“It all hangs on one day”

One of my soon-to-be-ex-students remarked recently how fragile results are, all hanging on the outcome of one day. At one level he’s right: a few clicks to your results page, and it’s done.

But it struck me that this year I wanted to tell that story, the stuff I’m in the thick of now, the narrative that leads to results day. It’s much the same story in many Universities, and I’ve talked about this before, although without so much of the step-by-step story.

“When first the college rolls receive his name…” Well, it’s not quite like that – but there is a problem as to where we begin. The tutor deciding the assessment? The Programme Development team determining the learning outcomes? We’ll start in the library, and since this is a Brookes-based narrative, that means here (a bit arbitrarily). The student is working on an assignment, the last of the umpteen assessment points in his degree. It is week eight of a twelve-week semester, because he is a virtuous and well organised person. Whether or not that is the case, let’s make this a no-hiccups process: hand-in deadlines come and are met.

And then the marker, often the tutor, starts. There are twenty, thirty, sixty similar scripts to mark, decide on, comment on. A sample is checked – moderated – by another tutor, to make sure the team’s standards are being upheld. Marks are uploaded into the massive database of marks, according to a centrally determined deadline. The wheels in the computer crunch and click (yes I know there aren’t really wheels in a computer, and to call this huge set of processes a “computer” is a bit silly) the marks, not just to record them, but to check them against the course regulations. Administrators check, double-check, produce reports, communications with wayward tutors, and the next stage – here at Brookes at any rate – is a set of decisions to be made by course leaders and managers: do we know why Student B has no marks for this module? Should Student C be asked about this or that? Decisions are made by real people, ones in general who are conscious of the delicacy of this or that letter being sent to to this or that student.

Then the Examination Committees convene. Tutors from other Universities have been recruited as External Examiners to look at standards, at decisions, at processes to ensure good order, compliance, fairness. The meeting processes all the marks it needs, and all the degree classifications, and this is fed back into the University central systems as if they were a cross between a refecting rabbit and Deep Thought from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. More rushing for paperwork follows, more checking. This part of the cycle ends here at Brookes with a meeting of all the Programme Leads with more External Examiners, a Vice-Chancellor (or similar), and lots of central administrators, ironing out any difficulties, checking any serious cases. Questions are asked, eyebrows (occasionally) raised, final decisions taken on Student Q and Student R.

The computers are fired up again, and a few days later, the results that have been determined by the complex interaction of assessed marks, University regulations and this series of meetings are available: we are at that “one morning” on which it all hangs. Then the final rush to graduation, and I try to scrub up well enough and learn to pronounce everyone’s names for the ceremonies, and then it’s academic dress, and bubbly and meet-the-parents…

…et ceux qui vivent encore vont commencer tout doucement à les oublier et à confondre leurs noms. And those who are still alive begin imperceptibly to forget them, to mix up their names… [Interesting that I had misremembered the quotation until I checked it here]. But we don’t always subside into forgetfulness, and it really is nice when you keep in touch.

Party Time?

From hearing David Blunkett’s try at silencing criticism by calling those who questioned him “cynics,” to the wobbles, Herschisms and Grammarian Gwynne of Michael Gove, I know I have a long tradition of passive-aggressive sniping, but I don’t – I really don’t – want to be thought of as part of the blobby problem that Nick G sees us belonging to.

And today feels different why?

Because of this article in TES: https://www.tes.com/news/school-news/breaking-news/stop-after-test-parties-nicky-morgan-tells-primaries and the verbiage round it.

Nicky Morgan is quoted thus:

“It’s the same when we get to the end of primary. I don’t want to see after-test parties being held. I want it to be something that children take as part of their schooling.”

The tone is magisterial, rather than visionary. She walks into Miss Trunchbull’s office and sits down at the desk with “I don’t want to see after-test parties being held.” But she has a point: to normalise these tests would require them to have less fuss made about them, from teachers praising their children’s mindfulness training, to parents and schools celebrating the end of the tests, a bit of a cooler attitude might help the children. The multicoloured ticker tape that floated idly past my office window today – I suppose after someone’s final undergraduate exam- is not a way to make children take the tests without stress. We are only a step away from parents giving fivers for good results. Parties are out, then. So far, so good.

“I want it to be something that children take as part of their schooling.”

Ah.

Now what this seems to me to imply is not that children should not celebrate, nor even that they should take these tests in their stride, but that children should just accept that testing is part of schooling, that the stats-sticky fingers of government can and will come and test them. And this is where the problems begin.

I am caught here between the two (or more) arguments, and I don’t think I’m alone. Are tests there to provide quality-assurance testing like an MOT for schools, or are they there to help teachers, parents and children with the children’s learning?

“Ms Morgan said she would be speaking to headteacher representatives and teachers to explore how best to assess seven-year-olds in the future. More rigorous assessments were “really important” to measure the progress pupils were making in primary school and to hold schools to account, she said.”

So who, at heart, is the audience for test results? If I can find an answer to that I might know which argument to follow. Is testing to become a normal part of school – more rigorous, too – whether children learn from it or no, simply to hold schools to account? Is it there because governments have so little trust in teacher assessment that the rigmarole of national tests is the only way to make sure Miss Honey doesn’t favour Hortensia? Are tests the pike-sergeant way of keeping teachers on the (important) task of -erm – teaching?

I am not helped by the way this article changes tack and looks to Mary Bousted at the end:

“We support the government’s commitments to help schools enable more children to achieve expected standards of English and maths at primary school,” she said. “But continual testing is not the answer…”

What really is the argument about testing here? What is it that raises standards? What does measuring progress do for the individual child? Or should we see children en masse as the product that needs testing? Are tests so important for whatever this purpose is that they should become part of a school’s way of doing things, no more stressful than sharing assembly (yes, I know sharing assembly is not without teacher stress, children over-worrying, parents over-investing: that’s why I chose the example)? It’s hard to tell what is being proposed or opposed here: there are so many voices in this short article, no wonder we are all confused. So here’s a naive plea:

Where is there a clear, single-purpose rationale for the tests?

Pigs and more nonsense, briefly.

Again, little more than a tweet, but this came into my twitter feed from Sheffield: Print, Protest and Poetry 1790-1810.

Then hold not Swine in such disdain,
Since ‘tis by them you have your gain;
But learn to treat them with respect,
Lest they should grunt at your neglect:

It seems to me to be part of the disquiet in my previous blog post – but also, perhaps, part of a Network “mad as hell” moment which may be leading to the “school tests strike” today (which I want to return to when I am in calmer waters after marking). It is also extremely relevant to the research meeting about visual sources and children’s understandings of history that I am going to now.

More later.

More Nonsense in a Minute

Dave Aldridge has released an interesting blog post I want to respond to or at least use as a springboard for a personal rant. Where Dave asks “What, then, will become of the proposed LEA chains?” I guess he is dealing with that uncomfortable truth that the big businesses behind academies will – or may – not want to take on smaller schools, rural areas, some of the seemingly insoluble issues that lead to “poor quality pupils.” [NB: the website of the original report seems to have been taken down] That the state provides the “safety net” (I’m not sure of this shorthand metaphor) seems eminently reasonable; if the government has decided not to be the major player in what was a national initiative, well, we, the electorate, voted them in, sort of. Today it seems “we, the people” voted for a string of idiocies.

I join Dave Aldridge in his disquiet. However, I would be more sanguine about this if it weren’t for the dreadful other things we are seeing from this government at the moment: high-handed bullying around dodgy dealings on the NHS; rich people making decisions about their taxes that takes money from public services – and then covering it up; the opposition of the current government to taking in refugee children under the “Dubs Amendment.” This Kindertransport moment (the PM says it isn’t) is where I give up. If, as the Secretary of State for Education has said, this is a “broadly Christian country” (a phrase I believe she used to justify her position at the time in opposing equality in marriage, presumably based in part on a reading of Leviticus 20:13 or Romans 1:27), then where is our broadly Christian Government going to stand on Deuteronomy 10:18, 19, where God “takes no bribe…and executes justice for the fatherless and loves the stranger,” or the vilifications of the prophet Amos (e.g. Ch 8) against those who trample on the needy, eager to resume their unfair trading? And if the mention of Amos makes anyone think this is all a bit Amos Starkadder, then 2 Corinthians 8 is a more human take. Be kind: it seems that kindness – the recognition that we are all the same kind, all human, all with needs and talents and joys and disasters – is exactly what is being written out of our lives systematically.

So this is my Catiline question (I know I am not alone in using it) : Quousque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra? How long will you abuse our patience? If “accuracy is for snake-oil pussies,” if High Street tycoons can make a packet and then walk away, it is as if the last election entitles only to attend feeding time at a pool of crocodiles.

Yes, it goes without saying that these views do not necessarily represent an official position by my employers.

And yes, I know Cicero would not necessarily approve of my use of his phrase in this argument.

Transitions into HE

“What’s on my mind?”, asks WordPress whenever I start a post. How to work with students is always on my mind at work, whether it’s the ex_CACHE Year 1 student talking about time management or the final semester over-deliverer. This research report from MMU, published by QAA has given me a lot of think about: as University admissions seeks for more and more diversity in its intake, it is ever more essential that we don’t just plonk the new students in the middle of the quad, so to speak, and say “There you are: Uni!”

The perceptions of learning and teaching in pre-University experiences crystallise for me in the table which talks about dependency:

Answers always provided;very short cycles of input,testing and feedback; all resources provided; monitoring system provides motivation and nudges; daily contact with same staff member; activity is always directed; some structured activities (for example, writing frames)

and contrasts it with how things might be in HE:

Students find answers for themselves; some resources provided, students expected to find more resources; students expected to largely find their own motivation;contact with same staff member weekly or less; activity required is essentially undirected (for example, lecture) .

This is about challenge and independence (something the report acknowledges) and I would be among the first to say that Year 1 in HE becomes all but useless if challenge and independence are minimised – but how do we increase them while teaching the “survival skills” that getting through Year 1 requires? And what about getting on in subsequent years?

A first thought: this is partly about expectation (again, the report is right to look at this, and the vignettes/quotations from the students are fascinating), but also, I think, about how the study skills debate gets clouded by the issues of mental health and wellbeing. They are both vital components in success – but it can’t be that HE tutors become welded to their students, any more than students are told “just cope.” Perhaps as school/college-based learning has changed, HE Y1 provision now needs to look (again and again, and more seriously) at differentiation?

School Based Training: more dura et aspera

There is a myth about teacher training (well, tbh there are thousands: this is but one!) that somehow the completion of an ITT (ITE) programme from a BA/BEd, through a Masters-led PGCE or School-centred programme to “You have a degree, here’s six weeks on how to cope” means that at the end you are a teacher. Compliant and complex, informed and (to some extent) uniform, here is the student who was Rosie or Ryan and suddenly “Here is Miss Smith, here is Mr Jones, your new teacher.”

It’s September the whatever, and the job you applied for, schmoozed for (and perhaps when you got it felt smug about or trepidacious over) is yours, and you’ve met the team and put a mug in the cupboard in the staffroom and the headteacher introduces you to the class, and you shut the door and smile and you are the teacher.

You know you are a teacher because… Answers on a postcard. The NUT guidance asks the question “I have QTS: What’s next?” What indeed?

One of the key things that may keep you in the profession, it seems to me, is how you learn on School Based Training. I’ve written about the “hard and harsh” – what St Benedict calls the dura et aspera – of parenting before and teaching is not dissimilar, with the important difference that your school-based training gives you a chance to see teaching for real in a way that many modern parents don’t get to see bringing up babies. Seeing it without rose-tinted specs may be just what you need to keep you going in three years’ time. On a placement you get to (this list is a bit tongue-in-cheek):

iron;
smile at people you don’t like;
sing;
be someone special for children;
learn children’s limits of patience, attention, social skills – and how (and when) to stretch them;
learn your own limits of patience, attention, social skills – and how (and when) to stretch them;
learn your own language of teaching – do you like “stretching” and “pushing” as models of learning?
learn to treasure weekends – switching off is an important skill, if only so you are switched on on Mondays!

You also get to dress up for World Book Day. Something elaborate like the Very Hungry Caterpillar (“How the heck will I teach in this?”) or something less so (“George from George’s Marvellous Medicine? But I’ll just look like any boy!”)? Something ambiguous (“Mrs Twit? Will they notice I dressed up?”) or something ambitious (“Aslan? I’ll roast in this costume!”).

So how do you learn on School Based Training?

Very Hungry Caterpillars aside, you learn by doing, by picking up (consciously and unconsciously) on how to use your teacher voice, your real smile, or how to identify the people to charm (and please remember the parents!!!) – and by making mistakes.

By not backing up your records before you dropped the laptop;
by dropping the paintings from the class while they were still not annotated;
by saying something so vastly comic you could hardly keep from laughing out loud (“So while we are learning the /sh/ sound, what could we be shovelling?” [You meant ‘shiny things;’ that’s not what your TA thought]);
by forgetting the head’s name with her standing right next to you…

And by wishing you’d gone as Miss Trunchbull instead.

EPPSE and beyond

October’s report on pre-school and early home learning effects on A-level outcomes (DFE-RR472A) has some heartening things to say for us who are struggling as Children’s Centres are closing, reshaping or simply looking gloomily at their money being taken away. Lasting impact to AS level; lasting impact beyond that for young people whose background is more problematic.

I’m going to put up part of the executive summary, partly for my students (yes, you: now look up the full text, linked above), but also because it never hurts to keep saying these things:

Pre-school
• There are continuing effects of pre-school at age 17. EPPSE students who had attended any pre-school were more likely to enter AS-level exams (mostly taken at age 17) than those who had not. In addition, if they attended a high quality pre-school they were twice as likely as those who hadn’t attended pre-school to take AS-levels.
• However, for most students the pre-school effect had disappeared by the time they took A-levels (generally at age 18) as there were no continuing effects of pre-school at entry to A-level exams or on the grades students achieved in them.
• Separate analysis for the Sutton Trust (Sammons, Toth and Sylva, 2015) showed that there is lasting impact of pre-school for the specific sub-group of disadvantaged young people who were classed as ‘high achievers’ at the end of primary school.
Home learning environment
• The quality of the home learning environment EPPSE students experienced before they attended school does have a continuing effect at ages 17 and 18. EPPSE students who experienced a good early HLE were more likely to enter AS-levels, A-levels, and have higher attainment in terms of KS5 point scores.

And beyond? Well, the implications for how we and the Higher Education students with whom we engage see the role of Early Childhood is a start: coming into the sector “to make a difference” really does seem to work.

Pas Devant Les Enfants

A spat of sorts came and went in the Guardian and places where they tweet last week over A Song for Ella Grey, and Lynne Reid Banks’ reaction to its marketing – or placing it among “children’s books:”

In the first five pages there is lesbian love, swearing, drinking, and enough other indications that, once again, this is not a book for children. Children are people up to the age of 12. They are not grownups of 17. The books are going straight back to Waterstones.

Woe to us who really do write for children! No prizes for us. Publishing is not a children’s world any more.

I can sympathise with her to some extent, in that I feel that better categories and prizes associated with them might actually lead to a celebration of quality that is more discernible. I am less sure about the tone she adopts, which has an acerbic tone of distaste reminiscent of Joyce Grenfell‘s “George! Don’t do that!”

I have to ask myself if there are stories or parts of stories that I would avoid reading with children. I do find Roald Dahl’s casual racism hard to get round – unacceptable even in the dates of publication, something that I have always edited out. Even this isn’t perhaps a reason for editing them out of children’s experience completely. C S Lewis is not immune from this either, and his views on how young women grow up strikes a sour note at the end of The Last Battle to say the least. But then we have the Junk shouting match from the 1990s, and a pious Christian asking me if I would “let” my teenager at much the same time read His Dark Materials. There is debate here about childhood, agency and censorship.

However, what it raised for me, in discussion with my colleague Mat Tobin today was something about the transferability of children’s narratives. Is one of the marks of whether a story “holds water” as to whether it might be told to adults or from the adult perspective?

Two brief examples:

What might The Children of Green Knowe be like if written for adults and from the perspective of Mrs Oldknow? Mrs Oldknow’s comfortable magical realism is disrupted by the (welcome) intrusion of her great grandson, whose curiosity forces her to come to terms with a series of horrific deaths. I think this could work.
Or what of the Chronicles of Ancient Darkness? Torak’s path through adolescence (which takes, in its physical form, a few weeks and is described in the present books in terms of a change in his smell) and his struggle with evil might become precisely the kind of literature Lynne Reid Banks would take back to Waterstones.

I wonder whether the complexities of narrative – and particularly the complexities of the unspoken in “children’s books” – are what make good children’s narratives effective. Is it the every coyness that makes for the complexity? And in which case what would we want to have that makes that coyness work for the intelligent, critical reader, whatever age they are? How explicit does the tension between characters have to be? How explicit the violence, the sex, the drinking?

I’m not mocking here, but wanting to point out that these would both be valid stories. So my first thoughts are around whether this is true of all good stories initially envisaged for children – and if that is (or even might be) the case, then what about stories that perhaps are not? On whose authority do we age-band stories? And what are the markers that show narrative A to be on one side and narrative B to be on the other?

At any rate, the translation of children’s narrative into adult perspective can provide a bit of a parlour game. Anyone for the Moomins from The Groke’s point of view? Or Where the Wild Things Are in the voice of Max’s mother?

What did you to in the curriculum wars, Daddy?

When I asked back in March what we do about evaluation that goes against the grain I was asking (part of ) a question that I come back to again and again: What is a curriculum? and the purpose of the rather glib title is to begin to wonder about whether the contested nature of the curriculum is something I should return to.

We are surrounded by real violence at the moment, and the notion of curriculum wars is a bit silly: there are other things we might take arms, or a moral stance on, and I won’t digress on them here. What I do want to do is look at some possible readings of the OfSTED report “Teaching and play in the early years: a balancing act?” which is linked here.

The Summary begins like this:

“Research has never been clearer – a child’s early education lasts a lifetime.
“For too many children, the foundations for a successful start to their education are weak. In 2014, around two fifths of children did not have the essential skills needed to reach a good level of development by the age of five. Worryingly, in our most deprived communities, the outcomes were much worse.
“The 19 percentage point gap between disadvantaged children and their better-off counterparts has remained unacceptably wide for too long.”

My heart sinks at this; this looks all too like the “beat-up-the-teachers” line of too many politicians. But read on (and I hope I’m not being too selective here):

“The early years providers we visited showed that a strong start can be the norm for all children, regardless of their background. The schools and settings in this survey focused relentlessly on developing children’s communication, language and vocabulary.
The schools and settings we visited did not see teaching as separate from play or infer teaching to mean one fixed view of how things should be done.”

Where is this going? Well, this is the key section for me:

“There is no one way to achieve the very best for young children. Many different approaches to teaching exist. Most of the providers we visited did not think of their time with children as being either teacher-led or child-initiated. They found this terminology unhelpful and sought a better way to articulate the subtleties of their work. They saw their approaches to teaching and play as sitting on a continuum, their staff weighing up the extent of their involvement and fine-tuning how formal or informal, structured or unstructured, dependent or independent each learning experience should be to meet the needs of each child most effectively.”

So is this a contrast with opposition to child initiated learning? Or a compromise? Or a plain fudge?

When we ask what a curriculum is we have to be careful. Is it a programme of study? A set of adult-composed activities through which a child is taken systematically (Swarbrick 2013: 81)? or is it “what it intended to be taught and learned overall (the planned curriculum),; what is taught (the curriculum as enacted); what is learned (the curriculum as experienced)”? [This is from the final report of the Cambridge Primary Review, Children, Their World, Their Education (Alexander 2010:250).]

I suggest that the ambiguities in Teaching and play in the early years are reflected in the subtitle (and its question mark). Is it “a balancing act?” Who requires it to be a balancing act? Still no nearer to a lasting stability, perhaps, but at least the struggle to keep upright, the wobble of a balancing act sounds better than the violent image of a curriculum war.

HE and EY – what really makes for quality teaching?

Some while back I made a point about how cycling might be underpinned by similar principles to the key themes of EYFS, and it reminded me of how often I made a similar point about teaching in Early Years and teaching in HE when I first came to Oxford Brookes on my CertTHE (not perhaps always successfully). But recent conversations face to face and on Twitter prompt me to revisit the key themes of EYFS and what might constitute good pedagogy in HE.

Here are the outlines of the key principles:

every child is a unique child, who is constantly learning and can be resilient, capable, confident and self-assured;
children learn to be strong and independent through positive relationships;
children learn and develop well in enabling environments, in which their experiences respond to their individual needs and there is a strong partnership between practitioners and parents and/or carers; and
children develop and learn in different ways and at different rates.

and with a bit of translation:

Every student is unique, who is constantly learning and can be resilient, capable, confident and self-assured; but how do we show that we are working on this principle? How does systems-led HE do this except on a personal contact level?
Students learn to be strong and independent through positive relationships; and what do lecturers do to foster these relationships?
Students learn and develop well in enabling environments, in which their experiences respond to their individual needs and there is a strong partnership between lecturers and student support… And how do we ensure that enabling can happen in stuffy or chilly classrooms, in over-flashy or dowdy work areas? Who enables? Save us from the Student Enablement SubCommittee!

But what about “students develop and learn in different ways and at different rates”? Can we recognise this? Should we? Where does flexibility support learned helplessness? Where does system-first higher ed fail the rising number of students who come to University with a long way to go emotionally or academically?