Tag: Higher Education

Nutbrown Review of Qualifications

Not a rant this time, just the links to the pdf of the report, and to the DoE webpage on the review which also has other useful links.

Here are the nineteen recommendations:

Recommendation 1
The Government should continue to specify the qualifications that are suitable for staff operating within the EYFS, and the Teaching Agency should develop a more robust set of ‘full and relevant’ criteria to ensure qualifications promote the right content and pedagogical processes. These criteria should be based on the proposals set out in this report.
Recommendation 2
All qualifications commenced from 1 September 2013 must demonstrate that they meet the new ‘full and relevant’ criteria when being considered against the requirements of the EYFS.
Recommendation 3
The previously articulated plan to move to a single early years qualification should be abandoned.
Recommendation 4
The Government should consider the best way to badge qualifications that meet the new ‘full and relevant’ criteria so that people can recognise under what set of ‘full and relevant’ criteria a qualification has been gained.
Recommendation 5
The EYFS requirements should be revised so that, by September 2022, all staff counting in the staff:child ratios must be qualified at level 3.
Recommendation 6
The EYFS requirements should be revised so that, from September 2013, a minimum of 50 per cent of staff in group settings need to possess at least a ‘full and relevant’ level 3 to count in the staff:child ratios.
Recommendation 7
The EYFS requirements should be revised so that, from September 2015, a minimum of 70 per cent of staff in group settings need to possess at least a ‘full and relevant’ level 3 to count in the staff:child ratios.
Recommendation 8
Level 2 English and mathematics should be entry requirements to level 3 early education and childcare courses.
Recommendation 9
Tutors should be qualified to a higher level than the course they are teaching.
Recommendation 10
All tutors should have regular continuing professional development and contact with early years settings. Colleges and training providers should allow sufficient time for this.
Recommendation 11
Only settings that are rated ‘Good’ or ‘Outstanding’ by Ofsted should be able to host students on placement.
Recommendation 12
Colleges and training providers should look specifically at the setting’s ability to offer students high quality placements.
Recommendation 13
The Department for Education should conduct research on the number of BME staff at different qualification levels, and engage with the sector to address any issues identified.
Recommendation 14
Newly qualified practitioners starting in their first employment should have mentoring for at least the first six months. If the setting is rated below ‘Good’, this mentoring should come from outside.
Recommendation 15
A suite of online induction and training modules should be brought together by the Government, that can be accessed by everyone working in early education and childcare.
Recommendation 16
A new early years specialist route to QTS, specialising in the years from birth to seven, should be introduced, starting from September 2013.
Recommendation 17
Any individual holding Early Years Professional Status (EYPS) should be able to access routes to obtain QTS as a priority.
Recommendation 18
I recommend that Government considers the best way to maintain and increase graduate pedagogical leadership in all early years settings.
Recommendation 19
I am not recommending that the Government impose a licensing system on the early years sector. However, the Government should consider supporting a sector-led approach, if an affordable and sustainable one emerges with widespread sector support.

Gambia 2012

This year’s trip starts, in some ways, with last year’s video. Click here for the link – we went for a week of working with Gambia College students/graduates, and EY students from Brookes would be doing the same again this year (others may have a different programme). Watching it instantly makes me (as always happens!) eager to go again. This is a long link, and you may need QuickTime to watch it – but it’s worth a look!

Cost?£800.00, organised via Gambia Extra and Alan and Tony from GE are coming on 20th Feb to talk to anyone interested – details on the posters round Harcourt Hill.

Back to the Dark

Hallowe’en is coming, and with it the difficulties schools – perhaps UK culture, if we can talk in this way – face with the Americanised rituals. We could be wary of these things for the sake of children worried by them, we could take a mono-cultural stance, we could take a wider view that this is an opportunity not for worship of some dark force or bowing to Coca-Cola culture but for an opportunity to let children explore fear of the dark.

And in a dark, dark town… some skeletons lived.

Those last three words from the introductory page of Janet and Allan Ahlberg’s Funnybones set the oxymoronic tone of the whole riotous book (and its successors).

Body Horror

This is the link to posters for the forum in which I will explore some of these ideas next week: how can they be skeletons and live?

Aesthetic and anaesthetic education?

Some interesting stuff here – an RSA Animation again from Ken Robinson, whose fascinating insights I have cited before.  Thanks to my colleague Helen for the link, by the way.

The link between the growth of routine medication for possible ADHD and routine testing makes for a thought-provoking “moment” and (such is Robinson’s way) a good gag about the way different states in the US provide for what he calls a “fictitious epidemic” – but he has some important things to say about  “aesthetic and anaesthetic education” and the  link between patterns of industrial and educational organisation. And what do we make of the decline in divergent thinking throughout schooling? It reminded me powerfully of a poem Jack Zipes cites in his wonderful Relentless Progress, “…Because the houses of Quiet Restraint/had so few gifts in them…”

Spend just over 11 minutes on this and rethink (some) ideas on what education is about.

Kindergarten Graduation

The end of the year approaches, the first degree ceremonies are over in UK Universities – although here at Oxford Brookes the major push for such things is in Early September – and in a cycle that has something to do with saints’ days, something to do with harvest time and now a lot to do with holidays for students and staff, people move on academically. September sees professorships awarded, (with professors being given chairs, installed or just plain appointed ), and small children move from home to early education and daycare, from early years into Big School, and then in a very few years’ time from Key Stage 2 to 3, and so on.

It is interesting to observe that business is growing in the US and worldwide around graduating young children from their earliest educational experiences. One site  with the catchy but curious name of Rhyme University sells whole packages for gradation at affordable prices. The company’s website states that “we’ve been able to successfully grow from 121 customers in 1954 to over 20,000 schools worldwide.”

The “About Us” section has a telling story to set the tone about a child’s pride in a scrappy diploma, and notes that
“If early learning provided the keys to greater success later in life, then the transition from preschool and/or kindergarten should be marked with no less importance.”
Rhyme University’s deluxe package ($23.95) comprises a cap with tassel, a gown, a sash, a ring and a diploma.

While this site – Kindergarten lessons – seeks to minimize the ritual elements, this site is more specific about what graduation might mean and might entail:  suggesting that “[E] ach year of graduating from one grade to the next deserves a special celebration” and that this is “a time to honor their achievements, let them know they’ve done great work and have accomplished the goals of moving on to the next stage of life.”

And this leads me to the thought for the day: at what point is progression the same as graduation?

Back again

… from the Gambia (see a previous and all-too-brief entry),  no thanks to the titanic rumblings of Eyjafjallajökull.  The University’s article on the subject in Onstream shows us in a very good light – although I could have wished Geoff had been decribed as leader, since he did much, much more than I did.

Our thanks have to go to Alhajie, Brendan, Jenny, Jo and Butch – not to mention Josh and Fatou and Mustapha and all the others – at the Gunjur Project who took us in and looked after us and kept us busy while airlines and politicians panicked around us. We, of course, did not panic at all.

It was interesting to meet new people on this trip. Interesting, for example, to meet the wonderful Fatou who runs Mariamma Mae nursery, a little gem of pre-school provision tucked in behind Gunjur Lower Basic school. More later, perhaps, on this. Life in Gambia College was also good – the hospitality of the staff was, as ever, very welcome. It was also very good to meet some of the other people in College, from more senior University officers through to (I couldn’t say “down to”) VSO workers such as Rachel, whose blog is linked here.