Turning Tide
Turning Tide
Turning Tide
I don’t know when the verdict will come on the GCSE fiasco legal case. I don’t know what it will conclude. But I do know that whatever Lord Justice Elias and Mrs Justice Sharp finally say, the sense of injustice about what happened behind closed doors last summer remains palpable.
Last term it was all about the students. Now it’s all about the damaging effect on the reputations of schools and local authorities.
What happened was disgraceful, and the way the examination boards and Ofqual have avoided responsibility for the fiasco is as galling as it is immoral.
So although the volume of Twitter angst and blogs and articles may have died down, no one should think that the issue has gone away. We’ve simply been awaiting the outcome of the legal challenge.
We were told we would have a judgment before Christmas. We didn’t. Then it was to be mid-January. It wasn’t. Then by the end of January. No sign.
Something somewhere is going on.
Meanwhile, in the turbulent waters of education policy, it feels as if the tide is turning.
That pathetic back-of-an-envelope plan to dream up an alternative to GCSE, the woefully-conceived and stupidly-named EBC, has gained no support at all. People from exam boards contact me all the time trying desperately to get someone - anyone - to join the bandwagon of reform that would (if it happens) earn them money.
Similarly, the knee-jerk decision to scrap A/S levels has antagonised universities such as Cambridge who know that the alternative - teacher predictions - is abysmally unreliable. They know that A/S helped to broaden post-16 students’ educational experience.
The obsession with international comparisons has been shown as dodgy. The performance tables are dubious. And the role of special advisers is, tonight, being exposed as highly suspect.
I have it on very good authority that these reports of incredibly personalised, highly vituperative attacks on critics of Gove-ment policy are spot-on.
Ever since I got into a spat last summer with the official DfE Twitter feed about why it (he or she) should be drawing our attention to articles in newspapers sympathetic to the latest wacky wheeze I’ve wondered why, in this age of austerity, our money was being used on someone spending time reading the newspapers in order to retweet stories they think help the DfE agenda.
As I’ve said before: it feels as if we’re being run by people who have never run anything.
And never has that felt more visceral than tonight.
Which is why the most important thing is that we keep doing the stuff that matters and ignoring the stuff that doesn’t.
We need to raise standards in this country, but I’m increasingly unconvinced that the people in charge of education have any clue about how to do that. All they do is push their trolleys around the international pick-n-mix and quack banalities from the latest book of psychobabble.
Instead I subscribe to the view outlined by Fullan and Hargreaves in their brilliant book Professional Capital:
When the classroom door is closed, the teacher will always remain in charge. Where students are concerned, the teacher will always be more powerful than the principal, the president or the prime minister. Successful and sustainable improvement can therefore never be done to or even for teachers. It can only ever be achieved by and with them.
Never has it been more important for all of us in our classrooms to show that we are helping students to achieve more. Being critical of this Government’s education ideals doesn’t mean we are accepting that standards are anywhere near good enough.
Nor has it been more important to resist many of the banal, gimmicky and ideologically-driven initiatives of the DfE that are being fearsomely spun by people who would be better employed as cover supervisors or teaching assistants, so that at least they were doing something that helped children to learn more.
It’s only in the classrooms of this country that standards will be raised.
Geoff Barton
Suffolk
Saturday 2 February 2013
22:15
Saturday, 2 February 2013