Jonathan Savage

The ongoing development of educational policy by Gove et al has caused me to wonder about who the winners and losers might be. The key winner, it seems to me, is the Headteacher of your local school. They will be left in a position of unchallengeable power in relationship to their school. Let me illustrate this by considering some of the key things that we know already about the education policy of this coalition:

1. QCDA gone – no challenge regarding choice and composition of the curriculum (beyond a basic nod to a slimmed down National Curriculum);
2. BECTA gone – no challenge to poor ICT procurement or usage by schools;
3. OFSTED – their role is waning. There will be no challenge to many school’s approaches to management, teaching and learning (and probably no visits to schools that are ‘oustanding’ anyway, despite the part that OFSTED might have played in raising their attainment and achievement perhaps?);
4. GTCE gone – no challenge regarding teachers’ pay, terms, conditions (and, as we all know, the power of the teaching unions are also waning); if your school becomes an academy, then democratically elected bodies have no voice and provide no challenge, instead you get Trustees (unelected and who knows what level of challenge they’ll provide);
5. The role of HE institutions in initial teacher education – going, and likely to be significantly reduced given Gove’s comments this morning. Headteachers will have a much more active role in teacher education, with larger numbers of trainees and less ‘interference’ from outside agencies. So, no challenge to what might be poor and incestuous teaching practices.

All in all, these reforms seem to suggest one thing: Headteachers know best and will not be challenged. This is not a healthy situation in my view. What do you think? Please tell me that I’m wrong.

Following on from the previous post, here’s the quote from Michael Gove’s speech about the slimming down of the National Curriculum:

I want to ensure our national curriculum is a properly international curriculum – that it reflects the best collective wisdom we have about how children learn, what they should know and how quickly they can grow in knowledge. I want to use the evidence from those jurisdictions with the best-structured and most successful curricula – from Massachusetts to the Pacific Rim – to inform our curriculum development here. I want to remove everything unnecessary from a curriculum that has been bent out of shape by the weight of material dumped there for political purposes. I want to prune the curriculum of over-prescriptive notions of how to teach and how to timetable. Instead I want to arrive at a simple core, informed by the best international practice, which can act as a benchmark against which schools can measure themselves and parents ask meaningful and informed questions about progress.

There was also a lot of stuff about academies and accountability, etc, which I’m just too depressed to write about again.

Here the most detail that we have  so far about the ConDem coalition’s views on how to education our new teachers. This extract, from Michael Gove’s speech to the  National College for Leadership of Schools and Children’s Services’ Annual Leadership Conference in Birmingham today, signals some major changes in policy direction. (My emphases are in bold):

We also want to take urgent action to attract more great teachers into the classroom. We want to further enhance the prestige and esteem of the teaching profession and further improve teacher training and continuous professional development.

Look at the highest performing nations in any measure of educational achievement and they are always, but always, those with the most highly qualified teachers. Whether its Singapore, South Korea or Finland, as Sir Michael Barber has pointed out in his ground-breaking study for McKinsey nothing matters more in education that attracting the best people into teaching and making sure that every minute in the classroom is spent with children benefiting from the best possible instruction.

The generation of teachers currently in our schools is the best ever, but given the pace of international improvement we must always be striving to do better. That is why we will expand organisations such as Teach First, Teaching Leaders and Future Leaders which have done so much to attract more highly talented people into education. That is why we will write off the student loan payments of science and maths graduates who go into teaching. That is why we will reform teacher recruitment to ensure there is a relentless focus on tempting the best into this, most rewarding, of careers. And that is why we will reform teacher training to shift trainee teachers out of college and into the classroom. We will end the arbitrary bureaucratic rule which limits how many teachers can be trained in schools, shift resources so that more heads can train teachers in their own schools, and make it easier for people to shift in mid-career into teaching.

Teaching is a craft and it is best learnt as an apprentice observing a master craftsman or woman. Watching others, and being rigorously observed yourself as you develop, is the best route to acquiring mastery in the classroom. Which is why I also intend to abolish those rules which limit the ability of school leaders to observe teachers at work. Nothing should get in the way of making sure we have the best possible cadre of professionals ready to inspire the next generation.

As more and more detail is added to this coalition’s polices, the more and more scared I get about the future of our educational system.

What future does the National Curriculum have under this Government? It is obviously going to be have a major review. Alongside their hasty work on academies, the DfE even have a separate section of materials about it on their website.

At the primary level, the decision to scrap the Rose Review has been announced, but alternative plans to return to ‘basics’ are still to be unveiled.

At Key Stage 3, the end of Key Stage assessment changes are now scrapped. This is what the website has to say about it: Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last few days I’ve been considering some of the debate surrounding the Academies Bill, and wondering whether or not it would be an appropriate move for the school where I’m a Governor. I’ve prepared this paper which presents some of my own thinking in this area. There are a number of key areas surrounding academies that are worth considering carefully. This paper presents these, together with key quotes from other headteachers, Professors of Education and professional bodies. I’ve also shared a folder from my Dropbox account here which contains many other articles from the press, academic journals and policy pronouncements, etc.

For the record, last night the school where I’m a Governor voted in favour of becoming an academy subject to certain assurances. I voted against this decision. It was made after a short period of consultation organised by the Headteacher, including a letter to parents (from the Headteacher), a staff meeting chaired by the Headteacher held during morning break, and a two hour drop-in for parents – again held by the Headteacher – which only one parent attended. In this case, there has be no meaningful, sustained consultation organised by the Governing Body which is regrettable in my view.

It also seems strange to be making decisions about the future of the school when the Academies Bill is still working its way through Parliament, when the impact study done by the DfE clearly shows that limited numbers of schools will be able to make this change each year (probably around 200 or so) and so many details are still unclear. Read the rest of this entry »

The whole Dick Clamberon style of government here is having a major impact on what has been a significant and systematic improvement to the infrastructure of school buildings across the country, i.e. the BSF programme. There is no clarity about what will/will not happen and, it seems, we will have to wait for a spending review in the autumn before any decisions are taken about individual projects that have already been signed (back as far as last July apparently).

This article from an industry source caught me eye. As it explains, the whole mess is like a game of Deal or No Deal:

The whole £55bn schools renewal programme should be a carefully thought-through plan to give our children a better chance in life, instead it has turned into a game of Deal or No Deal. If you are working on the six schemes given the go-ahead in March by the then education secretary Ed Balls, the box you open is likely to contain a blue. If you are lucky enough to be in line for work as a preferred bidder the chances, if this week’s Fenland example is anything to learn from, are you will open a red box. But actually no-one can bank on it until their number is up. For contractors up and down the country incurring millions of pound in costs keeping experienced bid teams together this is simply not good enough. It is not fair on the project teams nor the management who are worrying whether their staff’s talents could be put to better use elsewhere. It is unrealistic to expect a lot of detail at this early stage, but education secretary Michael Gove must issue a statement about the Government’s intentions for BSF. Expecting the industry to sit around for months wondering whether they have chosen the £250,000 or 1p box is no way to handle things.

It’s unacceptable but not, unfortunately, surprising.

Howard Jacobson’s piece in The Independent last Saturday caused my hackles to rise somewhat. I won’t bore you with the whole thing (which you can read here should you want to), but rather just quote the bit towards the end of his piece about the new Education Secretary – Michael Gove:

I confess to a liking for Michael Gove. He is a cultivated man and looks the way a cultivated man should look – always just a touch unkempt, cross-toothed and with a bit of a headache (I’m talking of impression, not fact), ironical, intellectually impatient, not quite inhabiting the space, as the two Cs (that’s Cameron and Clegg) occupy space, carved out for him by privilege. He is also, against all the prevailing orthodoxies, Arnoldian. Read the rest of this entry »

John Adams has written a great spoof on the whole issue of using laptops and notation software as a compositional tool. I’d highly recommend that you read it. You’ll find it here. As a piece of writing, it’s amusing because it touches on a number of issues that most of us know are true. But, as with any polemic, there is much left out and several of the commentators on his blog are pointing things out. Of course, I’m sure Adams is fully aware of these.

His story reminded me of a lovely exposition on the relationship between user, tool and objective in Wertsch’s book Mind as Action. Whilst Adams suggests that pencil, manuscript and eraser might be a better toolset to learn about musical composition, in Chapter 2 of his book Wertsch points out that processes of long division are often mediated by pencil and paper. Without a calculator, one relies on the tool to carry out the task. For most of us it is almost impossible without reliance on these tools. However, Wertsch’s point is that the tools that we use implicate our thinking in an essential way. Werstch extends this example by considering the use of the slide rule as a design tool in aeronautical design. It is a brilliant exposition and highly recommended.

For us, the question might be, what have we lost in the rush to use laptops and notational software as a composition tool? And in terms of a compositional pedagogy, what might be the advantages in promoting musical thinking and understanding through the use of a range of tools including, perhaps, those from our past (e.g. paper and pencils, analogue four tracks, etc). The rush to composition as a inclusive activity does, in Adam’s view, have many downsides, not least the possibilities of opticians playing you their latest opus and a puppy called Cubase (check the end of his article) – perhaps that should have been Cakewalkies?

I really enjoyed reading this article about the music teachers behind some of the famous names in contemporary music today (Arctic Monkeys, Muse, XX, Leona Lewis, etc). There are some brilliant stories here about how they coached, encouraged and developed their musical talents often in less than ideal circumstances. Hats off to the Guardian for putting this story together. It should serve as inspiration for the large number of hard-working music teachers across schools, and the great work they do in providing a regular, systematic, developmental and high quality music education for their pupils.