John Bald/language and literacy

Not a bad day's work...

To Hackney, for a short professional development session on French with some of my thoughtful, determined and well-organised colleagues who are holding the line for civilisation. A quick reorganisation of my main slide on suggestions for the very first lesson, and we are away, just twenty minutes to discuss what we have achieved in our first term - introducing pronouns, positive and negative sentences with être and avoir, identifying masculine and feminine, songs and practice with Languagenut, and beginning to say anything we wish to. French is not a bolt on to the school's work, but fundamental to its core values of helping children to make the right choices, and to see that hard work and concentration will pay off. A very happy atmosphere, and I am rewarded with a warm round of applause. This will not make it any less tough when the children return next week. Bon courage à tous.

Then across London to work with a ten year old whose reading problems have not been completely resolved by synthetic phonics. The basic techniques outlined by Sue Palmer in her description of work with her daughter, slightly reorganised so that the same guidance can be used for reading and spelling, produce their usual effect, and the observing parent describes the outcome as "fantastic". A colleague has observed the whole lesson, from the time I greeted the young man to the time I left his home, and will send an account to Sir James Rose, who did not receive the evidence I sent him about this teaching, and who is now very interested in it. 

On the way back to the tube, I bump into a very senior figure in the education world, whose name I can't give here. He had also had dealings with the last government on a range of issues, and said that civil servants had become so close to ministers that they simply excluded anything that was not in the party line. They were no longer behaving as civil servants. The ministry says that my work may have been lost en route to a researcher. I can't believe this. Someone must have made a note of it, and, if it had been sent to an (unnamed) researcher, someone must have expected a response, and would have chased it if none had been received. This would have shown the loss, and I would have been asked for an other copy. It's embarrassing to lose things, but this is what I and newspapers I've worked with have done when it happens - the penalty has usually been a sarcastic comment from the sender, followed by a new copy.

My own belief is that the work was deliberately suppressed by someone in the ministry, or by someone else connected with the inquiry, as it goes against both the government line and the views of the voluntary organisations that have been given a disproportionate role in public provision for dyslexia. This is the way New Labour did things. As Mandelson once said, it involves the creation of truth. He later retracted this statement, saying you can't create truth. But he was right the first time. The price of artificial truth in this instance is tens of millions of pounds wasted on training and provision that is not based on full assessment of the available evidence, and much puffed up self importance from what New Labour termed third sector organisations that don't know as much as they think they do. The whole truth, or as close to it as current evidence will take us, is now available, and it is not too late to put right the mistake.

Love's Labours Lost - Katharine Birbalsingh, her book and her critics.

To Miss With Love was an obvious choice of title for Ms Birbalsingh's book, but maybe not the best. The love here is pretty much a one-way street, teachers making nearly all the effort and only the occasional pupil, like Stoic, deciding to join them. Stoic is a a realist. As he puts it  "if you were black, you had to be bad...So I made the decision to go without friends, and to work hard instead."

Stoic is well-named, as are most of Ms Birbalsingh's characters (try Babybarrista for the same idea in law). The teachers are Mr Goodheart (HT), Ms Sensible (DH), Mr Sporty, Hadenough, Ms Useless, Ms Joyful, Ms Alternative (who leaves), Inspirational (who has left to go to Basic School, where they have mixed-ability, and who hates it) Mr Cajole (DH, these places always need more than one) Ms Magical (whom KB admires, and who gets a satisfactory from an formulaic Ofsted inspector). Pupils - Seething, Deranged, Munchkin, Cavalier, who is bullied badly by Furious, gets expelled and comes back to put Furious in hospital - justice! - Adorable, Beautiful (Furious's girlfriend, and cause of the bullying of Cavalier), Dopey, Dreamer, Psycho, Smartie, Inspired ( a pupil KB talked to once, and who got to Oxford) etc. Ofsted hangs over the book like the sword of Damocles until near the end, when the school is rated good - which shows how much David Bell's Ofsted knew - and Mr Goodheart congratulates KB, aka Snuffleupagus or Snuffy, on her having made sure the inspectors did not see the fight or the ambulance turning up for Furious. 

The Secretary is Ms Reliable, parents Ms Principled, Mr and Mrs Well-meaning (he Chair of GB, and keen for teachers to learn from the pupils, even if it is how to spot drug dealers on slow bicycles), Mrs Important (solicitor, mother to Adorable, who has her phone stolen by Furious), Mr Inevitable and Ms Desperate, foster carers to Furious, and completely at sea. Oh, and Mrs Nutter, who yells down the phone at KB over her objection to Seething's nose stud -"You teachers are always victimising these kids. I know what you teachers do. It's illegal...I've taught Seething how to stand up against you teachers. I've taught Seething how to stand up for her rights."

The book is summed up in a phrase toward the end, when KB talks of "the excruciating madness that is the secondary-school system", but I have to admit to a touch of disappointment. KB is not the only writer to shine in brilliant, brief moments - I think the same of Burns - but the powers that be have got to her. KB's blog had the directness of something that happened yesterday. It seems from her account, here, that the problem is that the truth is actionable, and Penguin were afraid of being sued, as were the lawyers from The Sunday Times once it was clear that schools she had worked in could be traced. The book is still interesting, still true at heart, but the immediate, pin sharp focus has gone. And of course her critics are now saying that she's written a work of fiction because she's disguised children's identities - one of them is even citing an Ofsted report on a school she taught in as evidence that it was a good school, no doubt the report in which Ofsted failed to spot the fight and the ambulance. The criticisms of Ofsted in the book seem fully justified, as it is set in Ofsted's bad period of 2005-10.

Are most schools as bad as Ordinary and Basic?  No,  but South London schools in the early seventies certainly were. I  was at Beaufoy, and my head of department, a man of 6ft 4 and built to match, was put in hospital for three weeks by a gang of pupils who attacked him on the school site. The Inner London Education Authority refused to take action, as they usually did. Tulse Hill had a reputation worse than ours, and yet when a colleague of mine took over as HT, the first thing he said was what a good school it was! I have worked for Mr Goodheart.  It's now six months since KB's brilliant, brave, conference speech. What she said needed to be said, and she was and is an authentic voice from the lower depths. Thankfully, it is not all as bad as this. I hope that she will be happier in her next job.

Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy

A R4 discussion on 30.12.09 on this book, published in 1957, which I read in my first burst of reading about literacy, a time in which I read everything I could get hold of in order to try to find some keys to the problem. I was puzzled then, and am now. The book says a lot about British social class, but nothing I can find about literacy and its uses. Today again, the panel are talking about their place in the class system, council estates, hardship, but not about literacy. Why did he pick literacy for a title? Is it all some kind of hidden sub-text? And why has no-one questioned it? The Road to Nab End says more about literacy and education in this context, and I strongly recommend it.

Alexander's last stand: Children, their World, their Education. Updated 9th November 09

Update, 9th November 09. Julia Flutter kindly loaned me a copy of the Cambridge Primary Review, with an interesting paper on neuroscience by Professors Uta Goswami and Peter Bryant FRS, of which more in a later posting. Alas, Goswami and Bryant's detail is not carried through into the main publication, which has virtually nothing specific on the teacihng of literacy and maths - or indeed nearly anything else - and too many rent-a-quotes. There is just too little substance. One paragraph on primary languages, adding nothing to Rose, just will not do - any one of 150 primary languages consultants could have done better off the cuff. Overall, this is a poor return on so much work and so much of a charitable foundation's money. The Esme Fairbairn trustees should be hauled over the coals. 

The Alexander primary review is progressive education's answer to New Labour. Google provides links to a wide range of personalities and publications related to the review, which has used the names of the university and its sponsor to give it the trappings of an official policy proposal.  The main team members are here. The dissemination co-ordinator, Julia Flutter, is a psychologist, as are Linda Hargreaves and Ruth Kerschner. Christine Doddington and David Harrison's main fields are philosphy of education. Robin Alexander himself is simply a professor of education, notable for his contributions to "pedagogy", progressive education's pretentious alternative to teaching and learning. There is a little academic equation here - psychology + philosophy = pedagogy.

The three Ps rule. But only in progressive circles, where philosophy - in education, a set of ideas based on values rather than evidence - ruled the roost in primary schools from sixties to Lord Dearing's review of the National Curriculum in the mid-nineties. Robin Alexander was a big player in this field until he joined the "Three Wise Men"  review of primary education in the nineties. He has since tried to return to the fold, with this as his pitch to be leader of the flock.

His review was, quite rightly, rejected immediately by the government and Conservatives, chiefly on the grounds of its suggestion that children should not start formal education until the age of six.  Once Professor Alexander had staked so much on this card and lost, some other questionable ideas - such as having 30 per cent of the curriculum determined by "the community", and dividing it up into "domains" instead of subjects - disappeared into the mist.The review had a field day in the press and media on its launch day,  but we will hear less of it in the future.  It has collected a lot of evidence on the mistakes and authoritarianism of New Labour's education policies. As an alternative, it is too complicated, woolly-minded and impractical. It may be progressive education's swansong.