NEETs are only a symptom of a much deeper problem

Tweet

 

It has been suggested this week that “Primary schools in England should be required to identify children at risk of leaving education at 16 without finding a job”, with a view to putting mentoring / tutoring arrangements in place for the children thus identified. Although the review is specifically about England, the same issue exists in Wales. There is something profoundly depressing about the idea that we can and should categorise children in such a way before they are even 11 years old - or even, according to the author, for pre-school children.

It’s not a new issue, and the links between deprivation in childhood and poor opportunity in adulthood have been well understood for at least 60 years – I read the seminal study on the issue by JWB Douglas (“The Home and the School”) back in the 1960s. Six decades later and we’re still only debating how to address the symptoms – because treating the symptoms is what the proposal for mentoring and tutoring is about. That’s not to argue that we should not be trying to treat the symptoms – any help that we can give the children concerned is to be welcomed.

But really, after all that time, we shouldn’t still be debating potential corrective actions at all – we should be addressing the underlying cause. It remains the case that the social class and financial situation of the parents are the factors with the greatest influence on children’s life chances. Even if we were to accept that the situation of the parents is down to their own choices in life (although I hasten to add that I don’t accept that things are as simple as that), that is no justification for restricting the opportunities open to their children. Yet, far from seeking to make the starting point in life less unequal, recent decades have seen a continued concentration of wealth and income in fewer and fewer hands – and the gap between the richest and poorest in society has grown, not shrunk.

Gross inequality isn’t the natural order of things, and life doesn’t have to be that way. It is the result of political choices made by UK governments, both Tory and Labour, over decades. And the most depressing part of the reporting on the pending review is that it doesn’t even seem to touch on that.

Hard hats and graduate caps

Tweet

 

According to the PM, “From today, Britain will value the hard hat every bit as much as the graduation cap”. It’s a nice soundbite, but what does it actually mean? He’s not the first politician – or even the first UK Prime Minister – to talk about what has often been called ‘parity of esteem’: the idea that people with key technical skills should be as highly regarded as those with a degree. Few would disagree with the sentiment. And it’s certainly true that an academic degree, and the learning involved in gaining one, is not something which suits everyone, although we need to guard against the idea that making learning less academic also strips away the remaining vestiges of the notion that a well-educated populace is a good thing in itself.

But one of the other things that those who want fewer people to seek a degree are concerned about is the lack of what they call ‘graduate jobs’, which generally seems to be a euphemism for jobs which pay a higher salary, or graduate premium. There is an obvious conflict here: it is simply not rational to support the idea of there being a graduate premium whilst also demanding that other types of qualifications and learning should carry equal value. Having done a certain amount of graduate recruitment in the past myself for two different organisations, I’m not convinced that the requirement for a degree is, in many cases, much more than a filter mechanism enabling lazy employers to discard large numbers of otherwise suitable employees. There is, though, no real question that employers seeking only graduate recruits do find themselves obliged to reinforce the pretence by offering higher salaries.

Achieving real equality of value requires more than identifying which young people are more suited to a so-called ‘vocational’ route, providing the necessary places, and making airy statements about parity or equality. If I thought that Burnham was wanting to start a serious conversation about how we value and reward different occupations, his statement today would be very welcome. How do we determine the relative value of lawyers and nurses for example? Does the current difference in reward reflect that relative valuation or reverse it? I’m pretty certain, however, that that isn’t a can he proposes to open, and that what he’s talking about is more about persuading people to accept their station in life – and the level of reward which goes with that. His fine words are, in short, more spin than substance. Being better with words doesn’t change the underlying message.

Avoiding the real issue - again

Tweet

 

Last week, this blog referred to the question of a falling birth rate, and the alleged ‘problems’ it creates. The Sunday times (paywall) carried an article this week about a new report from a think tank calling itself the Centre for Social Justice on the same issue. The report itself, Baby Bust, is available here. The main factor on which it alights is that it is all the fault of immature men, who are entering the adult work force later and thus deferring parenthood for men and women alike. But it was the ‘solutions’ which caught my eye.

Leaving aside the socially conservative proposals about incentivising marriage and encouraging mothers (not fathers, note) to be stay-at-home child carers, moving to ‘household’ rather than individual taxation – all massive steps backwards, particularly for the status and role of women in society – it was their proposals for education which leapt out at me:

“Reduce the school leaving age and get most young people into the workplace as early as possible”, and

“In a similar vein, we should drastically reduce the numbers of 18-year-olds going to university.”

They didn’t suggest to what age the school leaving age should be reduced. I suspect that they don’t want to go back to sending 8 or 10 years olds down the mines (or aren’t prepared to say so), but it seems clear that they want to at least reverse the increase from 16 to 18. They also want to increase the retirement age to qualify for the state pension. My interpretation of it all was that their idea of ‘social justice’ seems to mean that working class boys, and women in general, should know their place and understand their station in life, as though the 1950s was some sort of golden age. It was a depressing read, and no surprise to find the foreword written by a Tory Shadow Minister.

But, to return to last week’s post, what it’s really all about is looking for a ‘solution’ to a ‘problem’ in a way which avoids the need to look at how the economy serves society, and above all at wealth distribution within society. ‘Social Justice’ which protects the wealthiest at the expense of the rest is an Orwellian use of language, to say the least.

Will Farage let me drive on the right if I want to?

Tweet

 

Whether the 20mph default speed limit in built-up areas is a good thing or a bad thing is obviously a matter of opinion, depending on whether we prioritise reducing casualties or convenience and speed. The statistics show that it has reduced the number and severity of casualties on the roads, although a thorough evaluation might need a few more years to assess whether it is really working as well as it appears to be. On the downside, experience suggests that it has led to an increase in aggressive driving and risky overtaking manoeuvres, especially by those vehicles whose drivers are exempt from the law. I can’t find a definitive definition of exempt categories in the legislation itself, but simple observation over the past year leads me to conclude that it includes taxis, white vans, and BMWs.

Farage told us last week that it is a ‘looney’ policy, and went on in a Q&A session to describe it as being an example of government telling people what is right for them, adding "It is typical of control, control, control". In essence, his view seems to be that it has nothing to do with safety, and that the Welsh Government have introduced it solely with the aim of controlling what people may or may not do. It’s a particularly silly argument – if it applies to the 20mph limit, then it also applies to the 30mph limit, or to any limit set at 40, 50, 60 or 70. All of them control what citizens can and can’t do. Come to that, why should the government control on which side of the road I should drive? All laws set limits on what we can and can’t do, they all ‘control’ us to a greater or lesser extent. The question is – or ought to be – about where we draw the line, and how we balance safety against speed of travel – or, more generally, personal advantage against collective advantage. ‘Not liking something’ is not enough to distinguish between an arbitrary control of behaviour and a sensible safety measure.

Reasoned debate is not, though, what Farage and his ilk want. Their aim is to appeal to people whose minds are already made up, and to strengthen those existing prejudices. Not that reasoned debate would ever help anyway. No-one who has not arrived at a particular view in the first place through a careful and rational study of the evidence is going to be persuaded to a different view by a careful and rational study of that same evidence. And that doesn’t only apply to the question of speed limits. Believing that evidence can and will shift an opinion which was never evidence-based to start with is a mistake which many of us make. Overcoming prejudice and a willingness to disregard mere facts is more of a long term project, which involves teaching critical thinking as a key element of education. There is a reason why Farageists and their fellow travellers are hostile to the idea of an educated populace.

Could we really do any worse?

Tweet

 

Leaving aside the colourful language with which the English Education Secretary expressed herself in an unguarded moment yesterday, what came through was a belief that parents should be extremely grateful to the current government for acting after previous governments had done nothing about the issue. If you assume, as the English constitution does, that a new Prime Minister equals a new government, and that a new government cannot be held responsible for the actions of its predecessors, then she almost has half a point. In the real universe, the one most of us inhabit, it’s rather more clear that the problem has been building up for years, and that successive Tory governments have cut back school building and refurbishment. At the moment it’s perceived as being primarily an English problem, but that is at least partly down to the fact that the English government has been slow and reluctant to share information about its findings. And when it comes to putting things right, we will come up against the fact that English spending on rectification works directly impacts the amount available in Wales, through the application of the Barnett formula. It’s hard to believe that similar construction methods weren’t used as widely in Wales as in England, and that there aren’t more problems waiting to be exposed.

That rectification will be costly, on which note Sunak wants us to be grateful, apparently, that he only cut the rate of building new or replacement schools down to 50 a year when he was Chancellor, a level in line with what had happened under the previous (also Tory) administration, and despite the fact that he was being told that the government needed to plan to replace at least 400 a year. Even that higher figure is inadequate to meet the need. England, we are told, has 22,000 schools: assuming that the planned lifetime of each school is 40 years, then 550 need to be replaced every year just to stand still. A replacement rate of 50 every year implies a planned average building lifetime of 440 years. In Wales, there are around 1470 schools; if the replacement rate were to match that in England (<0.25% per annum), there would be a similar requirement for buildings to last hundreds of years.

Whilst this might appear an entirely normal expectation to Wykehamists like Sunak (where some buildings date back to 14^th Century) or Old Etonians (some date back to 1440), it really isn’t applicable to the schools most children attend. There certainly are many buildings more than a century old (indeed, my old primary school was built in 1908 and is still in use) and, arguably, there is no great rush to replace them all on grounds of imminent collapse (although I still remember the incident in the late 1950s when the ceiling in one of our classrooms fell down – we had some time off while they assessed the rest). They were built to last. But whether schools designed and built in an era when children sat at individual desks in neat rows in strictly delineated classes are still entirely suitable for delivering the modern curriculum is a more complex question, to say nothing of the number of them which have some classes in demountable buildings installed as a ‘temporary’ measure decades ago. The problems which have emerged over the past week are largely in the (comparatively) newest schools, built from the 1960s on, which were deliberately built not to last that long in order to save on building costs at the time (and, although the problem identified is with the concrete, it would be a mistake to blithely assume that that was the only lifetime-limiting factor with the materials and methods used). The extent to which building cheaply to last just a few decades makes sense depends largely on whether there is a long term plan in place for eventual replacement. And there isn’t, and never has been. That isn’t just a Tory problem; governments of all colours have just assumed that the quoted lifespan was some sort of guaranteed minimum, rather than an accurate assessment, and made no plans for a rolling programme of rebuilding. It makes the economic projections for government expenditure look ‘better’ (i.e. lower), although it does somewhat divorce them from reality when this sort of need arises.

It’s not entirely unfair of the Welsh government to say that their ability to deal with the problem is constrained by London, although that’s not something which the perpetually and professionally angry leader of the Welsh Tories is ever likely to admit. They have, perhaps, been too ready to do nothing until England suddenly announced the problem, but there is little that they can do about the funding issue until England acts. And Hunt’s statement that they will do whatever it takes as long as it doesn’t cost any more tells us already that English action will be inadequate. Both questions (waiting for England to lead on identifying the problem, and depending on English decisions for funding) underline the issue at the heart of ‘devolution’; real power remains elsewhere. There is, of course, no guarantee than an independent Welsh government would have done any better (although it couldn’t have done much worse). But we in Wales wouldn’t be able to blame anyone else, and would have to take responsibility both for the problem and fixing it. That would surely be an improvement on where we are now.

Seeking fulfilment, not just work

Tweet

 

Wales’ Education Minister, Jeremy Miles, told a meeting of business professionals in Wrecsam yesterday that children should start learning about the world of work from the age of three. He also argued that children should be helped to get off the educational ‘conveyor belt’ which sees progression to a university place as the natural aspirational outcome for the education system and look instead at more technical and vocational qualifications. The latter is a common argument, advanced by Tory and Labour politicians alike; and the idea of early contact with the world of work is hardly a strange one either, although whether it should start as early as three is open to rather more question.

They are both arguments which leave me uneasy, however, because they both raise questions about the purpose of education. Both seem to start from the point of view that the aim of the education system is – and should be – the production of ‘employment-ready’ workers; people with the skills, aptitudes and attitudes required for them to fit into the roles which employers have to offer. There is a lack of any understanding of the potential value, both to the individuals themselves and to society as a whole, of education, learning and a wider skillset not necessarily immediately applicable to any particular job. And although they skate round the issue and prefer to avoid facing up to it, the idea that some children should be encouraged to follow a more ‘vocational’ pathway is, in practice, to argue that higher education should be reserved for the privileged. We have decades of knowledge which tells us that it effectively means (with a few exceptions which enable people to talk vaguely about ‘equality of opportunity’ and ‘social mobility’) separating middle class and working class children into two different educational pathways. They always claim that such a separation is based on ‘ability’, but that ability is assessed on the basis of an educational system which consistently allows children from more affluent households to progress further than the rest. It’s not that I disagree with the notion that a university education might not be the right route for everyone, or the notion that there should be more parity of esteem between a degree and other forms of qualification; it’s just that the economic inequalities of the society in which we live largely predetermine which children follow which route and end up preserving those very inequalities as a result.

It would be far better to start encouraging children from an early age to think about what a fulfilling life might look like. For some – particularly the middle class children who enter the well-paid professions – their future employment might be a large part of that, but for many, work will be a necessary but largely unfulfilling part of their future life. Giving children the means and the skills to seek their fulfilment outside of their working life would be doing more for them than turning them into mere ‘resources’ for employers to exploit. It would also make for a more balanced society; not every worthwhile human activity has an economic value. There is, though, one other thing it would probably also do, which is why supporters of the current economic system – Labour and Tory alike – will shy away from it: it would lead people to question the whole basis of an economic system which sees children as young as three primarily as future workers whose role is to serve the system. Not all of us would see that questioning as a bad thing.

Proof of the theorem?

Tweet

 

In relaunching his mathematics strategy yesterday, having done little or nothing about implementing it since the last time he launched it (anyone else see a pattern emerging there?), the Prime Minister claimed that the UK economy is losing “tens of billions” of pounds a year due to functional innumeracy. The first question which sprung into my mind was that often voiced by my old maths teacher, “show me your workings”. That thought was closely followed by memories of the same teacher's strictures about applying the ‘reasonableness test’ – if an answer looks or feels wrong, it probably is.

If we take “tens of billions” to mean £20 billion – the lowest possible mathematical interpretation of the number – and compare it to the UK’s total GDP of £3.1 trillion, it implies that the UK is losing just over 0.6% of GDP every year, purely (according to Sunak) as a result of the fact that children are only taught mathematics until they are 16 rather than 18. According to the government’s own figures, that’s equivalent to between 7 and 8 trade deals with Australia. In ten years’ time. ‘Show me your workings’ is an apt response.

I don’t doubt that there is an economic cost to innumeracy (although a substantial part of that cost may well be the result of having a surfeit of innumerate politicians who pluck arbitrary figures out of the air), but attributing that to the fact that most pupils are not taught any maths after the age of 16 looks like a non-sequitur to me. As someone with three maths A levels to my name (I’ve always liked numbers and what they can tell me), I can honestly say that I don’t think that much of what I learned in the field after reaching 16 has been of much practical use to me in life, no matter how interesting I found it at the time. It seems far more likely to me that the problem of functional innumeracy lies not in the age to which maths is taught in schools, but in the extent to which what is learnt matches what is being taught. That is to say, at its simplest, that maths teaching up to the age of 16 is far from universally effective, and that putting that right would be a better use of any additional resources which can be made available. That isn’t a criticism of teachers as such – we know that there is a huge shortage of specialist teachers of the subject, and has been for a long time. It’s just that assuming that lessons delivered = lessons learned, especially when they are delivered by non-specialist teachers, is an invalid premise. And if they can’t deliver the resources and the processes to get the basics right, the chances of a successful outcome to Sunak’s latest half-baked proposal are close to zero, a statement which can be confidently made even without having enough data to calculate a precise probability.

There is an old adage which claims that 97.8% of all politicians’ statistics are made up on the spot (although estimates of the precise percentage vary), and in this case Sunak’s numbers appear to provide proof of that theorem. It's not exactly a first for him.

Legislating for Welsh

Tweet

 

When I was a small child in primary school, we had an occasional lesson in Welsh. Our usual class teacher would leave the room, and a Welsh-speaking teacher would take over the class for a period. He usually proceeded to read us a story. In English. Somewhere, a box was duly ticked, and a class of monoglot English speakers had officially had their exposure to the language. My first real educational contact with the language didn’t happen until I went on to the grammar school. Welsh was compulsory for the first year, after which we were given a choice of continuing with Welsh or learning German. And it was fairly obvious that the teachers (with the exception of the Welsh teachers) thought that German was preferable. Prevailing attitudes at the time. It might be down to my long-term rebelliousness that I chose Welsh anyway. I eventually emerged with an average (grade 3 in old money) ‘O’ level pass, but unable to use the language in any meaningful way. Much like the French that I also learned.

The teaching of Welsh in English-medium schools has improved immeasurably since those days, although I have a sneaky suspicion that lurking behind the statistics and the boxes ticked the actual situation on the ground may not be quite as the official reports suggest. And we know for certain that Welsh lessons in English-medium schools, even though compulsory until the age of 16, are not generally turning out citizens who can use the language. The odd individual who does manage it – and I’ve known a few – is very much the exception, and those exceptions result more from personal determination and motivation than from simply attending lessons. If the objective is to build the number of Welsh speakers, the one thing that we know does work is Welsh-medium education (although there are still some serious questions about the way in which so many seem to ‘lose’ their Welsh after leaving school).

There are many things that the Welsh government need to do if they are serious about reaching the target of 1 million speakers by 2050, but given that adults find it harder to learn a new language – any language – than children, education is always going to be the most important; and it is Welsh-medium education that works best. The call by Cymdeithas yr Iaith and others for the government to ensure that all children are educated through the medium of Welsh highlights the one policy that could really make a difference, although it’s neither a simple nor a short term response. Getting non-Welsh speaking teachers to the point at which they can confidently and fluently teach their subjects through the medium of a second language, which they themselves have learned as an adult, is a massive undertaking. And getting there involves a great deal more than simply legislating for the outcome.

The negative response to the idea by the First Minister is disappointing, of course; but I can’t help feeling that there is some merit in the points he makes. It is far too easy for those of us committed to the cause of the language to believe that legislation will do the job, and I suspect that Drakeford is actually right to fear that trying to simply impose such a solution, even in the form of a decades-away target, will create something of a backlash (even if it were politically possible for any leader of Welsh Labour to suggest such a thing and carry his or her party with him or her). It would be a lot easier to suggest such an approach if we’d already achieved the first million and were looking to get to the second, but that’s a bit of a ‘chicken-and-egg’ argument. Such legislation is not a bad idea per se; but it looks premature, and had Drakeford found a way of expressing that, I’d have a lot more confidence that he was convinced about his own government’s aim.

The growth in Welsh-medium education has been a success story over the past 60 years, but it’s a growth which has largely been demand-led, fought for by determined campaigners, with authorities (usually, but not exclusively, Labour controlled) dragging their feet and being slow to respond to that demand. There are many children who have already missed out on the opportunity due to a lack of availability in their areas, and there is little doubt that there are children today being educated through the medium of English who would have been educated through the medium of Welsh had convenient provision been available. Speeding up the process of making that provision, training the educators, and getting to the point where future growth is more supply-led (Welsh-medium education is one of the few things where ‘build it and they will come’ actually seems to be a viable approach) than demand-led (with a requirement for comprehensive ‘proof’ of that demand before a new school is even planned) are entirely within the control of the Welsh government, and they are simply not doing as much as they could. The time for legislation will surely come in due course, but in the meantime there is a danger that premature demands for legislation that Drakeford can’t and won’t deliver diverts attention from those things which he can and should deliver. And on which he is failing.

What's the difference between the Tories and the Taliban?

Tweet

 

It’s neither the start of a joke, nor a trick question. And the answer, in the specific case of education, is ‘not a lot’. The Taliban select on the basis of gender: they effectively exclude all girls from education, since girls have no role in the economic or social life of the country, and need to know their place. The Tories want to select at age 11 on the basis of parental income*, providing the children of the wealthiest 20% with a better education than the rest, who need to know their place in society. It’s a difference of detail rather than of kind. Both see education as a means of serving the interests of their god rather than those of the children – in the case of the Taliban, that’s Allah, whilst for the Tories it’s Mammon, as in the case of Sunak’s proposal to ban any education which does not confer a significant earnings advantage on the student.

Neither sees, nor is capable of seeing, any advantage in having an educated populace (indeed, it’s something that both fear, probably with good reason), and both are utterly incredulous at the idea that education should ever be about providing fulfilment for individuals. For the Tories, the idea that there are social advantages in having well-educated people (for example, to serve in a volunteer capacity in their communities) rather than using their education purely for selfish personal gain is something that they not only can’t begin to understand, but that they see as a positive threat. Better education has, from the perspective of the Tories and the Taliban alike, an unfortunate tendency to lead people to ask more difficult questions.

The final, and most depressing, similarity is the degree to which they have managed to convince so many people to agree with them. It wasn’t just their weaponry which gained the Taliban control of Afghanistan; the populace (well, the men at least) largely welcomed them back. And the Tories aren't imposing their will on a reluctant population – people actually voted for them, in large numbers. Just as many rejoiced at having their freedom of movement curtailed, so they also rejoice at having the educational opportunities of their children constrained.

Afghanistan under the Taliban is a failed state; the UK under the Tories is rapidly becoming another. In both cases, restricting educational opportunities is just one specific example of how and why. Time to head for the exit.

*Yes, I know that they actually want to select on the basis of tests and exams, but we have at least 60 years of research which tells us that parental income is an extremely good predictor of success in those exams. And the few exceptions who sneak through merely serve to put a veneer of meritocracy on what is in essence a system designed to maintain the privilege which comes with wealth.

Maintaining privilege is what the Tories are all about

Tweet

 

In answer to a question at the Tory hustings yesterday, Sunak seems to have committed himself to a wholescale reintroduction of selection at the age of 11 and the opening of more grammar schools. Strictly speaking, his comments only apply to England, although I’m not sure that he fully realises that and, given the increasing disregard for the boundaries set by devolution, I wouldn’t be so sure that it wouldn’t end up applying here too. His argument, though, was specious at best, and even that’s giving him considerable benefit of the doubt. He said that “… education is the most powerful way we can transform people’s lives”. It’s a point with which many us would agree, but dividing children into sheep and goats on the basis of alleged academic ability at the age of 11 means that it’s a benefit which he plans to bestow on only a proportion of the country’s children.

One thing which all the research into selective education tells us is that separating children into two categories in this way has the entirely predictable effect of also separating them by parental income. The more comfortably off the parents, the more likely it is that their children will end up in a grammar school and vice versa. It’s not a 100% match, of course – as a council house kid who went to a grammar school in the days before selection was abolished, I know that from personal experience. But there is a high degree of correlation between parental affluence and success in the selection process, and the general result of selection is that more investment is made in the education of some children than others, setting out their respective life paths at the age of 11. The lives being transformed under Sunak’s vision are overwhelmingly the lives of the better off – who just happen to be the children (or more likely grandchildren, given Tory demographics) of the Tory party members to whose prejudices he is currently seeking to appeal.

That’s not to argue that comprehensive education has been an unqualified success – it has not. There are still ‘good’ schools and ‘bad’ schools based on academic results, although that may be as much to do with catchment areas as quality of education. Catchment areas are far from being equal in terms of socio-economic status. The solution to that, however, is not to entrench those differences in the structure of the system but to address the underlying causes. Far too much of what our politicians try to do on this is based primarily on trying to address the symptoms – how to help those from poorer backgrounds catch up with their more affluent peers. It’s a sticking plaster approach when what we really need is to address the underlying social and economic inequalities. It’s unrealistic to expect the Tories to come up with any sort of plan to do that; they are always going to be happier securing and enhancing their own privileges. What’s more depressing is the lack of clear alternatives from opposition parties on the issue. It allows the Tories to set the parameters of the debate, and, as Sunak’s comments show, they are not afraid of moving things further in the direction of privilege. One clear benefit arising from the Tory leadership debates is that they are openly demonstrating the extent to which they are the party of the better-off and the privileged, a fact which Johnson’s practiced mendacity managed to obscure in 2019.

Following England on education would be a mistake

Tweet

 

The changes to university policy in England which are, apparently, due to be announced today are little short of an open attack on the idea that a university education should be equally available to all. Extending the period for repayment of student loans from 30 years to 40 will leave students in debt from the time they graduate almost to the point at which they retire, and it is an absolute nonsense to pretend that that won’t have a disproportionate effect on the less well-off. And given the long-known link between family income and educational attainment, the proposal to increase the minimum level of educational attainment to gain entry to university in the first place will also exclude poorer rather than richer people. Coupled with proposals to cap the number of places in English universities, the overall thrust is to return university education to what it was decades ago when I was young – the preserve of the middle and upper classes.

Of course, some would argue that there’s nothing wrong with setting a minimal level of educational attainment for university entry, and adding a minimum requirement for a GCSE in English (in England) and Maths sounds almost reasonable. It is, though, asking the wrong question and blaming the wrong people, and it’s based on ideology more than anything else. If English students are getting into university without a basic command of English and Maths, the question we should be asking is not ‘why are those individuals failing to achieve?’ so much as ‘what is wrong with an educational system which sees pupils leaving school without such basic skills?’ It is ideology which blames the individuals and seeks to exclude them, as though the failure is entirely down to them, rather than looking at how an educational system is failing individuals so badly.

I hope, and believe, that there is a more enlightened view in Cardiff, and that Wales will not follow suit. It will be difficult, though, for a devolved administration whose funding is set in London by comparison with England, to continue with current policies if their funding is reduced. There is also a danger that English students – excluded from England’s universities by the new regime – will seek to fill a greater proportion of the places available in Welsh universities. Reluctant as I would be to start imposing restrictions on the right of students to study where they wish, the Welsh Government needs to be ready to protect the interests of Welsh students if that appears likely to happen. England turning a university education into the privilege of an elite should not lead to Wales doing the same. It’s yet another example of the need for independence to set our own direction.

Envisaging an alternative

Tweet

 

There is a spoof newsflash doing the rounds on social media, which claims that Priti Patel is setting up a taskforce to deport any EU lorry drivers who happen to be enticed by the option of temporary work in the UK on 24 December, when they will, according to the government, no longer be required. It’s almost credible; there does seem to be an attitude in government that the problem is not going to be attracting lorry drivers in permanent jobs to come to the UK for lower wages, worse conditions and a very temporary contract, but getting rid of them afterwards. I suppose that, for those who ‘know’ that the UK is the best place in the world, and that everyone everywhere else is desperate to come here, it is ‘obvious’ that getting them to go home on 24 December is far and away the biggest problem. The newsflash is a spoof, but that underlying attitude is very much in evidence, and the inability to understand why this amazing offer from the UK government really is not too good to refuse is the main reason why the scheme seems doomed to fail. And even if it were true, as they seem to believe, that EU lorry drivers will be queuing up (presumably not the ones who remember being on a certain disused runway in Kent last Christmas Eve) to come to the UK and take up the jobs, 5,000 for two months seems unlikely to make much of a dent in a longer term structural shortage of 100,000.

But that underlying attitude of the current government can also be generalised. Many of their policies clearly start from the assumption that ‘workers’ exist solely to meet the needs of ‘the economy’, where ‘the economy’ is a neutral-sounding term which is actually a euphemism for the interests of capital and those who control it. In policy terms, it means that the education system exists only to supply workers with the skills needed by ‘the economy’; the government response to a pandemic is governed first and foremost by a need to protect ‘the economy’ rather than people’s lives; people on benefits are expected to take whatever jobs exist, wherever they may be and regardless of personal preferences or find themselves without any means of support; and foreigners are expected to come here as and when required to fill any gaps and then depart promptly when no longer required. It is a world view which sees people as ‘resources’ and values them solely in terms of their economic usefulness rather than individuals with needs of their own, and which sees government as a means of facilitating that. It is a deeply ideological mindset, based around serving the interests of the few rather than the many.

It’s not the only possible view of the world, though. Imagine an alternative which sees ‘the economy’ as existing to meet the needs of people, education as a means of allowing people to seek knowledge and personal fulfilment, and government as a means of managing the economy towards those ends. The success of capitalist ideology is that so few seem able to envisage that alternative – even the official party of opposition. Much of what has come out of the Labour Party’s conference this week is about trying to put a very slightly kinder edge on the application of the ideology rather than offering any sort of alternative to it. But the truth is that the economic system under which we live is a human construct which doesn’t have to operate as it does. Humans built it, humans control it, and humans can change it. Just not the humans currently in control.

A level grades are a blunt instrument

Tweet

 

The report last week that the UK Government is being ‘forced’ to fund more places in English universities to train doctors and dentists as a result of ‘grade inflation’ raises more questions than it answers. At a simplistic level, the problem is easily understood – if pupils get higher grades at A level than would have been the case had they sat exams, then more people will meet the grade-based criteria for entry onto the courses. But if those people are suitable to become doctors and dentists under one system, what is it about sitting exams which would somehow have made them unsuitable? If Pupil X gets an A* when assessed by his or her teachers but ‘only’ a B in an exam, why is the same pupil, with the same knowledge and abilities, doctor material in the first case but not in the second? How do we ‘know’ that pupils with an A* grade obtained in an examination can go on to be successful doctors and dentists, whilst those with a B cannot?

Using grades obtained by an adolescent in his or her last year at school as an absolute determinant of his or her future career prospects seems almost designed to waste a lot of potential talent. Clearly, the grades obtained by pupils at A level tell us something about how much work and effort those pupils have expended, how much knowledge they have accumulated, and how likely they are to apply themselves to their work at university, but they aren’t – and can’t be – as definitive as the way in which they seem to be being used. Exams are in some ways a blunt instrument; they are not an assessment method which suits all, and the circumstances in which a pupil finds him or herself on one particular day may not be representative of that pupil’s general character and approach. And although all of us want those providing our medical care to have the necessary knowledge and expertise, it’s not at all clear that the precise grade obtained in A level Biology is a particularly good indicator of that.

We know that there is a shortage of doctors and dentists in the UK, and that the UK is simply not training enough to meet our needs. We also know that this is a problem which cannot be resolved quickly, given the length of time it takes to train people. But neither is it a recent problem: it is a long-running problem under successive governments, whether Tory or Labour, which share an ideological commitment to competition and markets. What this so-called ‘grade inflation’ underlines is that that shortage is not a result of a lack of people wanting to become doctors and dentists, nor is it a question of their suitability for the role. It is the result of decisions by successive governments to limit the number of places, largely on financial grounds. They have made a deliberate choice to train fewer than we need and recruit people trained outside the UK instead, in the process not only rejecting many of those who want to follow careers as doctors and dentists and have the ability to do so, but also depriving other countries of the benefits of their own investment in training. Any government which was serious about providing proper health care for its citizens would start by looking at how many people it needs to train to provide that care and then provide enough places to meet that need, rather than setting a financially-driven cap on the number of places and filling those places through market-style competition. It is yet another example of a government decision driven by ideology rather than need.

As good as it gets

Tweet

 

The English Education Secretary came under attack from almost all sides yesterday, with some of the kinder descriptions including words like incompetent, ineffectual, careless, tribal, and inept. Number 10 leapt to his defence claiming that the PM had full confidence in him (although if he were a football team manager, that would normally be the prelude to an imminent departure). In a rare moment of honesty, the PM’s Press Secretary declared that Williamson is doing the job “to his utmost ability” apparently not realising that that is not so much a strong defence as an entirely accurate statement of the problem. It’s an analysis which could be extended – the whole cabinet, including the PM himself, are doing their jobs to the utmost of their ability. This really is as good as it gets from a Johnson government.

Hoping for the best isn't good enough

Tweet

 

There was a time when a political leader who declared one thing to be true at breakfast time and then said the opposite by tea-time was the preserve of dystopian novels, but in Johnsonian Britain it’s the new normal. And despite him having done the same thing several times already, his loyal sycophants are still gullible enough to defend his first position all morning and afternoon before defending the second all evening. They seem incapable of even realising that they’re being played. The latest iteration of this was on Monday over schools in England, when they were mostly required to open on Monday (having been threatened with legal action just a fortnight earlier if they did not do so), only to be told at the end of the day that they would then be required to shut for at least a month.

In justifying his pivot, he repeated his claim that schools are basically safe, because children are unlikely to suffer serious illness as a result of catching the virus but added what was apparently, to him at least, an entirely new factor – namely that spreading the virus amongst children, even if they showed suffered few or no symptoms, risked transmitting it to their families. Who’d have thought it? Apart, that is, from the scientific community who’d been warning him of this for weeks, and anyone who is able to apply very simple logic to the way in which the autumn uptick in cases began shortly after the September return to schools. In fairness, neither of those categories can reasonably be applied to Johnson, and expecting him to read or understand briefing papers which are not in Latin or Greek and do not heap unmitigated praise upon him is wholly unrealistic.

The question to be asked is not whether schools are ‘safe’ for learners and teachers, it is whether keeping schools open threatens the safety of the wider community. The problem is not the risk to children, which is low (although not zero) or even to teachers which is also low (albeit higher than the risk to children): it is that mixing infectious but asymptomatic children with other children can – and clearly does – spread the virus from one family to another outside the school setting. And, despite the PM’s posturing, the obvious didn’t only become so at lunch time on Monday.

It isn’t only the English Government which labours under a rather narrow definition of what is involved in making schools safe, however. Yesterday, both of Wales’ main opposition parties (Plaid and the Tories), called for the Welsh government to give priority to teachers for vaccination in order to reopen schools quickly. But if the problem is the way in which the virus spreads amongst the children, vaccinating the teachers is never going to be the solution. That’s not to argue that teachers shouldn’t be given priority – if we, as a society, expect people to continue working in a potentially hazardous environment, then it is reasonable to give them as much protection as possible. It’s simply that doing that doesn’t solve the real problem. (And whilst it’s easy enough to call for added priority for one group, it’s a lot harder to decide which group should be deprioritised as a result, despite that being the inevitable consequence of limited availability. No surprise that neither party seemed to be in any rush to go near that one.)

Given the need to be seen to be offering something, it’s understandable why politicians would seize on that which is (comparatively) easy to do, not least because addressing the real problem is far from being straightforward. If we knew that vaccinating people stopped transmission and infection as well as minimising the effects of infection, then vaccinating pupils as well as teachers would be a good starting point. But there is, as yet, no evidence to support that proposition – which means that we could vaccinate every child and every teacher in every school and have no impact whatsoever on transmission within schools. That leaves only two currently viable options. The first is to keep schools closed for as long as is necessary to ensure that the virus is at least as controlled as it was following the first lockdown (and then repeating the process as and when necessary), and the second is to assume that this is going to be a long haul and invest time, effort, and money in setting up alternative approaches to educating children, approaches which it is already clear would be required for at least a year, and possibly longer. The politicians currently in power – in Cardiff as in London – seem to be showing no appetite for either of those approaches, with all effort going instead into finding ways of returning schools to something near normal as soon as possible.

It might, to the extent that we are prepared to give people the benefit of any doubt, be forgivable that an assumption was made after the first lockdown that the situation was under control and education could be resumed in September. But there is no excuse for the time lost since the virus started to take hold again in September for the lack of planning and preparation for an extended period of school closures. And there is even less excuse for the time still being lost today as the politicians continue to seek a quick fix instead of looking for longer term alternatives. “Learning online” is a major part of the answer, but in itself is oversimplistic, since it ignores the lack of equity of access let alone facilities in the home. Jeremy Corbyn’s widely mocked election policy of superfast broadband connections for all looks even more sensible now than it did to some of us at the time, but it cannot be delivered in days or weeks and we also need equipment and facilities in the home. And how do we ensure direct interaction between teachers and pupils? Should teachers give more of their time in smaller groups to the most disadvantaged, rather than simply teaching online groups of 30 or sending out work packs? None of these are easy questions, and it would be naïve to expect instant answers. But the longer we go without asking the questions, the more we are effectively depending on a vague hope that things are going to improve as if by magic. That may be a fair summary of Johnson’s approach for England, but it should not be the approach in Wales. We can and should do better than that.

Missed opportunity

Tweet

 

In what looks like only a minor variation on the customary song that Wales should use its devolved power any way it wishes as long as it does the same as England, the Secretary of State has been complaining that the Welsh government has axed next year’s school examinations. Apparently, he sees some sort of strange equivalence between a devolved body acting entirely within its own powers on an issue which has been completely devolved, and a UK government which ignores the devolution boundaries, in the sense that both, in his view, should be subject to what he euphemistically calls ‘consultation’. It’s another illustration, not that one were needed, of the fundamental problem with ‘devolution’: it doesn’t recognise Welsh sovereignty as being anything other than a temporary loan of power from London.

Whether the actual decision of the Welsh government is the right one or not is another question, and is a legitimate subject for debate, even if it’s a debate in which the Secretary of State has no legitimate role. The problem is that it’s an issue clouded by ideology and prejudice rather than one led by facts and evidence; the question of whether exams are the ‘right’ way to assess pupils seems to be highly correlated with political outlook. There’s no doubt that some children are well-served by an examination process, but neither is there any doubt that others are not – for a variety of reasons, exam performance doesn’t always reflect the progress and ability seen by teachers in classrooms. On the other hand, there is more scope for teacher assessments to contain a subjective element in their assessment of pupils, no matter how hard they strive to avoid that. There is no perfect system.

In the limited circumstances of the pandemic, it is probably better to do as the Welsh government have done and take the decision early, thus giving themselves plenty of time to think through a proper and robust alternative assessment process rather than the chaos we saw last year, and it’s probably reasonable to assume that the approach of the Westminster government of leaving things until the last minute to decide will lead to more chaos in England again next year, unless they get lucky in controlling the virus. (And lucky is the right word, given the obvious lack of any planned approach to anything.) The problem remains, though, that this still looks like a one-off decision to deal with a particular anticipated situation next year, rather than an opportunity for a thorough review to determine what Wales needs from a system of pupil assessment and how such a system can be made fairer for all. It’s in danger of being an opportunity missed.

Will they be coming for the socialists next?

Tweet

 

The guidance for schools which the UK government published last week applies only to England, but that doesn’t mean that it should be of no concern to us here in Wales. Whilst the specific issue (relating to the curriculum) is a devolved matter, the current government has amply demonstrated recently that it is no respecter of such boundaries; but the even bigger concern for us should be that the attitude behind their move leaks across into other areas of policy and legislation. The inclusion of the word ‘capitalism’ when they label any “… publicly stated desire to abolish or overthrow democracy, capitalism, or to end free and fair elections” as an ‘extreme political stance’ is another dangerous step towards authoritarianism. It is hard to see how any teaching of modern history, politics, or economics can exclude any mention of any alternatives to the capitalist economic model; the desire to produce students who only know about one particular ideology, and one particular type of economy, is the sort of thing we generally associate with states such as North Korea rather than a European democracy. Arguing, in the same paragraph, for the protection of free speech is also the sort of nonsense we would expect from such a regime; what they mean is that we have the freedom to say whatever we are permitted to say, a rather limited definition of the word ‘freedom’.

It’s a short step from labelling anticapitalism as an extreme view to banning those arguing for an alternative to capitalism from participating in debate or political activity. It’s another short step from banning mention of alternatives in schools to banning it in universities, or to devising programmes such as Prevent to ‘re-educate’ those who do not conform. We have already seen attempts to label supporters of Extinction Rebellion as terrorists; it’s all too easy to see how socialists might be added to the list. It is increasingly clear that those at the heart of the current government have a strong authoritarian streak, view the masses as people to be instructed and controlled rather than citizens, and want to impose their view of the world on society as a whole. One of the lessons of history is that freedoms do not usually disappear all at once, and authoritarianism doesn’t appear overnight – both things happen in a series of small steps; by the time people realise where that series of small steps has taken them, it’s already become a big leap and is too late to reverse. I’m not sure that the current PM knows or understands any of this – he seems to be ideology-free, have no patience with or interest in the details, and be a generally lazy and incompetent individual whose core belief revolves around only himself and his desire to be PM. He’s little more than a bumbling and occasionally funny (although that’s wearing very thin) front man for the real ideologues, not all of them holding elected office. But being a willing tool just makes him more, rather than less, dangerous.

Escalating incompetence doesn't make it go away.

Tweet

There is only one thing that surprises me about the suggestion that teachers and parents in England have lost confidence in the Education Secretary, Gavin Williamson, and that is the implicit presumption that they ever had any in the first place. I suffer from the rather old-fashioned prejudice that it’s impossible for anyone to lose anything that they didn’t first possess. What’s much more surprising than the lack of confidence in Williamson is the government’s proposed solution, which is that Boris Johnson should “…take the reins alongside Williamson…”. I cannot conceive of any rational conversation which concluded that the way to deal with the proven incompetence of the Education Secretary is to keep him in post and let another proven incompetent take the decisions for him. Apparently, according to a ‘source’ at Number 10, “There is barely an issue [the PM] has been more personally associated with…”. The implication that he has been less personally involved with other minor issues such as a pandemic and Brexit might tell us rather more than the ‘source’ intended. But anyone who concludes that the answer to a government foul-up is Boris Johnson should surely be wondering whether they’re asking the right question.

Locking disadvantage into the system

Tweet

Last week’s ‘A’ Level results fiasco reminded me of my own experience of ‘O’ Level results back in 1967. Shortly after we got the results, my French teacher stood in front of the whole class and said that she really didn’t understand how I’d managed to get a grade 3 in French whilst a fellow pupil (whom she also named) only got a grade 6 pass. “I’d have understood it better if the results had been the other way round”, she told us. Being charitable, she was probably trying to boost the confidence of my disappointed peer (and it may well have been fair comment anyway!) but my gratitude for her faith in my ability wasn’t exactly unbounded. Perhaps my fellow student had a bad day and I had a good one; perhaps the questions on the day were simply a better match for what I’d remembered than what he’d remembered; perhaps I was just better at sitting exams – I’ll never know how it happened, only that had my grade been based on teacher assessment rather than examination it would have been lower. (And, had that been repeated in other subjects, life could have turned out very differently.) The point is that teacher assessment is no more perfect a method of assessing ability in a subject than an examination. Both can create anomalies and the two methods will always produce different results for at least some of the pupils. Which result is the fairest is an open question, and our faith in the reliability and accuracy of the system as it impacts individuals is seriously misplaced even in a normal year.

We know for certain that examination performance varies between schools, and if results based on teacher assessment reduce or eliminate those differences, then they are not reflecting accurately what would have happened had the exams been held. (I should note, in passing, the implicit assumption in that statement that the exam results are the accurate ones, itself an assumption open to serious question.) That, in effect, is the justification for making ‘adjustments’ to teacher assessments. They are an attempt to reflect historic differences in performance between schools and, in fairness, they may well have more-or-less achieved that at an overall level. But, by being based on a statistical approach, we can be absolutely certain that the individual pupils whose scores were thus ‘adjusted’ from teacher assessments would not always be the same pupils whose scores would have differed from those same assessments had the exams been held. Reducing it to a mathematical exercise might produce the ‘right’ averages, but it can never produce the ‘right’ results for individuals. It’s an approach which is fundamentally flawed.

We also know the main reason that some schools regularly see lower results on average: they serve poorer communities. We have known for decades that there is a very strong correlation between academic performance as measured by examinations on the one hand and parental income on the other, and none of the actions taken to try and address that have been particularly successful. (I suspect that is primarily because they all set out to address the symptoms rather than the cause in an attempt at some sort of short-term fix, but that’s a subject for another time.) That difference in performance may be well-known and well-established but it isn’t, and never has been, fair. There is something particularly grotesque about a Labour government here in Wales trying to ensure that historical disadvantage based on relative affluence is properly reflected in this year’s results. They are effectively locking in that household income based disadvantage for another whole cohort of young people based on historical results for the schools they attend without the individual members of that cohort having even the limited opportunity to buck the trend which the examination system provides, and from which at least some would have benefited had the exams gone ahead.

There is no perfect solution to this year’s issues (and even less is there an easy fix for the real underlying long-term problem), but applying an algorithm specifically designed to perpetuate the injustices of the past is about the worst solution which anyone could devise. The (eventual and belated) Scottish decision to simply accept the teacher assessments isn’t a perfect one either (the idea that hundreds of teachers in hundreds of schools could ever be grading students precisely and consistently is laughable), but, coupled with a robust appeals process, it’s probably the least worst option in the circumstances. I really don’t understand why ‘Welsh’ Labour prefers to follow an only slightly adapted version of the approach of the English Tories instead.

Whose history?

Tweet

A while ago, in the wake of the release of the film “Darkest Hour", there was something of a debate about the nature of the leading character portrayed by the film.  Was Churchill a great wartime leader whose resolve and stirring rhetoric motivated people throughout the empire (and it was the British Empire which went to war with Germany, not the United Kingdom) to fight and win, or was he a white supremacist, a vile racist who believed other races to be inferior, and a war criminal prepared to order killing on a horrific scale in order to achieve victory?  In truth, he was all of those things; but there’s also a sense in which he was none of them, in that none of them alone paint a rounded and complete picture of a complex character.  Yet both sides in the debate demand that the other accept their assessment, that he be considered an out-and-out goodie or an out-and-out baddie.  The fact that, within the UK at least, prevailing culture regards him as a hero owes more to the fact that history is written by the victors than to a balanced assessment.  

From Churchill’s viewpoint, the Empire was unquestionably a ‘good’ thing; he came from an age in which ‘civilising the natives’ (even if they would, nevertheless, always be inferior) was part of the beneficence of European rule.  It’s an attitude which is mirrored by one of the candidates for the Tory leadership – in 2002, writing in the Spectator, Boris Johnson said of Africa, “The continent may be a blot, but it is not a blot upon our conscience. The problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge anymore.”  There are others who would argue that such attitudes are based on a very superficial understanding of what the Empire was about and what it did, and that understanding could be improved if a more balanced view of history were taught in schools in the UK.  In truth, the problem isn’t so much that pupils don’t learn anything about the history of the Empire, it’s more that they learn a very superficial version of that history which largely glosses over the negatives.  Again, the history we think that we ‘know’ is based on that written by the victors; changing that ‘knowledge’ is a long slow process.

The question raised by that article – about changing the history which is taught in schools – brings me to the point raised in the Assembly recently by a Plaid AM in relation to the teaching of Welsh history.  Whilst I entirely agree that pupils should learn more about the history of Wales, the real issue is about which version they learn.  To take one example: is the history of Wales over the last few centuries the story of a nation valiantly clinging to and promoting its own unique identity and language in the face of the overwhelming dominance of our neighbour, or is it the story of a nation being slowly but surely subsumed and assimilated into a greater whole?  The ‘facts’ and ‘events’ are the same, but what matters is the selection, interpretation, and emphasis placed on those facts and events.  There is no such thing as ‘objective’ history, and little point teaching students dates and facts without also teaching them how to interpret and understand those dates and facts.  (For what it’s worth, my answer to the question I asked above is similar to that attributed to Zhou Enlai in relation to the French Revolution – “It’s too soon to say”.)

I’m reasonably certain that the version of history that I’d like to see taught would be very similar to that which Siân Gwenllian wants to see taught, so I don’t disagree with the point which she is making.  Bearing in mind, though, that history is always written from the point of view of the victors, I wonder whether demanding that the version written from the point of view of the ‘losers’ be taught instead isn’t putting the cart before the horse.  The state – any state – always wants its citizens to know the version of history which most promotes the unity and continuation of that state.  There’s an element of chicken-and-egg, (or perhaps interdependency) here – changing the ‘official’ version of history depends on first creating or controlling the necessary elements of the nascent Welsh state; but one of the factors involved in creating a full Welsh state is giving people a better understanding (or, rather, a different understanding) of their own history.  Of the two, I tend to suspect that making a different version of history the ‘official’ one will follow, rather then precede, the political change.  After all, it’s the winners who decide what history is.