The Wolf Report was published today

This report of an enquiry into 14-19 vocational education and qualifications, led by Alison Wolf, was published today. 4 of its 27 recommendations were immediately accepted by Michael Gove, and this was confirmed in a press release. One of these is that teachers with QTLS (Qualified Teacher in Learning and Skills status - ie in the post-compulsory sector) are now qualified to teach in schools, where hitherto only QTS (Qualified Teacher Status - ie in schools only) would do. QTS teachers have always been qualified to teach in colleges, but until today it didn't work the other way round. It's interesting that Gove announced this immediately, and I guess it won't be popular in some quarters, but there's no logic to the present arrangements (sorry, the old arrangements). My colleagues teaching in FE and teacher training in HE are somewhat dazed - it had been hoped for but not really expected.

Perhaps now teachers in the post-compulsory will be happier about joining the Institute for Learning, which is essential for them to get QTLS, and paying the fee of £63 for full-timers. UCU is arguing against this, saying that forcing teachers to join and then charging them, is unfair; but my view is that other professionals take it for granted that to be seen as professionals they must belong to a professional body that is wholly controlled and financed by the professionals themselves, and certainly not by the government. The £63 fee recently announced by IfL seems a shock because for the last two years it has been free, because it was subsidised by the government. But this couldn't have gone on, recession or not - the whole point of the IfL is that it is a teachers' professional organisation or it is nothing.

Anyway, today has been interesting, and the Wolf Report, which also recommends that funding in the post-compulsory sector should be on a student basis, as in schools, rather than by enrolments on qualifications, a system which has operated since the early 90s and is the envy of nerds all over the world because it is so complicated (does anyone remember the Dan Quayle guide to the FEFC Funding Methodology, published I think by Lewisham College in about 1995 - an invaluable document at the time, now sadly well out of date, but it would nowadays need to be 6 times as long) should start a lot of hares running.

One of Wolf's main arguments is against the plethora of low-level vocational qualifications which have sprung up and which have become very popular not because they are useful for students in the labour market (few are), but because they attract funding. This is certainly true of the raft of Skills for Life qualifications which I am familiar with: having a level 1 literacy certificate merely demonstrates to a prospective employer that you don't have a GCSE in English. Alison Wolf also states bluntly that Key Skills qualifications at level 2 are not equivalent to a GCSE in English - this has been the Emperor's new clothes for nearly a decade. More on this when I get more familiar with the report.

Full Report:
http://www.education.gov.uk/publications/eOrderingDownload/The%20Wolf%20Report.pdf

Press release: http://www.education.gov.uk/inthenews/pressnotices/a0075181/wolf-review-proposes-major-reform-of-vocational-education

Conference on Remaking Adult Learning

March 14th 2011, 1 to 5pm, Institute of Education, 20 Bedford Way London WC1H 0AL.

A survey of adult learning at the present time, and a start on envisioning a renewed and strengthened tradition of adult education in the future. Come and get involved! Speakers include Alan Tuckett (NIACE), Bob Fryer (Campaign for Learning, former Principal of Northern College) Ursula Howard (former Director NRDC), Kathryn Ecclestone (University of Birmingham), Tom Schuller (Director Longview; former Director, Centre for Educational Research, OECD), John Bynner (Longview and Institute of Education), Fiona Aldridge (NIACE), Peter Templeton (WEA), Ken Spours (Institute of Education), Lee Davies (Institute For Learning), and me!

For the full programme, and to register, go to: http://www.niace.org.uk/campaigns-events/events/remaking-adult-learning

Bad logic

"Your brain is 80% water, you remember stuff. Water has a memory. Therefore homeopathy works" Twitter post from KerryHomeopath, quoted in the New Scientist 19-02-11

Sigh

RaPAL Conference 2011

The Annual Conference of Research and Practice in Adult Literacy (RaPAL), will be held this year in Norwich, 14-16 July 2011. The theme this year is Literacies in place and time: Looking in, looking out, looking back, looking forward.

More details at:

http://www.literacy.lancs.ac.uk/rapal/conference/2011.htm

Compass Education for the Good Society Statement

The latest version of Compass's Statement on 'Education for the Good Society' can be found at:

http://compassoneducation.org.uk/education-for-the-good-society-statement-version-2/

Comments are warmly invited

Education for the Good Society; Compass Conference

EDUCATION FOR THE GOOD SOCIETY CONFERENCE
10.30am – 4.00pm Saturday 5th March at the NUT, Hamilton House, Mabledon Place, London, WC1H 9BD

The Education for the Good Society Conference will bring together those on the democratic left to discuss alternatives to the current neo-liberal education settlement.

The limitations of New Labour’s education project and the election of a Conservative-led Coalition Government, with its agenda of austerity, markets and traditionalism, means that we have to ask fundamental questions about the purposes of education and its role in building the Good Society.

Conference speakers will include specialists from education and those involved in wider democratic left politics –
Prof. Richard Sennett, Fiona Miller, Neal Lawson, Prof. Tom Schuller, Prof. Ewart Keep, Prof. Ken Spours, Martin Yarnit, Prof. Jane Martin, Prof. Gary McCulloch, Prof. Michael Fielding, Dr Tom Sperlinger, Matthew Horne, Dr Jeremy Gilbert, Rhona Downie, Donna Hayter and representatives from Labour’s education team (tbc).

Conference themes, based on commissioned papers, will include:

Education for the Good Society
Education and fairness
Schooling for the Good Society
Lifelong learning
Education and sustainability
Education, skills and the economy
Education and democracy
Education for inclusion
Education and innovation
A curriculum for the Good Society
Visions of higher education

The conference will be organised around plenary sessions and workshops and there will also be a special session on ‘Schooling in Alberta’ with Rhonda Evans of the Guardian in conversation with Fiona Millar.

The final conference session will discuss how we develop what some all the ‘triple agenda’ - a long-term vision for change, influencing the policies of Labour and other progressive parties over the next few years and, crucially, connecting with professionals and the wider public around key campaigning issues.

Participants will be asked to contribute £10 on the day towards the hiring of the venue.

If you are interested in attending and reserving your place, please email - info@compassonline.org.uk

Remaking adult learning: Essays on adult education in honour of Alan Tuckett

This book, of which I was a member of the editorial team, was published recently by the Institute of Education, see: www.ioe.ac.uk/about/48777.html

For an interview with me by EducationNews, a global resource on educational issues, about the themes and ideas covered in the book, see: www.educationnews.org/educationnewstoday/107211.html

Is our culture's obsession with educational grading a sign of its democratic deficit?

This post connects with an earlier one questioning the view that 'Talent is Scarce'. Educational systems, particularly those in Britain and America, are more and more focussed on, and driven by, the awarding of grades for every kind of achievement. The key success indicator for secondary schools here in the UK, the one that decides how far up the comparative league tables they come, is the proportion of students who gain 5 GCSE passes (including English and Mathematics) with grades of A*, A, B or C. Passes at D and E actually count against the school, even though they are passes for the individual. For sixth forms and colleges it is A level successes, measured not just in passes, but in grades. Primary school children are assessed in English, Mathematics and Science as being at different levels, some being seen as 'below the average for their age', others as above. Educational providers in the post-compulsory sector following OFSTED inspections are awarded a complicated array of grades, including 'outstanding', 'good', 'satisfactory' and 'unsatisfactory'.

Now, no one would disgree with the idea that we need systems for assessing whether or not individuals are suitable and qualified to work as plumbers, brain surgeons, solicitors, airline pilots, car mechanics, teachers or gas engineers, but it is not immediately obvious why within those systems we need a range of different grades. What is wrong with simple pass or fail outcomes?

One possible answer is that grading provides a reassuring justification for the obsessive 'over-selection' that our system engages in, as pointed out by Richard Sennett, referenced in my earlier post. The numbers project a veneer of objectivity to relatively subjective, unreliable and sometimes invalid assessment and marking processes, and thus assure us that the selection processes for which the grades are used - getting into or failing to get into university, or getting or being rejected for a new job or promotion, or in the case of educational institutions the chance or not to access special funding streams, are also objective and so seem to have been fair.

'Fairness' is stated by all parties to be a key objective of current political activity, but as it is not a well-defined category, it needs an apparatus which dresses up these imprecise processes as objective and not subject to potentially partial judgements by individuals, however expert or distinguished. It is felt that without this apparatus, these decisions would depend rather too clearly on the decisions of individuals and return us to a system of patronage, bribery, corruption, etc, in which to look for any notion of fairness would be beside the point. The argument therefore goes: we need fairness or at least an appearance of fairness, so we need a technical apparatus - examinations, grades, rubrics, transparent assessment criteria, etc - to eliminate as far as possible favouritism, any form of prejudicial discrimination or corruption, so that we can all be satisfied that access to jobs and professions is (a) fair and (b) only admits people with the requisite competences and skills.

A system in which access to all professions, jobs, exam success, universities, was governed entirely by 'pass/fail' outcomes, would be one that demanded trust in the systems and the people working within them. And for me this is the connection with the democratic deficit. Onora O'Neill, in the Reith lectures she gave in 2002, demonstrated clearly how systems characterised by bureaucratic accountability assume low trust and actually intensify low levels of trust between individuals, and by individuals in public institutions and in the society as a whole. This lack of trust breeds the cynicism which leads first to democratic inertia and then increasingly to loss of faith in the democratic ideal itself.

Is expressing opinions unprofessional?

This discussion came out of a conversation about films, and in particular Control, the recent biopic of Ian Curtis. Commenting on this film, someone said: 'biopics never work'. He went on to argue that biopics nowadays tend simply to present more or less factual details of someone's life, in a simple documentary manner, rather than expressing a view about it. The director aims not to be a presence - this would be seen to detract from the truth and objectivity of the film. In this mode critical discussions focus merely on the factual truth of the film, rather than what values it is expressing. This, we all agreed, fitted in with the present ubiquity of minimalist, impersonal, abstract approaches in the creative arts, which, in the same way, typically tend simply to present an image, a film, or a text, without comment or any kind of interpretive framework, for the viewer simply to experience: this tendency does not try to encourage people to think, only to react. The emphasis is on the surface, not what lies underneath: on what things look like, rather than on what they might mean.

My view of this tendency is that as a general approach to art and life, it is a cop-out, an abnegation of responsibility, a tendency to take the easy route, one that presents but does not comment. A political perspective would argue that such art, by doing nothing to express any kind of critical view, supports the status quo.

I wondered whether there was any connection between this conversation and my recent experience of marking written assignments as part of my work as a teacher on PGCE courses. These assignments are sometimes marked at Level 5 (degree level) and sometimes at level 7 (masters level). The commonest comment I have found myself making in feedback at both levels is: 'this is OK, but needs to go beyond the descriptive mode' - that is, these scripts typically present what some academic commentator has written, or describe an event in the student's classroom experience, but don't comment on or discuss these issues in any evaluative way. Sometimes they describe their mode of studying: 'I read the book which was on the reading list and we discussed it in class', rather than critically discussing anything they have read, or responding reflectively to the discussion. This is such a pronounced characteristic of many of these assignments that I wonder why this should be. Is it because students feel some inhibitions or barriers to commenting critically (either positively or negatively) on ideas about their work? Is it because they feel that it is unprofessional to be so personal as to be evaluative, to state their opinions about something to do with their work? Is the minimalist, impersonal mode so prevalent in art now becoming a pronounced feature of the culture in general?

Has having and stating a point of view become 'unfashionable'?

Having stated this question I do remember that after an MA seminar I took part in over 30 years ago, someone said: 'it would be so much better if people didn't express their opinions all the time!' So maybe nothing has changed. But do we want teachers who can't or won't express opinions? If the answer to this is yes, then what are the implications of this for society, politics, democracy, etc in the future?

Thought for the Day: A new educational paradigm

'The incidence of ADHD has risen in parallel with the growth of standardised testing' Ken Robinson, see this speech animated at RSA animate: http://comment.rsablogs.org.uk/2010/10/14/rsa-animate-changing-education

Quote for the day

'Learning is a liminal process, at the boundary between control and chaos'
Dylan Wiliam, 2007 at www.alt.ac.uk/docs/altc2007_dylan_wiliam_keynote.pdf

Videos for Numeracy teachers

Graham Griffiths' site for numeracy teachers, check it out: http://sites.google.com/site/teachingadultnumeracy

Haiku of the day:

A spectre is haunting
The triumph of capitalism
Authenticity

Talent is not scarce: most people can do most jobs

At a lecture called ‘The Social Craftsman’ given at University College London in November 2009, the eminent sociologist Richard Sennett argued that ‘Talent is not scarce: most people can do most jobs, given appropriate training and support, and therefore our obsession, particularly in the UK and the USA, to organise education primarily as a winnowing process, using continuous testing to weed out the few from the many, is wasteful to the economy as well as unfair in social terms.’

He started by asserting that successive governments in Britain and the US have effectively taken the view that ‘low-level’ jobs can be exported without damaging the economy, including service jobs such call-centre jobs as well as manufacturing jobs.

Robert Reich’s 1991 book The Work of Nations, articulated this view: ‘We are living through a transformation that will rearrange the politics and economics of the coming century,’ Reich noted. ‘There will be no national products or technologies, no national corporations, no national industries. There will be no national economies, at least as we have come to understand the concept. All that will remain rooted within national borders are the people who comprise a nation. Each nation’s primary assets will be its citizens’ skills and insights.’* Accordingly, developed societies need only foster ‘symbolic analyst’ jobs within their economies.

In Sennett’s view, this analysis initially appeared sound partly because of the exploitative, even imperialistic, way both the UK and the US think about foreign markets. The policies of our governments betray a restricted, static, non-developmental, non-social view of employment in relation to these lower level jobs. And what people in these foreign ‘client economies’ are achieving for themselves through these employment opportunities suggests this view is mistaken.

It is now clear that many people doing these jobs in other countries use their employment to build skills (starting often with learning English) and progress from being employees of a British company to employees of a local company to perhaps starting their own business, all a result of using their work to develop their skills. Sennett believes that almost all work, at whatever level, has this developmental potential – at least in principle – and that not seeing this is a serious and persistent mistake of UK and US employment and educational policy.

Sennett characterises the debate on how ‘skills’ are acquired as an ongoing argument between ‘endogenous’ theories of skill acquisition (in which learning is seen as a largely technical process common to all people and all contexts) and ‘cognitive situated’ theories, which see learning as deeply interconnected with the existing knowledge, understanding and motivation of each individual, and different in different contexts too. (He himself, ‘like any good Marxist’, he said, supports the second view.) We persistently try to ‘cut’ ability and talent much too finely, usually by using the blunt instrument of standardised testing in some form. His view on this is radical – he argues that most people can actually do reasonably well at most jobs – it’s only misleading test results and historic class prejudice that make us think differently.

In Britain and the US, it suits us to assume that talent is scarce and that it is therefore critical to identify the supposed one person in 20 who is capable. But in fact talent is not scarce. Most of the other 19 are just as capable in most circumstances, given the opportunity, educational support and the right social networks. Prevailing assumptions, however, lead us effectively to dump the 19, and to see the low status jobs they get (if they get a job at all) as not worthy of enriching with opportunities for professional or personal development.

We have limited awareness of, and generally little interest in fostering, the social and developmental dimensions of employment. Policy mostly ignores the potential of any work experience, provided it is sustained, to support the development of craft, social, civic and professional skills (understanding these in the broadest sense). The effectiveness for the economy of ‘just in time’ working patterns – repeated changing of jobs, short-term team working followed by dispersal, serial employment rather than sustained employment or careers – is exaggerated, while the disadvantages and costs of continual flexibility and volatility are systematically underestimated.

The net effect of this is that the UK and US exemplify a type of capitalism that (despite its rhetoric) is uninterested in developing human capital. The persistent idea that bankers and others in high-paid, privileged roles are by definition much more talented than those in lower status roles is an underlying cause of the recession and likely to mean that even after the recession, high unemployment and/or a significant ‘Macjob’ sector will continue to be toxic features of our economy, sustaining the vicious circle they are symptomatic of.

At the end of the lecture I asked him for his view on the idea that while too much testing was creating problems for sustained learning, at least it meant that there was less scope for discrimination in terms of access to jobs and higher education, Sennett responded with a story: one year during his stint as admissions registrar for Harvard University, an error in the admissions procedure allowed 90 students whose grades were clearly ‘not good enough’ to enter the university. All of them, he said, graduated brilliantly.....
* Reich, Robert B., (1991) The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves For 21st Century Capitalism

Richard Sennett
Born Chicago, 1943, studied piano and cello until hand injury in 1963
Attended University of Chicago & Harvard University, Ph.D. in 1969
1970s: Co-founded New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University
1980s: Advisor to UNESCO, president of the American Council on Work; teaching at Harvard
1990s to present: Divides time between New York University and the London School of Economics
Work: Social analyst interested in how individuals and groups make sense of material facts about where they live and the work they do
Books include: The Corrosion of Character, 1998, how middle-level employees make sense of the ‘new economy’
Respect in a World of Inequality, 2002, effects of new ways of working on the welfare state
The Culture of the New Capitalism, 2006, an over-view of change
The Craftsman, 2008, investigating the processes and work contexts which support people to develop the highest level of skill.

For more see http://www.richardsennett.com/

Thoughts for the Day

How much less sociable is false speaking than silence! (Montaigne)