The trainer banged on enthusiastically about rewarding good behaviour and working. Nothing exactly new there – my own teachers four decades ago would give housepoints for good work and deduct them for bad. I pointed out that the practice was being rendered meaningless by Senior Management gaming the system – I specifically mentioned the instruction to hand out more merits/praises.

She explained that this was perfectly in order and that for the behaviour policy to work properly there had to be three times as many praises as concerns. This stunned us into silence as we digested the implications. The obvious point is that if a class is being particularly badly behaved, you’d be scratching around for good behaviour to reward. Even more bizarrely – if I’ve got this right – in a well behaved class you might have to hand out an unwarrented concern. Which could be for a standard of behaviour or work that would earn a praise in a badly behaved class. What is clear is that handing out praises and concerns in a fixed ratio renders using them to monitor behaviour even more pointless than I thought it was.

Eventually one of my colleagues asked the right question: what evidence is there that handing them out in that ratio improved behaviour.

“Loads of research shows it” apparantly. Reminds me of the approach antivaccination types take when asked for evidence: they tell you there is lots on the internet and it is not hard to find. So you find some and deconstruct it only to be told that they did not mean that evidence.

Whatever ivory tower academics may think, schoolchildren are not stupid. They will be able to see that the earning of praise or the receiving of concerns is arbitrary. If they have no idea from one lesson to the next what behaviour is acceptable and what is not, there will be no incentive for them to change.

This question is prompted by a story in the April 1 edition of the METRO, regrettably not the April Fool spoof, entitled “Schools Cut Bacc on 25,000 pupils”. It goes on to say that students failed to achieve the EB because “schools failed to enter them for the GCSEs they needed” and that “175 state secondaries failed to enter a single pupil for all of the subjects required. To attain the [EB] a student must achieve at least a C grade at GCSE in English, maths, science, history or geography, and a foreign language”.

The whole thrust of this short article, which reads like the opening paragraphs of a Central Office press release, is that state schools have screwed up by failing to enter students for the correct exams. In fact the EB was cobbled together after the formation of the current Government in May last year, whereas students taking GCSEs in Summer 2010 started their courses in September 2008, long before the EB and this Government even existed. Schools are being castigated for failure to correctly predict election results and anticipate future policy.

In the pursuit of higher league table positions, schools will now be mindful of these shifted goalposts when advising students on their options so we can expect an increasing number of students to be entered for the appropriate range of subjects to qualify for the EB. Thus, come the next election in May 2015, Gove intends to use EB pass rates as the criteria of education policy success and point to an EB pass rate of 15.6% when he took office, rising to whatever in 2014. If they do not rise, expect the EB to be quietly forgotten.

I am not arguing against ensuring students are educated in a broad range of subjects, incidently. However what students do not need is yet another piece of paper the Government can manipulate for political advantage.

Blogs such as this one accuse Bromley Council of “blocking school choice” by opposing the transfer of Kelsey Park Sports College to the Harris Federation. Judging by this article in a local newspaper, the school chooses not to become part of the Harris Federation so Bromley is in fact backing ‘school choice’.

Perhaps conservativehome.blogs.com mean “parental choice of how their schools are run”? Maybe. Although I would have thought parents can influence how their childrens’ schools are run by standing for election as parent governors, discussing concerns with governors even if they are not on the governing body and by discussing their concerns with their local councillor. Why can’t the campaigners do that?

This might be a clue:-

However as Mr Lloyd has previously pointed out, none of the campaigners have children who actually attend Kelsey nor have they even visited the school.

It is claimed that the school will get much better results if it is an academy. Personally I do not see how replacing a London Borough of Bromley signboard with a Harris Federation one will bring about improvement. It might be pointed out that there is more to it than that – it is the way schools teach that is important. Fair point, but again I do not see why a transfer is neccessary for this. Indeed, the school is already improving – going from just 28% of students getting 5 A* – C grades at GCSE to 46%.

Interestingly, despite the rantings of right-wing bloggers, Bromley Council has not set its face totally against Academy status. According to the Spectator’s coffeehouse blog, the council wants a partnership in running the school:-

Having said earlier this year that they wanted our local school, Kelsey Park Sports College, to become an Academy – a decision that was a welcome relief for many local families – the Council is now backpedaling like crazy. You see, the person in charge of schools in Bromley, Cllr Ernest Noad, now says that he will only accept an Academies Sponsor that will agree to manage the school in a 50/50 partnership deal with him and his colleagues at the Council.

This rules out the Harris Federation who, on the basis of their superb track record in neighbouring boroughs, are the preferred choice of many parents. Their success has been blogged about on Coffee House before. Harris would like to sponsor Kelsey as an Academy but, understandably, don’t think they can improve it if every decision needs to be taken by committee with a Council which for years has been content to let the school drift.

Partnership does not suit conservativehome.blogs who have this to say:

Academies have too little freedom as it is without handing back half of it.

and

…I want the Harris Federation to get stuck into starting up Free Schools. In Nick’s borough. In my borough. In Lewisham, Croydon, Lambeth, Southwark and Wandsworth. However reasonable or unreasonable Cllr Noad is being, they are no longer beholden to him. Or his opposite numbers. They have been set free.

Being set free sounds so much better than being allowed to drift doesn’t it? Trouble is, I am not sure that the school has been “allowed to drift” because according to headteacher Brian Lloyd:-

“The authority has really supported us to the hilt.”

Trouble is with making schools free of LEA oversight, it allows public money to be mis-spent, sometimes criminally so, as in the case of Colleen McCabe, who as headmistress stole £500,000 from St John Rigby Catholic College. The embezzlement was only uncovered when Grant Maintained status was abolished by the last Government and Bromley Council auditors got a good look at the books.

Yes. Bromley Council. They have been burnt once by ‘setting schools free’. It would seem that some Tories can learn from experience. Just not the ones who write blogs or sit in Parliament.

Obviously, they will have been taught science in school laboratories themselves but after that they will have had three years of University laboratories before commencing their PGCE courses. In theory, this would re-acquaint them with school lab equipment but in fact they will not have much time for this as there is a whole lot else for them to get through.

Until relatively recently, this would not matter. When the newly qualified teachers started their first job, their colleagues would include experienced teachers (and usually experienced technicians as well) who were used to the apparatus available in that particular department and could train the NQT in its use.

Increasingly, however, older teachers are entering management or leaving the profession altogether so this experience is being lost. At my school there are still some experienced teachers in the department and we have a team of experienced technicians so inexperienced NQTs can be brought quickly up to speed. This is not the case in some other schools in the area. They not only lack teachers with much experience, the old technicians have retired or moved on and their replacements lack knowledge and experience of school science labs. In a situation where you have inexperienced teachers and inexperienced technicians there is no-one to do the mentoring. As a result skills are being lost and some experiments are not undertaken because nobody has the knowledge or confidence to do so.

To very briefly summarise our behaviour policy, the kids are given ‘merits’ for good behaviour and ‘demerits’ for bad. These are collated by management to get an idea as to whether behaviour is improving, getting worse or staying the same.

I was discussing stat-fiddling on Bad Science here and it was pointed out that the correct name for this is Goodhart’s Law. Goodhart was initially talking about economics but his law is more generally applicable. Another poster pointed out that Campbell’s Law was applicable to this sort of situation. The law reads:

The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to
monitor.

Campbell’s Law appears to be operating in my workplace because all staff have received an email noting an overall decline in the number of merits handed out. This was not an enquiry as to why this was, it was a thinly veiled instruction to hand out more.

I have also heard that some members of staff have been told that they are handing out “too many” demerits. It would appear then, that behaviour is getting worse. It further appears that the management approach is to treat the symptoms rather than the cause. I get the distinct impression that they believe that their surrogate measure is the reality and that by manipulating the surrogate they will change reality. Campbell’s Law applies.

I have to say that “duking the stats” is neither peculiarly American nor peculiarly fictional.

We were all called to a meeting where we were told that the grades our pupils were getting for their coursework was not matching their predicted grades. There is a good reason for this, too many of them won’t do any work unless someone is standing over them. Coursework requires independent work so there’s a bit of a problem.

Previous heads of department solved this problem by means of endless “catch up sessions” which included sitting the not-so-eager seekers of knowledge at computers and dictating what they should write – in effect doing their coursework for them. This might result in improved grades but hardly improved education. Quite the contrary, as I have remarked before, we are teaching them to be useless.

This can all be laid at the door of school league tables: the SMT need the school to at least maintain its place and preferably climb upwards. So they know what percentage of A* to C grades are required and teachers are expected to achieve them – one way or another.

Judging by the material we have had inflicted on us for the new BTEC science course, the production costs must be very low. They have taken some traditional experiments, made some totally pointless changes and repackaged them as something new.

Example: a common way to show that different materials conduct heat at different rates is to take rods of different materials (but the same dimensions) stick a pin on to the end of each with wax and place the other ends into a bunsen flame or onto a hot plate. These people have decided to replace the pin-&-wax with damp cobalt chloride papers – which apparantly have to be handled with forceps due to the toxicity of cobalt chloride.

This is perhaps a minor irritation but worse is the fact that the writing of the technician sheets and student worksheets appears to have been subcontracted to different people who evidently never bothered talking to each other. How else do you explain the fact that the technician sheet for one experiment specifies metal samples, wires batteries and bulbs to test for conductivity (with them so far), water to test for solubility (eh?) and a water bath set at 80 celcius to determine melting point (WTF?).

Further investigation shows that this sheet has conflated bits from three different experiments (none with the same number as the technician sheet) and was clearly written by someone with no knowledge of science otherwise they would have realised what bollocks they were producing. So that’s stage 1 of the process. Stage 2 is clearly gather in the first drafts and send them straight to the printer without proof-reading. Stage 3 is sell the final product to schools for a ridiculous amount of money.

You might think that the Science Department heads who have bought this crap might notice and I would agree with you but the trouble is, new courses are being rushed in so quickly that there is not the time. If the Government is serious about saving money, they could start by cutting crap like this.

That’s right. The Tories are planning on taking education advice from a Hollywood actress who has a scheme for controlling aggression by breathing excercises and meditation dreamt up while she was on holiday. I wondered what research backed up her system. Google found me this:

In 2005, leading researcher Kimberly Schonert-Reichl, Associate Professor of Education at University of British Columbia, received a grant from the The Hawn Foundation to conduct a pilot research study on MindUP (TM), developed by the The Hawn Foundation and author Nancy Fischer…The studies used rigorous scientific design, including a randomized control trial, to test the program’s effectiveness. One study also explored the program’s implementation, helping to refine the curriculum design. Ongoing longitudinal studies will evaluate the impact of MindUPTM over time.

Study Results
The studies found that children who participated in MindUPTM, compared to children who did not, showed significant improvements on all four dimensions of teacher-rated school behaviors, including:

Attentional control
Decrease in aggression
Decrease in behavioral dysregulation
Increase in self-esteem
Increase in pro-social behavior such as sharing
Increase in social-emotional competence
Program effects were also found for self-reported optimism, self concept, reflection, and mindful awareness attention. The positive emotional benefits were strongest for girls and/or younger children.

“Rigorous scientific design” sounds good, as do the claimed results. Although the “self-reported” optimism etc. sounds a bit subjective.

The actual research is summarised here.

The research design is described as:

Quasi-experimental, pretest, posttest, control group design

The first study consisted of 246 4th to 7th grade children in 12 classes, 6 classes received the Mindfulness Education (ME) program and 6 control classes did not. The classes were matched for age, ethnicity, gender and social background. The participants filled in questionaires before and after so that changes in social and emotional understading etc. could be assessed.

There is no mention of randomisation, so it would be perfectly possible for the worst performing kids to be assigned to the control groups. Likewise, there is no blinding, so this could influence the researchers interpretation of results.

A series of papers that resulted from this research are listed. All but one are conference presentations ie not peer-reviewed. The remaining one, Promoting optimism and well-being in school-aged children: Initial findings from the “Mindfulness Education” program by K.A. Schonert-Reichl and M.S. Lawler was, as of December 2008, being prepared for publication in Psychology in the Schools.

I had a look on that journal’s website and inputted “Schonert-Reichl” into the author field of the search function. Precisely 0 papers were found.

The second study involved 99 4th and fifth graders assigned to 4 classes, 2 ME and 2 control. This one is a randomised control trial ie the researchers should have no influence over whether a particular student is assigned to an ME or control class. However, we are not told what randomisation technique is used so we do not know whether it was adequate. Furthermore, once more no mention of blinding is made, so when the researchers are assessing the results they will know whether a kid was in the conrol or ME group. The results of this study are still being written up for publication.

There is thus no peer-reviewed evidence and indeed no sound science at all supporting this program.

Apparantly the idea is to cut 3,000 senior posts – including heads and deputy heads. I strongly suspect a lot of people are nodding at that thought and thinking “yes, he can start with our senior management team”. This would be a mistake. I worked in local government during the cut-backs of the 80s and 90s and know from experience that the first cuts will not be the last. Balls might start with your SMT but he’ll work his way down to you eventually.

I have heard a number of school staff commenting how the admin of schools has grown since they started work. What many forget is that until not so long ago, schools were run by the local education authority (usually the Education Committee of the local Council). When administration of schools was devolved to the schools, many of the admin jobs that were done at the Town Hall were now done in the schools themselves – hence the increase in admin staff.

You might think your SMT is a bit remote and does not know what really goes on but would a “Superhead” running several schools be any better? Of course, the logical conclusion of all this would be to group large numbers of schools together and have one admin team run them all. We could call the person in charge of that team the “Schools Officer”. Of course, the governors of the individual schools will have lost a lot of their functions but it might still be considered desirable to have some sort of accountability. The Schools Officer would have to be accountable to the local authority…

This is the problem with revolutions, in public service or elsewhere. You go round in a damned big circle and finish up back where you started.

Whenever you hear this yarn it is worth asking the spinners for their evidence. In my experience it rarely amounts to much more than “I read it onthe internet” or “it was in the paper”. There is a reason for this lack of evidence and that reason is that the notion that practicals don’t happen because of health and safety concerns is a complete myth.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have my criticisms of modern science education but a lack of practical work is not one of them. Modern GCSE students do dissect things (usually plants), they do use chemicals and they do wire up circuits. They also see demonstrations such as the thermite reaction.

There are more regulations than there used to be but these are generally such things as requiring risk assessments to be done, requiring experiments producing hazardous fumes to be done in a fume cupboard, using screens & personal protective equipment, testing electrical equipment to make sure it is properly insulated & earthed and ideally having a qualified first aider to hand. I have no problem with this – being killed or maimed is not generally a useful educational experience.

Compliance with the regulations does have some cost and it may be that some penny-pinching management or governors somewhere has decided not to pay these costs and then blamed “health and safety” for the fact that they can no longer undertake practical work. I can think of no other reason (other than deliberate lying) for this myth getting going. Now everybody repeats it to each other and each repetition of the recycled story is mistaken for confirmation.

Now Lord Drayson has trotted it out. Obviously the Science Minister did not bother to actually talk to anyone involved in science education before sounding off. Obviously too much to hope that someone in his position would actually bother to check that what he was going to say had any truth to it rather than lazily repeat the current urban myth. If this is typical of Government approach to policy then it is not only education which is screwed.