Paul Watkins- Location: Dover
- Registered: 9 Nov 2011
- Posts: 2,226
Perhaps the teaching of the understanding of respect might be relevant Darren.
Watty
Ross Miller
- Location: London Road, Dover
- Registered: 17 Sep 2008
- Posts: 3,706
Paul W - yes but without aspiration we cannot have progress
DT1 - absolutely right - there seems to be a bizarre double standard present here
Ray - teachers on the whole acquiesced as they (like most of us) wanted to keep their jobs - though you rightly spotted that is is the politicians who have sold students (and teachers) down the river on the alter of league tables
"Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die today." - James Dean
"Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength,
While loving someone deeply gives you courage" - Laozi
Guest 745- Registered: 27 Mar 2012
- Posts: 3,370
So pretty much all of us think that Michael Gove is doing a good job then.
Splendid.
howard mcsweeney1- Location: Dover
- Registered: 12 Mar 2008
- Posts: 62,352
love your tongue in cheek humour keith, we have discussed michael gove - maybe they should replace him in the job with that other success story andrew lansley?
DT1- Location: Dover
- Registered: 15 Apr 2008
- Posts: 1,116
Agreed Keith, Mr Gove is basic/basal.
Sorry Paul, I thought Keith was talking about 'respect'. In which case we are talking about 'respect of respect' as opposed to 'respect'.
Again Ross, I agree with your view completely. As if teachers, parents or students want to play these silly political games. They/we just want a good standard of education for all.
Keith Sansum1
- Location: london
- Registered: 25 Aug 2010
- Posts: 23,942
gove to be the first on the chopping block then
ALL POSTS ARE MY OWN PERSONAL VIEWS
Guest 745- Registered: 27 Mar 2012
- Posts: 3,370
Can Education Secretary Michael Gove's revolution succeed?
The Education Secretary's latest plans, including the return of O-levels, confirm the scale of his ambition for our schools. But the task he has set himself defeated his predecessors
Raising the bar: Michael Gove visits the Woodpecker Hall Primary Academy, Edmonton, north London Photo: Eddie Mulholland
In the lobby of the Department for Education there is a long line of photographs of former secretaries of state, 30 of them in total since the war. Very few made any difference at all.
Michael Gove must wonder whether he will make a bigger impression.
He has certainly been hyperactive, and has become the darling of the Conservative party as a result. His leaked plan to bring back the O-level, and ditch GCSEs, is the latest in a long line of announcements that have earned the Education Secretary full marks from Tory activists.
But what does saying there will be a "new O-Level" actually mean in practice? And will Mr Gove's school reforms really raise standards?
In all the countries with the best schools, teaching is a much higher-status profession than in Britain. With this in mind, Mr Gove has set more demanding standards for entry into the teaching profession: they must now have at least a 2:2 degree and the bar could be raised further in future. He has encouraged the growth of Teach First, which encourages high-fliers to try their hand at teaching. And he has reformed teacher training, so that more training is on the job, rather than based on academic theory or fashionable dogma.
To make their jobs easier and less stressful, teachers have been given new powers over discipline, and rules that undermined their authority in the classroom have been pruned back.
What about the quality of management? How do we make sure that the best teachers get rewarded and keep teaching, while those who are not up to the job are either turned around or moved on? A problem with state-run services is that in the absence of market forces, managers don't have the same incentives to weed out underperformers.
Labour had been turning around some of the worst schools by making them into so-called "academies". This meant that the failing management would be replaced, a rich sponsor would provide some extra money, and the new academy would have greater freedom to fire bad teachers and set its own curriculum.
There is good evidence that this programme worked, and standards in the academies rose faster than in their predecessor schools. But, although it started in 2002, the academy programme had only reached about 200 schools by the end of Labour's time in government, less than one per cent of all schools in England.
Mr Gove has continued this programme, but also hugely expanded it in a number of different ways. He has allowed good schools to turn themselves voluntarily into academies, which means they get greater freedoms over hiring, firing and the curriculum. Primary schools can now also be turned into academies. As well as trying to turn around the very worst schools, he wants to change the much larger number of "coasting" schools - the schools that are not terrible, but not good enough either.
He is raising the "floor standard" - the level of performance below which schools can be handed over to new management.
The long-term goal of the academy programme is to emulate the competitive forces of the private sector within state education. Schools that are badly run will be taken over by new and better managers. The process is just beginning, but already academy schools are forming into chains.
In the past we often saw brilliant head teachers turn around individual schools. But they could not take over other schools. Now groups with a proven track record of turning around poor schools are able to replicate their successful methods on a bigger scale. Already, more than one in 10 secondary schools is part of a chain. Federations such as ARK and Harris are raising standards in large numbers of schools.
Where does the proposal for a new O-level fit into all this? It fits with Mr Gove's determination to raise standards, and stop politicians kidding the public about how well schools are doing. Last summer, 23 per cent more youngsters had good GCSE pass rates than in 1995-96. In part, this reflects real progress but it also reflects the fact that exams have been made easier.
For years there has been a race to the bottom between different competing exam boards. To attract schools to sit their exams, boards have lowered standards. A recent Daily Telegraph investigation uncovered the full extent of the problem, with secretly shot footage of chief examiners advising teachers on future test questions and the exact wording that pupils should use to obtain higher marks.
Research by Durham University found that between 1996 and 2007, the average grade achieved by GCSE maths candidates of the same "general ability" rose by a whole grade. As part of the O-level proposal, Mr Gove is suggesting having a single exam board in England, as they already do in Scotland, which will remove one of the main causes of grade inflation.
Although Mr Gove has yet to explain his proposals for the new version, the O-levels of old were more "norm referenced" than GCSEs. In simple terms this meant that a certain proportion of pupils each year would get As, a certain proportion Bs, and so on. But GCSEs are not really anchored in this way, which has allowed politicians to say that grades are going up, even as international comparisons suggest we may be falling behind other countries.
Mr Gove is also concerned that targets set by politicians can have perverse effects. That's why as part of the O-level proposal he plans to end the Government's obsessive focus on the number of children getting five GCSE grades at C or better.
This measure, which formed the basis for league tables under the last government, has distorted teachers' priorities, because getting a child from D to C helps in the league tables, but bumping up a pupil from a B to an A doesn't.
As one teaching manual - "Boost your borderline students" - helpfully explains: "Students who achieve a GCSE grade C or above in mathematics help to boost the school's statistics for the Department... and so show the school in a better light for Ofsted and for league tables... D/C borderline students are now an important focus for all teachers."
The effect of this focus in recent years is clearly visible in GCSE results for English and maths. Comparing 2010 with 2002, 5 per cent more students got a C in maths, and 5 per cent fewer got a D or an E. But the numbers getting A* to B were unchanged. In other words, instead of increasing standards across the board, schools have been forced to play the league table system. In practice this means that bright children and the less able are being neglected because of government targets.
Yesterday there was a furore because of newspaper reports that the O-levels proposal could also mean a return to a two-tier system, whereby most children would study for O-levels but less academic children would study for a more basic Certificate of Secondary Education (CSE).
This looks unlikely to happen, and Deputy PM Nick Clegg was quick to rule out the idea, putting him on a collision course with Mr Gove. Yet while a simple return to the old CSE would be a mistake, something is needed in its place and the proposal raised a hugely important issue: how to cater for less academic children?
Governments of Left and Right have been right to try to get more children to go down the academic route and increase the numbers going to university. In the 21st century, there is more demand than ever for higher skills; globalisation and technological change are relentlessly pushing down the wages of the unskilled, and pushing up the premium that graduates earn.
But there will always be some pupils who are not suited to the academic route. By the age of 14, lots of my classmates were wondering why on earth they were struggling to learn quadratic equations, which they knew they would never use again in their lives. As a result they were bored, felt second rate, and were disengaged from school. We waste the talents of millions of children in this way.
Despite the success of small projects such as Young Apprenticeships, where 14 year-olds spend three days a week at school and two days in work, politicians have shown little interest in the subject. Perhaps that's because the political class is full of people like me, with dangerously similar backgrounds (PPE, Oxford) who think that academia is the only way to go.
In Finland, which is often held up as a model by the Left, more than 40 per cent of pupils go to vocational schools from age 15. Last year, former Labour education secretary Estelle Morris suggested that children in Britain could choose to go down a vocational or academic route at age 14. This is an attractive idea in principle, but we would need to guard against the vocational track becoming a second-class, second-rate option.
Mr Gove is thinking big, and ruffling a lot of feathers
along the way. His O-level proposals are another example of his radicalism, but their messy leaking also shows that the schools revolution is still a work in progress. He wants to tell us the truth about our schools, not kid us about how well we are doing.
His energy is impressive, and he is attacking the problems of educational failure from every angle. But when he contemplates the grainy colour photos of all those failed former education secretaries, he must realise that he has a mountain to climb.
howard mcsweeney1- Location: Dover
- Registered: 12 Mar 2008
- Posts: 62,352
keith
can you state where the article came from please, otherwise we could get into trouble?
Keith Sansum1- Location: london
- Registered: 25 Aug 2010
- Posts: 23,942
osbourne 0
everyone else won
ALL POSTS ARE MY OWN PERSONAL VIEWS
Guest 745- Registered: 27 Mar 2012
- Posts: 3,370
the telegraph
The article is in public
I don't know why every body is agents this man, it just looks to me that he is trying to reveres the decline
Guest 716- Registered: 9 Jun 2011
- Posts: 4,010
For your information.......
Dear Reg,
The Save Our Playing Fields petition is growing fast. It's now passed 90,000 signatures. And this Wednesday, 38 Degrees members in Surrey Heath will be carrying it straight into the office of Education Minister Michael Gove. Please can you add your name before then?
38 Degrees members in Surrey Heath are well placed to deliver our petition - Michael Gove is their local MP. But the message they deliver matters for the whole country. The more box-loads of signatures they carry into his office, the more pressure we put on him to prevent school children losing their playing fields.
Please add your name to the petition before the delivery on Wednesday:
https://secure.38degrees.org.uk/playing-fields
Keith Sansum1- Location: london
- Registered: 25 Aug 2010
- Posts: 23,942
playing fields fiasco, anothe thorn in mr goves side
ALL POSTS ARE MY OWN PERSONAL VIEWS
fish