doing so unlocked the development of liquid crystal displays (LCDs) as everyday consumer items.
He was born in Denny, Scotland, to John, a pharmacist, scientist and botanist, and his wife, Jessie. After graduating with a degree in chemistry from the University of Glasgow in 1946, he moved to University College Hull, an outpost of the University of London, to take up the post of assistant lecturer. With the guidance of Sir Brynmor Jones he studied for his PhD in the new topic of liquid crystals. After graduation he spent the next decade laying down the rules on the design and preparation of liquid crystals formed by organic compounds, culminating with the publication, in 1962, of his book Molecular Structure and the Properties of Liquid Crystals, the first English text on the subject.
By the mid-1960s, George found it difficult to find support for his work on liquid crystals. With provision from the Medical Research Council and Reckitt and Sons (now Reckitt-Benckiser, a Hull-based consumer goods company), he moved his research into the closely related study of the chemistry of the cell walls of bacteria.
Towards the end of the 1960s, there were worries that the licensing of colour cathode ray tubes for TVs was costing the country more money than it took to develop Concorde. John Stonehouse, who was minister for technology and postmaster general, encouraged the scientists at the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment at Malvern to develop new technologies to replace such devices. Liquid crystals were already in the mind of senior scientist Cyril Hilsum as a leading candidate for exploration in displays, and potential exploitation, if only he could obtain suitable and stable materials.
At a scientific meeting Cyril met George, and subsequently the University of Hull, as it had become in 1954, was awarded a research contract by the Ministry of Defence to investigate "substances exhibiting liquid-crystalline states at room temperatures". George appointed two researchers, Ken Harrison and John Nash, and within two years they had success – not by designing favourable structures into molecules, but by leaving parts out, and so the stable cyanobiphenyls were born. They became the workhorses in the development of modern flat panel displays and inspired the creation of an international industry, such that now there are more liquid crystal displays in the world than there are people.
After the invention of cyanobiphenyls, more developments followed, including materials for colour-change thermometer strips, large screen LCD TVs and the eyepieces of digital cameras. In addition to technological developments, George made many fundamental contributions on the true nature of matter, including discoveries of new liquid crystal phases and their properties. His original research was published in more than 300 scientific papers and patents, and several textbooks.
George spent nearly his entire career in science at Hull, moving to work for Merck Chemicals at Poole in 1990. His research at Hull brought recognition to the university in the Queen's award for technological achievement in 1979, the first award of its type to a university, and, in 2005, a Historical Chemical Landmark was awarded to the university by the Royal Society of Chemistry to commemorate more than 50 years of liquid crystal research.
George won many awards for his research, including the Kyoto prize in 1995, and he became a fellow of the Royal Society of London, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and the Irish Academy of Sciences. He was appointed CBE in 1991. Apart from his many honorary doctorates and medals for research, George was proud to have a train, which regularly ran from Hull to London, named after him.
George was once asked what advice he had for young scientists. He replied: "Science is a difficult field that demands great effort and dedication, but if you are willing to make the effort, there is much to gain."
He married Marjorie Canavan in 1953 and they were a warm, fun-loving couple. Marjorie died two weeks before George. Their daughters Veronica and Caroline survive them. Another daughter, Elizabeth, predeceased them.
• George William Gray, chemist, born 4 September 1926; died 12 May 2013
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Take a hard look at racism, sexism and homophobia on college campuses | Andrew Longhi
My recent experience at Dartmouth College has shown me that we are still not the society we want to be
Like many universities, Dartmouth College has venerated traditions. The annual Dimensions show – a festive, student-organized musical revue performed to entice admitted, but undecided, students to come to Dartmouth – is one such tradition. Many prospective students decide to attend Dartmouth because of how much they enjoy the performance.
On 19 April, a group of students calling themselves "#Realtalk" interrupted the show, protesting sexual assault, racism, and homophobia at the university. It was a real jolt for the campus community. President Carol Folt cancelled classes on 24 April for the first time since the mid-1980s due to the backlash: a barrage of rape and death threats on social media sites and internet forums. The ugliness and volume of these threats – not to mention the negative PR – convinced the administration that the school was in a state of crisis.
In place of its usual academic schedule, we had a day of reflection that entailed a rally on the college green and a series of facilitated discussions. But even that was not enough to heal us. The school faces a possible Title IX complaint by students and alums who claim that Dartmouth fosters a hostile environment to women, racial minorities, and LGBT students.
Dartmouth is not alone. Similar problems and complaints at Oberlin College, Swarthmore College, Occidental, and Amherst show that Dartmouth is not alone in believing that the campus fosters respect and care for all, when, in reality, it might not. This isn't a Dartmouth problem. It is an American problem.
We are often too fragmented, insular, and uncaring – excluding those who don't fit into our perception of ourselves. At a time when basic American civic responsibilities from voting to jury duty to paying taxes are perceived as burdensome, it should be no surprise that lethargy about cross community dialogue manifests itself at Dartmouth (or any other college campus).
The "#Realtalk" protestors at my school speak for a larger constituency of students who find Dartmouth's traditions, which are both reinvented and reinforced with each incoming class, unhealthy and destructive. The protests and backlash expose our basic tensions. Can Dartmouth shed its more damaging aspects while still remaining Dartmouth? I argue that it can.
College culture introduces many opportunities for inclusivity through personal interactions. After being rejected from the Greek house (aka fraternity) to which I felt affiliated, I adopted a sorority as my house, flippantly joking that I was a "sister" and planned on attending the organization's events uninvited. The women rejected my attempts to get involved. While it was a humorous circumstance, it reminded me that even students aware of social problems unconsciously reinforce our community's deepest sexist assumptions.
We need to listen to each other if we truly are committed to the stakes of "real talk". At this moment, the Dartmouth community is a series of fragmented groups, for example, athletes and members of the Greek community. There are very few shared notions of mutual care.
I am not excusing myself. I don't have concern for community members who operate in circles I perceive as hostile to gays, minorities, and women. Should I care enough to feel a sense of accountability and engage insular communities in dialogue? I absolutely must.
Like many colleges, Dartmouth has a Principle of Community that expects students to respect one another. We passively assume that respect happens. If care were explicitly questioned on campus, then students would engage in discussing these issues consistently and with respect. We would understand criticism as an act of caring and a form of investment, rather than separation. The issues that the protestors mentioned should instigate outrage within every community member, but they haven't.
The Dartmouth motto, vox clamantis in deserto – a voice crying out in the wilderness – is old, yet highly relevant. The protests were a cry in the wilderness, but one that many students did not want to hear. Once we as a student body admit that the presence of care has become a question, then there is an incentive to start to care. We can turn stigma into leadership by making what people recognize as problematic the basis for social transformation.
It is not that Dartmouth students don't care about racism, rape, and homophobia, but the assumed tolerance makes change impossible. Singling out certain fraternities as racist or the protestors as anti-Dartmouth will not move us to a place of social transformation. We are all racist – or sexist, or homophobic – in ways we won't, or can't, acknowledge. We have begun these tough conversations, and I am optimistic that our campus and others can prove that caring is true to those "old traditions".
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One British household in 10 has £1m assets
UK now has around 2.5m millionaire households, boosted by pensions and house prices, according to new book
One British household in every 10 now has total assets exceeding £1m, according to a new book based on work at the London School of Economics published on Wednesday.
Wealth in the UK crunched the findings from a comprehensive official survey that took place between 2008 and 2010, and found that 10% of households had total wealth of £967,200 or more.
The lead author, Prof John Hills – who previously headed Whitehall's National Equality Panel – says a subsequent surge in stock markets, London house prices and the valuation of occupational pensions will "have pushed the entry point into that wealthiest tenth over the million-pound mark today".
In the midst of a slump without end, news that Britain now has around 2.5m "millionaire households" may seem surprising. But over the decades since Frank Sinatra asked Celeste Holm: "Who wants the bother of a country estate?", general inflation has obviously done a great deal of work in devaluing the millionaire currency.
But surging house prices and – more recently – rocketing valuations of pensions have boosted Britain's wealth far beyond its overall earning power. Back in the 1960s, Britons' non-pension wealth was only about twice national income; by the mid-noughties Britons were instead worth four times what they earned.
Hills explains: "It is not that there are millions of people with millions of pounds in the bank, but rather that London property prices and – for those lucky professionals who retain them – final salary pensions have quietly made technical millionaires out of many who would only consider themselves as solidly middle-class."
The previous official Wealth and Assets Survey, which covered 2006 through to 2008, implied that the top 10% had total wealth of £853,000 or more. With house prices having fluctuated without much trend since then, at least outside London, Hills believes that the most important force that has subsequently pushed up the wealth of the well-to-do has been lax monetary policy.
"With rock-bottom interest rates and quantitative easing … any given fixed pension that has been promised for the future is now worth more, in terms of the money you would have to set aside to fund it today."
The valuations can be considerable: in the light of the 2006-08 data, actuaries at Hazell Carr calculated for the Guardian that the pension of a career police inspector on the point of retirement could be worth £1.3m.
Just as striking as the rocketing level of wealth at the top end, however, is the continuing gulf between the haves and have-nots. Inequality in British pay is familiar, but it is dwarfed by inequality in wealth: whereas the top tenth of households brings home roughly 10 times as much as the poorest tenth in annual income, the top 10% own 850 times as much as the bottom tenth. And if around one in 10 are in millionaire territory, then another one in 10 households – at the opposite end of the scale – have a total net worth of less than £12,600, the poorest among them actually saddled with a negative valuation on account of debt.
As in interpreting the figures for the wealthiest, it is important to remember that the definition of assets here is designed to be all-encompassing. As well as money in the bank it includes housing, pensions, vehicles, personal possessions such as furniture and jewellery – even the average of £1,300 that nearly 6% of households claim to have locked up in personalised number plates (making for a supposed total of £1.46bn).
With such a sweeping definition of wealth, Hills regards the implications of so many families having so little as frightening. If those with low or negative wealth were all youngsters, who had not yet had a chance to save or buy durable goods, then that would be one thing – much of the problem would then be expected to solve itself over time.
But what is really troubling, he says, is that "it's not just young people who have little or no assets. There are large parts of the population who have few if any assets, right across the age range."
Among households headed by an adult aged 55-64, for example, one in 10 have accumulated worldly and financial assets worth less than £29,000. A couple seeking to buy a joint index-linked annuity with that sort of pension fund would struggle to secure an income of £1,000 a year. In practice, seeing as much of that money will often be tied up in fixtures, furnishings and other personal effects, it is likely to leave next to nothing to contribute towards retirement. Hills warns: "A great chunk of the population is approaching retirement with no property, no assets to speak of, and no security beyond the state pension and safety net."
He also warns against the complacent temptation to regard the great surge in wealth at the top end as a "purely paper" phenomenon, arguing instead that it will have implications for social mobility for a long time to come.
"Inflation in house prices underlies the burgeoning wealth at the top end of the scale, and seeing as most of us are still living in the same old houses it is easy to regard this as an illusion. But that would be a mistake: whether through downsizing, inheritance or equity release, this notional wealth gets cashed in at some stage. And whether it is spent on a comfortable retirement or on master's degrees or deposits to help buy property in the right place, it will certainly have major implications for the life chances of some – but not others – in the next generation, and the one after that. The scale of the increase in wealth over the last 20 years makes the wins and losses from this lottery far bigger than it was in the past."
Wealth in the UK: Distribution, Accumulation and Policy, is published by Oxford University Press, and launched at the London School of Economics on Wednesday
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UK higher education: let's not follow the leader but develop our own vision
UK universities need an alternative to the US technology meme that says higher education is broken, says Saint John Walker
An avalanche is coming. Education is broken. Classrooms kill creativity. Higher education is a rotten tree being hit by lightning.
All these things have been said about higher education recently (Clay Shirky wrote the last one if you're interested). In fact, when I playfully did a Google search on "higher education is doomed", it returned some 2 million results. Those who work in teaching, especially in higher education, have had a rough time of it recently. It seems everyone's got it in for them and everyone has a prognosis of what to do about it.
To paraphrase Monty Python, you'd think the university system had kicked the bucket, shuffled off its mortal coil, gone to meet its maker, joined the bleeding choir invisible. But I disagree. I actually think that higher education system's vital signs are quite healthy even if I do think (to spin out the Palin-Cleese exchange a little further), it's probably been too busy pining for the fjords.
Higher education is often criticised for what it hasn't done rather than what it has.To quote the IPPR report, 'An Avalanche is Coming': "Nothing looked more impervious to revolutionary change than Brezhnev's Soviet Union in 1980, yet just over a decade later it was gone. The hegemony of the Catholic Church in Ireland looked unshakable in 1990, but two decades later it was gone". You get the subtle suggestion – higher education hasn't moved with the times, it needs glasnost and perestroika.
One of the biggest snowballs in this supposed avalanche is the MOOC (massive open online courses) phenomenon which has captured the imagination of so many observers. It's a rather simple and utopian ideal: education for all, free, delivered to your laptop, time-shifted to your schedule not the university timetable. It's also the notion of unlocking quality knowledge from elite campuses like MIT, Stanford, Harvard and UCLA that makes it such a seductive idea.
This story is also inextricably linked to the Silicon Valley meme of technology for good, and the alluring narratives of disruption and technical fixes that will create a new culture of mass learning. One of the noticeable things about this vision of the future is that it is (the launch of FutureLearn withstanding) very much an American story, and it's easy to see the reasons why.
According to the US Department of Education, student debt is now over $1 trillion, and an estimated 53.6% of degree-holders in the US are jobless or underemployed. The contract between higher education and the learner, who is willing to put up with short-term debt to get a great career, has broken down. There is a crisis of confidence.
Add to this mix the prediction that the edutech space is set to be worth $107bn (£70bn) by 2015 and you have a powerful impetus for change. It's often said when America sneezes, Europe catches a cold. Will that be the case in the higher education sphere too?
The European Union registered an unprecedented youth unemployment rate of 22.8% in September 2012, and in the UK 40% of graduates cannot find graduate-level work two years after their degrees. But student debt, despite recent changes, is nowhere near as extreme as in the US.
So, we have a different motive for our changes to education in the UK. We shouldn't just accept US-style MOOCs as a solution that also fits our national landscape. There are alternative narratives, different stories, and a more British vision of higher education that could be articulated.
We could use the language of complementing and collaborating a little more, rather than the US narratives of disruption, competition and overhaul. Let's critically evaluate the disruptive possibilities – good and bad – of MOOCs, and create our own hybrids to energise our particular university ecosystem.
Of course we too need edutech companies, entrepreneurs and educational venture capitalists. But here's my idea for a few acronyms that we Brits should create: POOCs, or Personal Open Offline Complements – real human gatherings based at scale; OAFs, or Open Access Funnels, that lead disenfranchised people from online courses to the real valuable experience of being part of a community at a physical place of learning; and how about hybrid apprenticeship and degree mixes?
There are plenty more acronyms we could create together. Let's include the most receptive and agile universities in those debates, treating them like a living breathing partner, rather than that poor old Norwegian Blue parrot with its feet nailed to its perch.
Saint John Walker is head of development at Creative Skillset, the UK skills council for the creative industries – follow it on Twitter @skillsetssc
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Phonics literacy test for young children 'a waste of time and money'
Test would have minimal, if any, long-term impact on pupils' standards of reading and writing, research shows
The phonics literacy test applied to first-year schoolchildren in England has had a minimal impact on reading and writing standards, according to teachers in a Department for Education-funded survey, leading education unions to describe it as a waste of time and money.
The survey, conducted in the first year that the phonics screening check has been given to all five- and six-year-olds in state-funded primary schools, reveals continued disquiet among teachers and literacy co-ordinators over the usefulness of the test, alongside apparent indifference from parents.
"Most of the teachers interviewed as part of the case-study visits to schools reported that the check would have minimal, if any, impact on the standard of reading and writing in their school in the future," the interim report, conducted by the National Foundation for Education Research, concludes.
A majority – 52% – of school literacy co-ordinators surveyed disagreed with the statement "the phonics screening check provides valuable information for teachers", while only a quarter agreed. Most teachers preferred to use their records or other means of assessment to gauge a child's progress, with only half saying they used the test results to judge whether a pupil needed extra support.
One teacher interviewed in the survey's follow-up case study was quoted as saying: "The check had no impact on me personally. I know exactly where the children are anyway. There were no surprises in the data and [it revealed] nothing we didn't already know."
While many teachers are strong supporters of phonics, a teaching method that involves pupils examining each letter within a word as an individual sound and blending the sounds together in pronunciation, many remain unconvinced of the need for a test or check on children as young as five, or in using the DfE's preferred technique, known as synthetic phonics, exclusively.
Christine Blower, the general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said the survey suggested the check was a waste of money.
"This report will make for very uncomfortable reading by Michael Gove as it has very little to say that is positive about the phonics check," she said. "The NUT agrees with many of the findings, in particular the key conclusions that schools believe the check provides no new information on pupils' ability and that phonics should be used alongside other methods in the teaching of reading."
Russell Hobby, the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, called the tests a waste of time. "We have seen nonsense words plastered on the walls of good primary schools to get children used to the concept of words that don't make sense. What on Earth are we being forced to teach children?" he said.
The average cost of administering the check was £740 per school, with one school reporting a cost of more than £20,400, although the survey's authors said that figure probably included spending on phonics teaching resources. Others spent £5,000 on teaching supply cover. Schools reported an average of eight hours spent administering the test.
A spokesman for the DfE pointed out that 80% of literacy co-ordinators said the results of the check would enable them to identify children who needed extra help.
"The phonics check ensures children struggling with reading get the help they desperately need. Last year's check – when teachers identified more than 235,000 six-year-olds behind on reading – demonstrated its value," the DfE said.
Teachers were divided over the usefulness of the test for pupils with more advanced levels of reading comprehension, with as many saying the check was inappropriate as those who thought it was appropriate.
The survey also revealed concerns that the use of "pseudo words" in the check may be confusing for advanced readers or children speaking English as an additional language. Made-up words, such as "halp" or "flarp", are included in the check to test a child's ability to blend sounds, rather than rely on reading a word they may already recognise.
Several teachers reported problems over the pseudo words, which comprise 20 of the 40 words tested. "They [the children] tried to make the pseudo words fit something they knew, for example by changing 'proom' to 'groom'," according to one teacher.
Others said children speaking English as an additional language also had difficulty adapting to the pseudo words. According to one teacher some children claimed the made-up words "were real words, like 'desh' – so we don't know whether in their own language that is a real word, or the pronunciation is a real word, and this confused those children".
Children with speech, language or communication difficulties or other learning issues were also reported to have experienced problems with the check, and to have been confused by the pseudo words, while the survey found some evidence of unsuitability of the check for students with severe autism.
The survey of nearly 1,800 teachers and literacy co-ordinators will be repeated this year, along with interviews with parents.
Richard Adamsguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Social work training reforms: it takes five weeks to create a social worker
Frontline, the social work training scheme, has been welcomed, but concerns remain that recruits will go too fast, too soon
Lyn Romeo had no time to celebrate her appointment as England's first chief social worker for adults. Even as the announcement was made last week, she was dealing with the deaths of a man who was "known to services" and his wife on Romeo's patch in Camden, north London.
Social work is tough. The profession is again in the stocks after the conviction of the men involved in the shocking child abuse ring in Oxford, where girls in council care were groomed and abused seemingly at will by local men. But the armchair critics rarely have much idea of what the job entails.
It's a tough challenge and there is concern about the speed at which graduate high flyers and career switchers will be parachuted into the frontline under a new scheme to attract top talent to children's social work. Recruits will go straight into on-the-job training after a summer-school crash course of just five weeks.
Architects of the scheme, which is indeed called Frontline, stress trainees will have full-time supervision by an experienced social worker before they qualify after 12 months. But those wearily familiar with social workers' heavy caseloads know only too well that, in the pressured reality of daily practice, such niceties can be set aside.
Yet there has been a general welcome for Frontline, which is modelled on the Teach First programme to fast track graduates into on-the-job teacher training in challenging schools. While there is no shortage of people wanting to undertake conventional social work training, via (in England) a three-year degree course, their calibre is often questioned.
Talk to anyone who recruits social work graduates and they will readily admit they regard certain university courses with disdain – something that is certain to emerge in a review of training for the Department for Education (DfE) by Sir Martin Narey, the plain-talking former chief executive of children's charity Barnardo's.
The first 100 Frontline recruits will start training in London and Manchester next year. They will be required to do a further 12 months as qualified social workers after their training year, remaining in the same local authority, and will receive a master's degree at the end of the two-year programme. Frontline is being "incubated" by Ark, the international children's charity set up by City financiers, but is receiving £1m upfront from the DfE.
There has been a general welcome, too, for the appointments of Romeo and of Isabelle Trowler as the first chief social worker for children and families. Both women are highly respected "doers" who, perhaps significantly, have risen no higher than assistant director grade in local government.
Trowler co-founded the acclaimed Reclaiming Social Work programme in Hackney, east London, by which small teams operate under consultant social workers with dedicated administrative support. She left Hackney two years ago to set up a consultancy to promote the approach, and, if there is any anxiety about her appointment, it will be how open she is to other thinking. Interviewed for Society Guardian in 2011, Trowler said her programme had to be implemented "with military precision".
A more general anxiety is the binary nature of the social work reforms. The response to the failings exposed by the Baby Peter scandal in 2007 was co-ordinated by a single reform board that led to the creation of a single professional college. Yet we now have two chief social workers; there is talk of a separate Frontline-type scheme for adult services; and Narey's training probe is mirrored on the adult side by another review commissioned by David Croisdale-Appleby, chair of the Skills for Care agency, for the Department of Health.
With about a third of councils now running adult and children's services together, this all seems rather bizarre.
David Brindleguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
I love art school because... – your best pictures
We asked you to send in photos via GuardianWitness telling us why you love art school. Here are your best pictures
Guardian readersHappy birthday to us, happy birthday to us…
Guardian Students turns one - and we're dishing out presents to celebrate
Guardian Students celebrates our first birthday tomorrow! Since we launched the site on 22 May last year:
• a student protest march fizzled out at a rainy rally where the NUS president was pelted with eggs
• student activism staged a dramatic recovery thanks to a plucky occupation by Sussex students protesting against privatisation
• girls became a third more likely than boys to go to university
• a student union employee posted film of a couple having sex at a ball all over the internet
• and students filmed each other pouring milk on their heads
We've been busy too, and throughout the day tomorrow we'll be highlighting some of our best bits in a live blog on the Guardian Students site. If you've written for us, keep your eyes peeled: you may feature in our Best of the Blogs.
Rebecca Ratcliffe has interviewed the new leader of the NUS Toni Pearce – and discovered that she's the first president never to have got a university degree. More revelations tomorrow...
But birthdays, let's face it, are all about presents. And we've got heaps to hand out to anyone who has signed up for membership since the very beginning. So take a moment's break from your revision to fill in this little form right now, and you'll be eligible for our prize draws on the hour on Wednesday from 10am-5pm. Easy as that, no multiple choice, no essay questions – just sit back and wait to see if you win one of dozens of really rather marvellous things:
Clothing vouchers from Topshop, Topman and Figleaves, Amazon vouchers from Coventry University, books galore courtesy of our colleagues on Guardian Books, goodies from Noisey, the music channel of Vice, subsriptions to the NME, Cath Kidson vouchers, trips to Alton Towers for you and all your mates and, wait for it, an iPad Mini.
Being one is brilliant! We're toddling off to crash-land face-first in our birthday cake.
Judy FriedbergRebecca Ratcliffeguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
The wonderfully weird world of webcomics | Dean Burnett
Webcomics are a popular, diverse and increasingly widespread format that most people are blissfully unaware. To address this, an interview was conducted with the team behind the popular UK-based webcomic Exterminatus Now
Webcomics are increasingly widespread and popular. It could be argued their proliferation is linked to the decline of print comics, in the same way that free news site and blogging is often blamed for the decline in newspapers. Webcomics don't get nearly as much mainstream publicity though (at least none that I've seen). Even the more popular examples like XKCD seemingly go largely unmentioned in other media formats, despite their considerable success.
Webcomics are interesting from a scientific perspective. They rely on both new and ancient technology (the internet and drawing, respectively) being fused seamlessly. They seem to be based on established rules and systems that appear to be the result of a bottom-up organisation, the result of numerous individuals contributing and responding to the responses obtained, rather than some structure put in place by some unspecified authority; a sort of "emergent system", if you will, only not as profound. It's enough to shoehorn this into the Guardian science section, at least
I could be wrong about all this; I'm not involved in webcomics at all. So, like any good scientist, I thought I'd investigate. To this end, I got in touch with the authors/artists/web gurus behind my personal favourite webcomic, Exterminatus Now.
For a detailed background on how it all came about, read this interview here. But in brief, Exterminatus Now is a webcomic about a four-man team of "Men in Black" in the Inquisition: a secretive international organisation who are responsible for policing and combating the constant attempts by occult forces to enslave society. It's a mix of sci-fi, fantasy, video games, wargaming, action movies and sitcom. Also there's swearing.
And every character is an anthropomorphic animal. I probably should have mentioned that first, if anything.
It's the work of Garry Webber, Alan Graham, Stuart Edney and Martin Faulkner, or as they're known in the comic, Lothar (homicidal cyborg echidna), Virus (bookish rat), Eastwood (boorish silver fox) and Rogue (arrogant ninja cat) respectively.
Here's how it works. Sort of.
It seems there's 4 of you responsible for the webcomic. Who does what, exactly?
Garry: We mostly all share in the writing duties. In the early days of the comic I was probably the most prolific writer. Today it's far more even, we constantly bounce ideas off each other. We all look after our forum as well. Alan does the art but there have been times and surely will be again where Martin has drawn the comic, though presently his time seems to be spent maintaining/designing the site.
What's the connection between the characters and you guys? Is it that they're named after you, based on you, inspired by you? It seems like the opposite of a writer publishing under a pseudonym, where you have clearly fictional characters that are meant to be "you". What's the deal there, basically.
Alan: The webcomic self-insert is an odd convention. When we started out, a lot of webcomics were "two guys on a couch" style, where the characters were literally caricatures of the authors, hanging out talking about video games. Even non-autobiographical comics in more fantastic settings would often have characters who were clearly meant to represent the author. We also came out of the online forum scene, the user's handles, signatures and avatar pics were often used to create characters that were imagined to convene in cyberspace. These two influences meant that when we started, it just seemed natural to have the main characters be our forum handles.
Garry: For myself, Alan, and Stuart, our characters are "us" in a small way, taking our funniest/worst traits and amplifying them. Take Lothar for example. During the comics early days I was a typical 18 year old internet user, i.e. full of self importance, righteous indignation, along with a smattering of being as dumb as a post. Lothar kind of typifies that "Internet Tough Guy" persona I put out there. It's definitely less true these days, mostly thanks to my wife putting up with me and making me calm down, but there is definitely a lot of my younger, more embarrassing self in there. Rogue is a different matter, an existing character of Martin's who is nothing like him aside from proficiency in martial arts.
Martin: As Alan says, forum culture around the time lent itself to building a character around ones username. Thing was, I'd taken my forum handle from a project I'd been working on before I met these guys, and associated myself with a character for that project. Rogue was made for some of EN's pre-existing material, and got used because he shared enough physical design traits with my existing character (Silversword) to act like a surrogate version, but was never conceived with the same over-exaggeration of our worst traits.
A lot of fiction these days presents worlds where magic and technology mesh, but you guys really take it to another level (angel-powered computer cores, various machine-Gods etc.). Do you have actual technical backgrounds/expertise, or is this a case of knowing the right words to use?
Stuart: I've read far too much pulpy sci-fi and fantasy, so I've gotten the feel for it over the years. My proudest moment was one comic that came to me marked "words words words" on the script Garry had, and it ended up with a full page of technobabble. I found it funny. No-one else did. But I'm about as technically-minded as anyone schooled in the humanities instead of the sciences, which is to say not. I am, however, a good bullshitter.
Garry: Indeed, a good example of such is issue #322, written by Stuart. It's all techno-babble fluff, but he manages to make it at least sound somewhat convincing
From inception to launch, is it possible to say how long a typical episode takes? Even a quick, short blog takes me a few hours, lord knows how long it must take you guys.
Garry: It really depends on the bolt of inspiration.. A lot of the times comics come from a conversation we have and can get written in near complete form within half an hour.
Alan: An artist as plodding and ponderous as me really has no business doing a regularly updated comic. A typical strip takes Too Damn Long.
Martin: It's the drawing that takes the most time - if even our shorter 8 or 12 page storylines take a few months to actually make it to web, you can see how easy it is for us to build up quite a backlog any time one of us writes something.
How do you differ from the big print comics, your DCs and Marvels? I'd imagine you don't have to deal with the problems they have (market demographics, constantly changing writers/artists, questionable reboots to consolidate decades long back stories and contexts, stuff like that), but are there any particular issues that plague webcomics?
Alan: It's funny, we do actually have a decade long back story now. And those early strips do feel quite rough and in need of reboot. That's one of the pitfalls: being a complete amateur when starting out. I feel like we grew into something to be proud of, but those first couple years, in hindsight? Tough to look at.
Garry: I think schedule slippage can be a bit more detrimental to a webcomic than print, especially for people who make a living out of their work. If you don't provide new content on a regular basis, you will lose readers and then your source of income. We do it for fun and have recently started selling T-Shirts, but we're not big enough for us to be able to do that yet. A lot of webcomics die simply due to lack of updates, sometimes for good reasons and bad.
Stuart: Occasionally Hellboy and Atomic Robo. I find most superhero comics to be soap operas for nerds (says the nerd). I nick most of my ideas from other places.
Martin: Print comics are meant to be read very quickly. A page with very little on it is fine when the next page is already right next to it, but webcomics have to take into account their update schedule. We do a lot of work to make sure each page packs a lot of punch, both in terms of humour and story development.
I've seen mention of you having a following among the Furry communities. Given that the comic is based in a world of anthropomorphic animals, this makes sense, but do you find you have followings or fans among certain communities or groups?
Alan: Curiously, we have a small, but visible Russian contingent. A majority of our readers are from English-speaking countries, obviously. But a .ru site frequently appears in our top referring URLs, and a handful of Slavic speakers frequent our comment sections. There's even been an attempt by fans to translate the comic into Russian.
Garry: I've also found we have a few fans in military service, at least the US and UK. We previously had application on the site that showed us where in the world our fans were, and we had a few in surprising parts of the world, including one in Israel who kept coming every week. Kinda makes me feel happy that we get people all around the world come and read our work.
Martin: The comments section, our forum - those show me some level of our demographic, but I'm never quite certain how the readership at large spreads
Do you deal much with other webcomics? I've seen mention of conferences and the like, but this is a community completely alien to me.
Alan: We're pretty insular, unfortunately. I'm wont to go off drawing and not get back to even my co-authors for days or weeks, let alone stay in touch with other creators. If a strip appears on the site, the guys assume I'm still alive.
Garry: We sometimes have interaction with other authors online, such as Alan Forman of PoisonedMinds.com, but aside from that, not really. I think the most successful collaboration is that of the "Big Three" webcomics creators. Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins of Penny-Arcade.com, Scott Kurtz of PVPonline.com and Kris Straub of ChainsawSuit.com (among others). These guys all started out separately and now all work in the same building in Seattle.
Stuart: I read a fair few, but as far as I know the webcomic community is primarily a North American one, so I tend not to dabble with it.
Martin: We tend to do our own thing. Certainly we all read other webcomics, and it's not unheard of for webcomics to reference and cameo each other regularly, or set up little rings of cross readership. At least one group set themselves up an entire publishing label to work under. Conventions, particularly, are a big thing across the states and Canada for webcomics artists to communicate with each other and their fans, and it's only been since Alan moved to Canada that we've actually found it feasible to try being a part of that ourselves.
So there you have it. Exterminatus Now, go read it and be one of the cool kids. If not that, then some other webcomic.
Dean Burnett's onlne creativity barely covers this blog and his Twitter account, @garwboy
Exterminatus Now is updated approximately every Tuesday.
Dean Burnettguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
10 ways to deal with low-level disruption in the classroom
Whether it's passing notes or tapping a pen, low-level disruption is a challenge in many schools. Tracey Lawrence offers some strategies to help
Lately, the most effective professional development I have undertaken has been free and extremely valuable. It has taken place on Twitter, every Monday night during term from 8 to 8.30pm on the #Behaviourchat hashtag. Often, advice given during these sessions looks at violent pupils or more extreme behaviour; however, it can be the low-level disruptions that can have a high impact on the learning atmosphere within your classroom. We have all experienced low-level disruption in class; chair rocking, humming, pen tapping, note passing. Just disruptive enough to slow the pace of your lesson but not dramatic enough to draw it to a halt.
During a recent Monday night slot of behaviour chat, a variety of professionals, including teaching professionals, learning support assistants and consultants, devised some tips to deal with low level disruptions. Here's a summary of them.
Adjust the volume
With loud classes, avoid raising your voice. It only increases the noise. Lowering your voice can be much more effective. If the volume of your voice is always high, it loses its effect and doesn't help to control the situation.
Move around
Your presence is extremely powerful. Don't stay stagnant at the front of your class. Move around and don't allow the children to become distracted. Talk to them about their task. Give them deadlines. For example say: "I'd love to see two more ideas by the time I come back as your ideas are really interesting." Then walk and visit another child/pair but make sure you come back.
Shut out negativity
Don't allow negativity to enter your classroom. If a child isn't ready to come in, stop them and provide a distraction. Allow the child to calm down so that they can enter in a calmer frame of mind.
Be prepared
This one is a basic one but doesn't always happen. Prepare your resources before you start teaching. It allows you to challenge the children's energy as much as you can. Rustling papers and setting out resources while children wait only encourages low-level disruptions and sets the mood for the lesson.
It's your classroom
Control your space. You are the decisive element in your classroom. Stand at the door as they enter. Talk, change moods. Say hello to the children regardless of whether you have their eye contact or not. Always say goodbye.
Keep calm
Have a calm outlook. If you can't leave the room but are getting annoyed, flick through your assessing pupil progress (APP) sheets or walk away from the situation to calm yourself down before returning.
Don't deviate from teaching
There is no need for an excessive response to low-level disruption. Don't interrupt your teaching to deal with it. It can be corrected by including the child's name into your explanation, a look or a signal of some sort.
Be positive
Deal with low-level disruptions by using positive language. "We sit in our chairs so that our handwriting is beautiful." It doesn't give the child the opportunity to opt out but also sets the expectation.
Share your expectations
Don't assume children understand what your version of acceptable is. Tapping, shouting, and throwing could be acceptable at home. A child needs to have reinforcement of your expectations.
Have a routine
Having a routine in your classroom can help. Children can be uneasy when they do not know what is going to happen in the day. Children need to feel secure in their classroom and with their activities. They like to know what is coming up in their day so if things are going to change give them warning that something different will be happening and explain what to expect.
All of these tips are not guaranteed to work. But having said that they are all tried and tested ideas from someone else's classroom. Try them, amend them, adapt them and make a comment to let us know of any other methods that have helped your with low level behaviours.
Tracey Lawrence is a primary school teacher and a specialist leader in education (SLE) with a focus on behaviour and attendance.
This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. Looking for your next role? Take a look at Guardian jobs for schools for thousands of the latest teaching, leadership and support jobs.guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Letters: Mr Gove, please listen to teachers
The secretary of state for education is pressing on doggedly with his proposals for the reform of education at all levels. This is in the face of opposition of the major headteachers' unions and representative associations throughout the maintained and independent sectors (ASCL, ISC, GSA and HMC). And all the admissions tutors of Cambridge University. At the weekend the NAHT expressed clearly what many teachers and headteachers think (Report, 18 May). The lack of respect for our professional expertise and long experience is breathtaking and will win no one to the cause. Indeed, it is a strategy no good teacher would ever use to alter the mindset of an apparently troublesome student. Conflict breeds conflict and, before long, contempt.
There is no hunger for many of these reforms. Parents and students are not baying for them. Teachers oppose them as retrograde steps in many cases. Too much change at too many levels is a recipe for chaos for the next decade. And at A-level – to name but one area – we risk undoing the progress since 2000 towards greater breadth and flexibility in the two years of study. Am I alone in thinking that cost-cutting may be just as important in these developments as any altruism apparently tilted at standards?
No good teacher I have ever met was against rigour. If it has been lost, by all means reintroduce it – but with teachers on side and not embattled by long lists of implied failings. Above all, Mr Gove, please just listen to those closest to the country's young people. You will find us open to constructive dialogue. But deeply resistant to endless, destructive – and undeserved – criticism.
Alice Phillips
Head, St Catherine's, Bramley; president-elect of the Girls' Schools Association
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Academy chains decide where children go to school
What can you do if you are told your child must move to a different school eight miles away? Not a lot, it seems, if the school is part of an academy chain
Janet May says she speaks for her entire village as she vents her frustration. "The word I would use to describe my feelings now is desperate. As a group we are incredibly sad and angry, but we also feel powerless in the face of the refusal of the academy trust to engage with us. Their whole attitude has been one of contempt.
"They say they have listened to us. But they have not: they have not grasped the anger and frustration of this entire community."
May, who lives in the picturesque Devon village of Lapford, is at the forefront of a dispute which critics say illustrates the power the government has given to academy chains across England to take major decisions over the future of schools, in effect over the heads of local communities.
Parents at Lapford community primary school, which sits in rolling countryside between Exeter and Barnstaple, have been fighting a decision by the multi-academy trust now running it to have its year 6 pupils educated eight miles away at another of its schools.
Long-term future
They worry that, from September, their children will face a lengthy round trip to school every day, that pupils will have to change school twice in two years and thus that the village school may become unpopular with families, putting, they fear, the school's long-term future at risk.
They have collected a 370-signature petition against the plans – quite a feat in a village of 250 homes – and parents also have the parish council firmly behind them. But there seems little they can do, with the trust not even, it seems, legally required to consult them.
It was only in January last year that Lapford opted to join the Chulmleigh Academy Trust, a multi-academy group formed of three other small primaries and the local secondary school, Chulmleigh community college. At the time, May says, parents were enthusiastic, especially as 56-pupil Lapford had faced an uncertain financial future under Devon county council.
But optimism quickly turned to concern as the academy trust, headed by Mike Johnson, who is principal of Chulmleigh community college, came forward with plans last summer to have older pupils at another of the trust's primaries, East Worlington school, taught at Lapford four mornings a week, with Lapford pupils travelling to East Worlington on Fridays from last September.
Parents at both schools were unhappy because of concerns about pupils travelling. In November, the trust came back with a new offer, involving East Worlington year 5 and 6 pupils spending all week at Lapford. Again, this was shelved after East Worlington parents protested.
In January, the current plan emerged. Lapford and East Worlington year 6 pupils would travel to another school in the trust: Chulmleigh primary, which neighbours the community college. It was approved by the trust in March.
May, whose daughter Tiffany, 10, would have to start making the trip to Chulmleigh primary from September, says: "How would anyone feel about a child having to transfer schools twice in two years?"
Lorraine Kigongo, who has two children at Lapford and runs the village's pre-school, says parents are already talking of pulling children out because they do not want them moving schools in both years 6 and 7. She says: "The trust has just not listened to us at all."
The trust has said that both educational and financial considerations lie behind its proposals. But parents say they have been given little detail. The latest consultation document says that the trust is "facing a deficit within two years" and cannot afford the current set-up of three teachers at both Lapford and East Worlington schools, which between them have 101 pupils.
But Johnson says the main reason for the change is the need to raise "educational standards" at Lapford.
The consultation document says: "The children at Lapford … stand to get better Sats results," but does not say why. Johnson says that Lapford is under pressure – both it and East Worlington have satisfactory/requires improvement verdicts from Ofsted – and that the quickest way to "raise standards" would be to have both classes taught at Chulmleigh primary, which was adjudged "outstanding" when last inspected in 2006.
Two weeks ago, the trust decided to press on with its plans, rejecting Lapford parents' alternative for all Lapford pupils to be taught there by two full-time and one half-time teacher, and with parents volunteering to help out.
Although Johnson says the trust has spent many hours responding to parents' concerns and answering questions, it seems that it has no legal responsibility to do so. When parents complained to the Department for Education, they were told: "There is no statutory requirement for the academy trust to carry out consultation on the restructuring".
In this multi-academy trust, there is no individual governing body for each school, and no formal representation for Lapford among the trust's decision-making directors.
The village of Corby Glen, Lincolnshire, faced losing its 50-year-old secondary school earlier this year after an academy trust that took over the running of the school in 2011 told parents it wanted to close it, moving pupils to another of the trust's secondaries, 12 miles away in Grantham, from 2014.
There was outrage from the community. Lincolnshire county council said the West Grantham Academies Trust's plans for the 230-pupil Charles Read high school would be "detrimental" to education in the area, but it has no powers to intervene.
However, campaigners persuaded their local MP, Nick Boles, to lobby the academies minister, Lord Nash, and are hopeful a deal can be done to have the school kept open by transferring it to another academy trust: the David Ross Foundation.
Academy critics say the underlying issue is that trusts are allowed to take major decisions without the checks and balances that would be present in a local authority school set-up – either around statutory public consultation, or through voter anger on closures feeding back to elected councillors. The only politician who can veto plans is not local, but national: the education secretary, Michael Gove.
Private institutions
Alan Parker, a former schools adjudicator – an official who settles disputes between parents, schools and local authorities over school admissions and reorganisations – says that, in academies, unlike in maintained (non-academy) schools, parents have no right of complaint to the adjudicator over school re-organisation. "In the maintained sector, if there is a reorganisation plan, you have to publish in advance what you plan to do, it's quite clear who must be consulted and how those planning any change have to respond," he says. "That's not the case with academies, which are private institutions, getting public money on the basis of a contract with the secretary of state."
Mervyn Benford, information officer of the National Association for Small Schools, says the advent of multi-academy trusts stands to make small schools more vulnerable. He says: "We believe the government should be concerned about giving academy trusts power to allow them to ride roughshod over local parents."
David Wolfe, a barrister at London's Matrix Chambers who has been involved in legal cases against academies, says: "[Multi-academy trusts] reverse a regime whereby schools were run by their local communities through elected organisations and makes them potentially the playthings of the people who set up the trusts, subject to approval by the secretary of state."
The only hope Lapford parents now have is a possible legal challenge, or persuading Gove to reject the trust's plans. May says that a group of parents are also considering home-schooling their children in the village rather than sending them to Chulmleigh.
Johnson says: "There is no contempt for the people of Lapford. I completely understand the opposition, but we believe this is the way to ensure education standards are as high as possible.
"I do believe that a local authority, with a local councillor speaking for a local primary school, could find it significantly more difficult to make the kind of change that schools sometimes need to make to improve standards."
Warwick Mansellguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
The Great Gatsby's world is every bit as unequal as Britain under the coalition | Aditya Chakrabortty
The wealthy in America and Britain no longer resemble the prewar elite, but appearances cannot mask how cut off they are from the rest of us
"Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes, and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor."
At its core, The Great Gatsby is the story of an American caste system. Jimmy Gatz, a Dakota farm kid turned army captain, tags along with fellow officers to a party, where he glimpses a woman from a different world. In his uniform, the penniless Gatz is not fenced off from Daisy Fay by the usual "indiscernible barbed wire". But in order to marry her, he must erase his history and turn into someone else: Jay Gatsby, former Oxford man, possessor of a vast fortune obscure in its origins but all too visible in its expenditure on parties and hydroplanes and shirts "piled like bricks in stacks a dozen high".
The rest you know – if not from F Scott Fitzgerald then perhaps from Baz Luhrmann's new film version. Although he normally can't see a subtlety without sending in a wrecking ball, Luhrmann has left intact the sense of tremendous human waste. At the top are the "careless people", such as Daisy and husband Tom Buchanan – and then there's everyone else, who cannot gain even a toehold in 1920s America except through some form of shadiness. The chasm between rich and poor puts the American Dream off-limits to most Americans. In Fitzgerald's telling, those such as Gatsby who gave it a shot were doomed to failure. As indeed, was the entire economy. The Jazz Age was followed by the Wall Street crash of 1929, and the Great Depression.
And yet, 90 years on from The Great Gatsby we are in a world that Fitzgerald would have recognised. Last year, the head of Barack Obama's in-house economic thinktank, Princeton professor Alan Krueger, unveiled a graph of what he dubbed "The Gatsby Curve". On the horizontal axis was measured economic inequality; plotted out vertically was to what extent children's chances of success were determined by their parents' wealth. At the bottom of the graph were countries such as Denmark and Sweden: relatively equal societies where children stand a reasonable chance of getting as far as their talent and hard work allowed. But at the top were the UK and the US: societies marked by a massive wealth gap, where poorer children are born with the dice already heavily loaded against them.
In Britain and America, inequality is now back to Gatsby-esque levels. Last year, prize-winning economic geographer Danny Dorling gave a speech in which he plotted how Britain's annual income had been divvied up down the ages. In 1923 the richest 1% of Britons took almost a quarter – 23.3% – of all income received. After the second world war came a long period of greater fairness so that by 1979 that proportion had dropped to only 6%. Then came Thatcher and Blair and soaraway inequality. By 2006, the year before the crash, we weren't quite at a Gatsby-esque divide, but we were heading that way: the top 1% of Britons were taking 15% of all income received in the country. This cash is then turned into houses, shares and other assets so that now the top 1% hold over 50% of all Britain's marketable wealth. And so inequality is passed down the generations. Today's headlines offer endless examples. The average London house now costs over half a million, or more than 19 times what the average British worker makes in a year. A Labour MP points out that of the 159 top civil servants, only five went to comprehensives.
David Cameron and Nick Clegg both know there is a problem with a society that only gives rich kids a chance. Both have made speeches denouncing the lack of social mobility in Britain; the government even has a social mobility strategy. Yet Clegg refuses to accept that there's a link between inequality and immobility. Despite academics advising him otherwise. Despite Alan Milburn's report on Britain's top jobs for the Cabinet Office last year that found: "A majority of employees offering the best-paid graduate jobs target … only 19 universities. The students who attend those 19 universities disproportionately spent their childhoods in the south of England."
The wealthy in America and Britain no longer resemble the prewar elite. They work, for one thing, and you may find the odd ethnic minority or woman in their ranks. But appearances cannot mask how cut off they are from the rest of us. It is still the case that 70% of high court judges were privately educated, even though only 7% of British children attend fee-paying schools. Last week, the Sunday Times reported that Bristol University tutors are considering treating applicants from state schools as "disadvantaged". We used to talk of oppressed minorities; now, it seems, we are in the age of oppressed vast majority.
For those state-school children whose parents can afford it, there is private tuition. Again, this is a world the young Gatsby would have recognised, with his hour each evening devoted to practising "elocution, poise and how to attain it". But for parents who don't need to scrimp and save, there are plenty more places to spend your money to gain advantage for your offspring. If you can, visit the Westminster school website. The insitution attended by our deputy prime minister is holding an auction of internships, often donated by alumni or present parents. For £500 you can buy your teenager two weeks with designer Amanda Wakeley; £600 a spell with a private-equity firm on Jermyn Street; while £300 buys work experience at Coutts.
Fitzgerald would have recognised such a world. Because this is what a 21st-century caste system looks like.
- Social mobility
- Economic policy
- US economic growth and recession
- Economic growth (GDP)
- Property
- Social exclusion
- Liberal-Conservative coalition
- Private schools
- F Scott Fitzgerald
- United States
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Michael Gove suggests Wales and Northern Ireland split off school exams
Education minister says nations' GCSEs and A-levels will diverge from English system as 'consequence of devolution'
The education system is set to splinter into national components, with Michael Gove writing to his Welsh and Northern Irish counterparts to kickstart the separation of GCSEs and A-levels as "a natural and legitimate consequence of devolution".
The education secretary's decision raises the spectre of England, Wales and Northern Ireland all having different secondary school examinations and qualifications, with employers and universities having to distinguish between English, Welsh and Northern Irish GCSEs and A-levels, leading, in time, to the evolution of entirely different education structures, as is already the case in Scotland.
In his joint letter to Leighton Andrews, education minister in the Welsh government, and John O'Dowd, education minister in the Northern Ireland assembly, Gove said "the time is right for us to acknowledge" that the three nations would need to go their separate ways on educational qualifications.
The letter follows a meeting between the three men last week to discuss the subject.
"I recognise that you still have decisions to take on your own reforms to GCSEs and A-levels. It is clear from our discussions, however, that our reforms are leading to very different qualifications in Wales and Northern Ireland from those I believe are right for young people in England," Gove wrote.
He said he had received advice from Ofqual, the education standards regulator in England, that "it will be very difficult, if not impossible, to maintain comparable standards when the structure, content and even grading of these qualifications are diverging to such an extent".
"I therefore believe that the time is right for us to acknowledge that the three-country regulation of GCSEs and A-levels is no longer an objective towards which we should be working," Gove wrote.
Currently, GCSEs and A-levels are set to the same standard for all three regions. But last summer's GCSE marking fiasco saw a fissure develop between the responses in London and Cardiff, with the Welsh government taking what their English counterparts regarded as a softer stance.
A Whitehall source said: "The Welsh are determined to keep dumbing down their exams. Leighton Andrews interfered with exam boards last year. He opposes our attempts to toughen things up and made clear he will continue to interfere to make things easier. It's better that we all go our own way and defend our positions to our electorates.
"It's been agreed that we will explore what the Northern Irish described as 'a surgical separation'."
The situation is complicated because Wales has no equivalent of Ofqual, with the education minister also acting as standards regulator.
In his letter, Gove warns that Wales and Northern Ireland may have to give up the GCSE and GCE titles. "With this issue resolved, I see no reason why cross-border differences in qualifications should not work between England, Wales and Northern Ireland as they do between our three jurisdictions and Scotland."
A Welsh government spokesman said: "Wales is keeping GCSEs and A-levels, as is Northern Ireland. We wish Mr Gove well with his plans to rename these qualifications in England."
Richard Adamsguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Education in brief: Is the DfE trying to rig the teacher-education market?
The education department seems desperate to teach more teachers; Newham local authority refuses to release a report's findings; parents give up on battle against academy chain
Trainee teachers: a spot of poaching?
Relations between the government and university-based teacher educators have reached a new low amid claims that a Department for Education agency has been attempting to lure would-be students away from the traditional higher education sector towards a favoured ministerial project.
An email sent by the National College for Teaching and Leadership – which oversees both traditional, university-based provision and the new School Direct school-based route – sought to persuade prospective postgraduate certificate in education university trainees to consider its rival. It reads: "You may have already applied for a PGCE by now, but have you thought about applying for School Direct?"
It continues, under "Why you should apply for School Direct": "School Direct is different. That's because you're part of a school team from day one, where you can train as a teacher with the expectation of a job once you qualify.
"It's free to apply. Simple too."
The Universities' Council for the Education of Teachers (Ucet) has furiously accused the government of trying to "manipulate" the teacher-education market, arguing that its members have tried to play fair by not discouraging would-be students away from School Direct, which is the favoured route of the education secretary, Michael Gove.
Just as intriguing, though, is why officials felt the need to make the appeal. Although the DfE published figures this month suggesting applications for School Direct have been very healthy, questions have been raised about the detail behind the numbers, amid persistent rumours that the total actually accepted on to School Direct is still low. Is the DfE getting desperate?
Governors throw in towelThe highest-profile battle fought by parents this year against moves by the government to enforce an academy "sponsor" on a non-academy school seems to have been lost. Governors at Roke primary in Kenley, Surrey, voted by a 2-1 majority to stop contesting its transfer to the Harris academy chain, bringing to an end four months of furious campaigning by parents.
This was triggered after the government responded to a "requires improvement" Ofsted verdict on the previously "outstanding" Roke by insisting that the school was to be sponsored by Harris, rather than another local academy seemingly favoured by governors and parents.
The majority of governors are understood to have come to the view that the arrival of Harris in September had become the only way to stabilise the school, which lost its headteacher last month. But parent campaigners are bitterly disappointed, complaining they were not consulted, and that they had raised money for a legal challenge. This would now not work, said a source, without governor support.
Ironically, governors have just been sent the results of the consultation carried out by Harris on the plans. Parents are said to have voted by clear majorities both against Harris's sponsorship and against any move to academy status. So much for local democracy.
School secretsA London local authority is facing pressure to release an investigation report on management practice at a school once described as "outstanding" by Ofsted. Newham council has rejected a freedom of information request for the report, which was written about activities at Langdon school in the period from 2004 to 2009, after a probe by education consultant Tim Blanchard. Allegations investigated included claims that free school meals and pupil attendance data were falsified.
Newham has relied on a provision within freedom of information legislation that can allow the non-release of reports on the basis that individuals could be identified. Rick Helm, a former teacher at the school who made the request, is challenging the decision through the information commissioner. Newham said: "Newham council's decision [not to release the report] is currently being reviewed by the information commissioner. It would be inappropriate to comment further."
Langdon was in the spotlight in 2005 when pupils travelled to Singapore to support London's successful Olympics bid. A letter sent to Langdon staff last year, by a second investigator into the affair, Susan Paul, said that Blanchard's report had found evidence of a "systematic process involving professional malpractice designed to show the school in the best light educationally and also to benefit financially".
It also said Blanchard had concluded that attendance, exclusions and free school meals data had been falsified and that "inappropriate processes" had been followed with regard to keeping pupils officially "on-roll" and "off-roll". Paul wrote to staff saying she wanted to "assess and if necessary challenge" Blanchard's findings. Education Guardian understands Paul's investigation never concluded.
Asked to comment, Newham said: "Following an independent investigation into serious allegations regarding management and administrative matters at the school between 2004 and 2009, six members of staff were suspended. Disciplinary procedures were undertaken … resulting in a number of these members of staff leaving. There has been no further evidence of management irregularities." It added that improvements had since been made to teaching and management.
Helm said: "I am disappointed that Newham has not released the report, as there needs to be a resolution of these issues." Last month, the school lost its "outstanding" rating and was placed in special measures.
Warwick Mansellguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Propaganda war: who will win Scottish teenage hearts and minds?
Schools are gearing up to be a key battleground in next year's referendum on Scottish independence
Rosie Duthie and Euan MacIntosh, both 15, have made up their minds on how they plan to vote in next year's referendum on Scottish independence. For Euan the answer is a clear "yes" because he believes it will be his best guarantee of a free university education. Rosie is a "no". She says: "We should be arguing that what we think is better for the future of young people in Scotland is better for England too and for the European Union."
Next year these young people from Douglas academy in the salubrious Glaswegian suburb of Milngavie will be among the first 16-year-olds in the UK mainland ever to vote. It appears that, like Rosie and Euan, many are taking their role in the process very seriously. It is a change that will bring politics into classrooms and canteens. People on both sides of the border will be watching closely the success or failure of extending the franchise to schoolchildren.
Some, like the Scotland Office minister David Mundell, claim the turnout among teenagers will be small because only middle-class children will bother to get themselves on the young people's voting register, which will remain confidential to avoid making children's addresses public.
But the move has widespread support in the Scottish parliament, with the first draft of the bill to give 16-year-olds a vote in the referendum passing last week on a vote of 97 to 12. The Liberal Democrats are committed to widening the franchise to all elections, and Labour is considering whether to include it in its manifesto for the 2015 election.
The leader of the Scottish Greens, Patrick Harvie, has said it may be "dispiriting and depressing" for young people who vote in the referendum to find they are then denied a vote in the general election a few months later.
The vote is something the 20-year-old vice-chair of the Scottish youth parliament, Kyle Thornton, and many others across the UK have lobbied hard for. "We have been campaigning for a decade and we will be working really hard to get people to register; we will be going in to schools and motivating the young people to make sure they are on the register … This is an opportunity to create a politically aware generation.
Thornton has now left Bellahouston academy in Glasgow, but he says: "In my last two years at school there was a general election, a European election, a council election and a Scottish election. There was an irony that we couldn't vote – I think we were as well qualified as any adult."
For teachers, the next academic year will be challenging as they try to ensure a fair hearing for both sides and to contain the massive lobbying effort that is likely to reach schools. Both sides of the debate are recruiting hundreds of teen ambassadors to take their arguments into schools, preparing teachers' packs, and offering speakers and visits. There is likely to be some mediation by the Electoral Commission in this new electoral battleground.
Emma Hendry, principal of modern studies at Elgin academy, is already debating the issues with year 9s and upwards. She says: "They are excited or at least interested in the idea that they will have a vote and that it will be about a decision that is so important to their future … I think they will be at least as well-informed as most adults because they are still in the education system and will have opportunities to hear the arguments."
Hendry herself is undecided. "The young people ask me how I will vote. I can honestly tell them I haven't made up my mind yet."
At Douglas academy, pupils are in training for STV (central Scotland's ITV franchise) and the national debating competition Debating Matters on independence. The school won a regional final of the Debating Matters championship this year and deputy head Stephen Sinclair is planning a series of debates on the issues around independence.
During the heats, teams will debate questions such as whether an independent Scotland should keep the pound. The last, televised, round will be on the referendum question: "Should Scotland be an independent country?"
Teenagers who have already volunteered to represent either side are accessing training and creating political relationships and CVs that could stand them in good stead for their future careers. Michael Low, 17, a sixth-year pupil at Bishopbriggs academy in Glasgow who has a conditional offer to study politics at Oxford next year, has already attended a session with someone from the Obama campaign.
"There is a lot of discussion in school, informally," he says. "People know I am a Better Together [the pro-UK campaign] youth rep and they can ask me about particular issues, or they can ask me for badges and other campaign material."
Meanwhile, the yes campaign aims to recruit 10,000 youth ambassadors. Ellie Koepplinger, 16, from Glasgow's Hillhead high, is on the yes campaign board. She says: "I feel my teachers are quite opinionated, and are willing to discuss independence when prompted, but most won't go out of their way to have that discussion with pupils. However, I strongly feel that many pupils are interested in the debate, and want to know more."
She wants to help counter some of the information teenagers share on social media, which can at times be "wildly unrealistic".
Like Low, Koepplinger believes in votes at 16 for all elections. She says young people like "the thought that we could actually make a difference to something. It will allow us to hold our heads up higher to say that we have proved we are able to take part in something like this."
Jackie Kempguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Confused about the national curriculum? Here, have a pre-loaded tablet
Michael Gove has a sense that 'significant innovation' is coming soon to a classroom near you. Could it have anything to do with Rupert Murdoch's education company?
Next year schools don't need to follow the national curriculum. The year after, only some of them will. And the year after that, robots will be teaching our children. Don't believe me? Read on.
To surprisingly little fanfare, the government has "disapplied" the national curriculum from September 2013, except for English, maths and science in some primary years. Schools should still teach all subjects named in the current curriculum, but it will be up to each teacher to decide what content to include. The logic is that removing the old curriculum for a year gives teachers a chance to prepare for the new curriculum, starting in 2014. Problem is, the next draft of the new content won't be out for consultation until July – a particularly bad time to consult with teachers – and it will mean the final curriculum will not get into the hands of schools until at least September. Teachers are therefore facing the distinct possibility of needing to create a hybrid curriculum ready for autumn but not knowing what that will involve until they are back in their classrooms.
So … won't teachers just stick with what they already have? They can't. The government's endless fiddling with assessments means even teachers wishing to recycle old materials must spend hours reworking them to meet new requirements. "Disapplication" sounds as if everyone is going to have a year off: to plan, and think, and innovate. That's an illusion. Instead, teachers will probably still spend next year revising their previous lessons, while painfully aware that the following autumn they will have to throw them out and write new ones.
Then, in September 2014, teachers must rein in all their innovative tendencies and follow the government's new "highly prescriptive" programmes of study. Unless the teacher works in an academy. Academies don't have to teach the national curriculum, ever – somewhat undermining the title.
So far Michael Gove, the education secretary, has given no clear reason why not all schools should follow the new curriculum. He recently praised individual schools for developing their own curricula, including Ark schools' maths programme and Pimlico academy's content-rich curriculum. But this praise for school-based development contrasts sharply with speeches made earlier in his tenure. Back in 2011, Gove repeatedly emphasised the impact of rigorous, prescribed curricula in the world's best-performing countries and was taken enough with the idea of compulsory core knowledge that he even asked experts to investigate the practicalities of having nationally required textbooks. Why has he suddenly gone cold on the idea? Oh yes, the robots …
Last week in the House of Commons Gove was asked whether children would be better served by having the national curriculum revised at fixed periods rather than at the personal whim of ministers. Gove, in an opaque statement, claimed he did not wish to prescribe in a way that might hinder changes arising from new technologies. "I have this sense of significant innovation coming," he said with a mystical flourish. "I don't want to unnecessarily constrain it."
One can't help but wonder if this "sense" has anything to do with Amplify, an educational group already selling tablet computers to schools in the US pre-loaded with curriculum materials. Amplify, as it happens, is part of Rupert Murdoch's education company. Also, Marketing Magazine reported in March, following a Freedom of Information request, that Gove had been visited in 2012 by officials from the TabletsForSchools programme – whose staff include Andrew Harrison, chief executive of Carphone Warehouse, and Sebastian James, chief executive of Dixons. Gove gave a seal of approval to the scheme and ordered his department to help the company with its plans of trialling and then rolling out tablets across the country. Results are due out in September of the first trials evaluating the impact of tablet teaching on student achievement.
So the robots aren't coming just yet. But it's not too much of a leap to imagine that schools full of over-worked teachers scrabbling to keep up with change might think an off-the-shelf curriculum on sale from another school, or a tablet replete with pre-planned lessons, is an answer to their nightmares. I don't know about you, but I have this mystical sense of significant profit to be made. No wonder some people don't want to constrain it.
• Laura McInerney taught in London for six years and is currently a Fulbright scholar
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