John Bald Ofsted and New Labour

New Labour, New Ofsted

New Labour has turned Ofsted into a political tool. In the process it has created a monster, that bases its judgements on inadequate evidence and unfair analysis. Ofsted is systematically unjust. The honest inspectors who still work for it can do nothing to repair the flaws in the system. 

I have led or taken part in over 170 inspections, including leading the inspections of some of the best and worst schools in the country. Our guiding principle, from Her Majesty's Inspectors, was to leave people feeling they had been treated well and fairly.  Our judgements, as Sir Michael Tomlinson has put it, were based on evidence, and the evidence had to be sufficient to substantiate the judgement. Our mistakes, when we made them, were honest and subject to review. New Labour's Ofsted does not treat people fairly, or set out to do so, and has been cleverly designed to make it virtually impossible to complain about it.  

This weblog will offer an independent voice, and place Ofsted in the context of other policies, notably New Labour's corruption of examinations and their use of "equal opportunities" as a weapon against quality and excellence.

A ray of light among the murk comes from a report on mathematics teaching that shows just what careful, thoughtful and rigorous inspection can do to improve the quality of education. Based on deep understanding of both maths and the processes involved in learning it, this report is devastating in its criticism of the abuse of testing by New Labour, and clear and courageous in showing how to improve. It is one of the best and most important inspection reports ever, and shows how Her Majesty's Inspectors earned the reputation they enjoyed before Ofsted.   Jack Grimston of the Sunday Times has described it as "a Landmark". It should also be a beacon, a signpost, and a turning point. But don't hold your breath.  

Update. Since the Haringey scandal, and Ms Gilbert's pathetic performance before the Commons select committee - she could not answer one single question about the Haringey inspection - Ofsted's incompetence has led it into crisis.  Sir Michael Tomlinson once said, rightly, that "poor teaching should not be tolerated."  Neither should poor, or in Ms Gilbert's case, very poor, inspection.

For my work on literacy and languages, click here

Whistleblower - where are the papers from the original Haringey review?

Following Mr Justice Foskett's rulings on Ofsted's "lack of candour", there is a missing piece of evidence that appears not to have been sought - the original evidence forms from Haringey's JAR review, the report that was, according to the Guardian's whistleblower, downgraded from good to unsatisfactory - a most unusual step in itself, as it moves the judgement by two grades not one. It is not credible that these have been lost. They may have been deliberately shredded, the action of a crook covering his or her tracks. They may still exist. They are the key to the whole issue. If the tone of these documents is positive, there is prima facie evidence that the report has been doctored. If it has been doctored, it should be possible to find out when, by whom, and at whose request.  The judge's request for chapter and verse should be extended to this area too.

Ofsted's whistleblower should get hold of his or her whistle again and blow harder this time - anything less than full disclosure of all documents related to Haringey since 2006 will let them off the hook.

New Ofsted - a lying organisation or just incompetent?

Most of us would think, if we asked ourselves the question at all, that school inspectors ought to tell the truth and not tell lies. After all, they are ritually referred to in newspapers as "watchdogs" and their findings are generally printed without much question. So what do we make of this report in The Guardian that Ofsted first denied the existence of draft reports on Haringey, and then has been forced to produce them and apologise? Here is a relevant section:

He demanded "a full explanation" about the way requests from Shoesmith's lawyers for information about the existence of the draft reports were dealt with. First they were "batted away", then the reports were said not to exist, "and now they do", Foskett said.

The court heard that Shoesmith's legal team had twice requested drafts of the Jar and been told they were not relevant. They asked a final time on the last day of the court hearing last month, after the Guardian reported a whistleblower's claim that a separate report had been downgraded, but were told Ofsted had been "unable to locate any further drafts".

After the handwritten notes were discovered late in October, other inspectors were asked to check for outstanding documents. The court heard that one was away but shortly after returning earlier this month he provided material including a folder of emails that were "overlooked" and the draft reports. James Maurici, for Shoesmith, said he was "simply at a loss to understand" why a sweep of available information that would have found the emails had not been conducted before.

The emergence of the documents was a "source of very considerable concern", he told the court, and Ofsted's submissions showed "very serious failings" over its duty of candour and response to requests for information.

Now I happen to be an inspector and know how Ofsted works - and how it worked even after David Bell got his claws into it. First, inspectors make notes on official evidence forms in either duplicate or triplicate. Typically, an inspector gives the top copy to the lead inspector and keeps the second for use in his or her evidence analysis. Then the top copies are kept as a record of inspection evidence in case the "evidence trail" needs to be tracked, for example as part of a monitoring exercise or in the event of a complaint. The lead inspector writes a draft of the report, in which s/he is bound to follow the evidence contained in the forms - the lead inspector cannot depart from this. This report is moderated before publication and usually submitted to the inspected institution so that any factual errors can be identified and corrected.

In the Shoesmith case, we have a combination of unexplained lapses from this procedure. First, HMCI was unable to answer any questions about the inspection put by the select committee. This looked odd at the time, and I put it down to incompetence. She clearly had not bothered to read the evidence, which would have shown exactly who Ofsted had spoken to and what they had said. Either that or inspectors had departed so far from good practice as not to bother to keep a note, again incompetence.  HMCI has so little practical experience of inspection that she probably wouldn't have known the right questions to ask anyway - not so Miriam Rosen sitting beside her, incidentally. So how did documents of such signal importance come to be mislaid, and how did people speaking for Ofsted come to deny their existence. In the end, the question of whether Ofsted is an incompetent or a lying organisation does not arise. It is both.

Gordon Brown and literacy

This letter from Gordon Brown to Jacqui Janes, mother of the Grenadier Guards soldier Jamie Janes, killed in Afghanistan, is worse than Kenneth Baker's famous failure to sign his name legibly on a letter to primary headteachers.

Men in power have an exaggerated view of the importance of their own handwriting and signature as a sign of regard to the recipient, and ignore their own shortcomings. Brown lives in a world of power and decision. He no doubt sees himself as some kind of national CO, writing letters to parents as in the First World War. Or perhaps he's seen Private Ryan, and aspires to be Abraham Lincoln.  No doubt he means well. 

A transcript of Gordon Brown's telephone conversation with Mrs Janes is here.

I make it seven spelling mistakes, not 25, but a lot of incomplete letters. It's partly a problem with someone trying to write as fast as he can think, which no-one can do, and partly, again, the idea of power. If Brown's time is so valuable, he should have understood the need to give more of it.

Edexcel

An examining board chief executive has resigned rather than go any further down New Labour's high road to ignorance, here. This is a brave decision, as such people, previously faceless bureaucrats, have been hyped up into educational superstars and paid hundreds of thousands a year. This is a mark of their importance to the New Labour project. You don't guard the guards, you bribe them. There is so much incompetence, and in papers like the Guardian, which had a special team of editors managing New Labour's coverage during the last election, that it's hard to keep up with it.

My source on that little nugget is one of the editors who was a member of the team. (The celebrated New Labour theorist Polly Toynbee was not a member.) They had a nice celebration after the result, with hotel accommodation to sleep it off. Attempts by the management to move the paper closer to the LibDems would, he told me, be subverted.

Ed Balls - man of action!

Never one to shut the door when it can be given a good slam, Ed Balls has cleansed the Augean Stables of Copland School following Sir Alan Davies' resignation by sacking the whole of the governing body. The Guardian's story, here, has a large proportion of the senior managemeht team going too - I was going to say most of it, but some schools, like some FE colleges, have so many senior managers that it is difficult to find someone on the staff who is not one of them. It is not Nulab's way to stint on administration - the more there is, the more control they have.

A problem here for the Conservatives - previous scandals in Brent were scandals in Brent, and could be tackled by sending in Her Majesty's Inspectors. Now every scandal is a government scandal. We can expect more as the Academy programme expands. The Academy programme will need more inspection, not less.

Jamie Oliver v Michael Rosen - knowledge poverty, deprivation and intercultural understanding...

Telegraph good this morning on Jamie Oliver, here.

This being Oliver, there had to be a television series. In Jamie's Ministry of Food, we were introduced to, among others, Natasha Whiteman, a single mother who fed her children kebabs and chips. Jamie, who minces meat but not words, fumed: "They've got a plasma screen, a Sky box, mobile phones and Nike trainers, but they'll sit on the floor and eat out of Styrofoam boxes seven days a week. There's a new kind of poverty, and it's f------ knowledge poverty."

Michael Rosen in Socialist Worker, offers a different cultural perspective, here

But there's something else. It's to do with the nature of what we might call "school knowledge". This is based on what used to be called "book learning", it favours the written word over the spoken, the theoretical and abstract over the practical. Schools themselves are arranged hierarchically with systems of regulation that are controlled from the top, as is the relationship with parents and the locality.

What all this means is that the kinds of knowledge and social qualities that you might have as a working class family are not affirmed and welcomed by most schools. Conversely, if you have the kinds of knowledge and social qualities that come from being educated privately and/or at a "good" school, then the chances are that your children will find school knowledge easier to absorb and school systems familiar.

I can walk into a class of seven year olds and within ten minutes see how these processes are at work. A reward system of smiley faces and stars punishes most children for not being good enough. The arrangement of the tables in the classroom punishes most children for not being good enough at their work. The top table is given more theoretical, abstract work to do. The parents of those children not getting the smiley faces and who are on the "lower" tables rarely, if ever, have their skills and knowledge affirmed.

The nub of the issue is this. Rosen says these children are likely to have practical rather than abstract skills. Cooking is practical, and Oliver is saying that the children's parents won't cook. Rosen says that childre who come from families that have less "book learning" have other skills that are equally valid and undervalued. Oliver is right to point out that the problem is not that the new working class children have alternative skills, but that they live in a poverty of activity and passive dependence. Rosen's view is from the past, when people developed practical skills they needed because they did not have access to education - for example, because their parents could not or would not afford a school uniform. It is also, paradoxically enough, based on another kind of "book-learning" - Marxist and post-marxist political theory. Oliver's view is from the here and now, and offers a shaft of insight into our broken society.

New Labour has linked in, usually covertly, with the ideas of Bourdieu, a celebrated French intellectual who is little known outside universities in this country. Bourdieu believed that what the educated - "middle" - classes did was accumulate knowledge, which he described as "cultural capital". They then used this to their own advantage and to the disadvantage of those in poverty, who did not have any education. New Labour's policies of "inclusion", aka dumbing down, are designed to attack cultural capital and to remove its advantages. There are several strands, but taxing knowledge through tuition fees, and dumbing down examinations to remove the advantages of the most able, are the two most prominent.

Ignorance, science and New Labour - Royal Society of Chemistry

This is a real GCSE question from 2008:

Our moon seems to disappear during an eclipse. Some people say this is because an old lady covers the moon with her cloak so that thieves cannot steal the shiny coins on its surface. Which of these would help scientists prove or disprove this idea?

There follow four choices

Collect evidence from people who believe the lady sees the thieves

Shout to the lady that the thieves are coming

Send a probe to the moon to search for coins

Look for fingerprints.

It is difficult to see how a government in the twenty-first century, after all of the hard work and struggle that it took to establish scientific method, can treat its population like prehistoric mindless idiots. Just in case the bozos who wrote this question believe that it is in any way a scientific test, they might consider the elements they don't include in their answer, notably scale and the supernatural.  The worst is that these people have had an education themselves, and are using it to condemn the next generation to something worse than the dark ages, under the disguise of a supposedly educational examination system. Don't they even know that the moon is made of green cheese, and that a cow once jumped over it? Even George W Bush knows that.

The sting in Professor Rose's tail...

New Labour disguises each new element in its policy of control under the heading of some kind of national improvement. Thus the title General Teaching Council, a respected body in Scotland, has been used to mask a politically correct Kangaroo court. So the proposal for a registered practitioner under the Rose review implies that anyone who does not accept their deliberately flawed analysis will not be allowed to register and so will be unable to work. Rose's view of dyslexia, discussed elsewhere in this weblog in detail, is a political fudge which even he can only defend as a "working definition", as he knows there is no evidence to support it. His proposal for registered practitioners will in effect validate this falsehood and invalidate the truth. It must be rejected or made honest.

How New Labour has botched primary languages

(cross posting with languages and literacy weblog)

The introduction of languages in the primary school has been botched, for the following reasons:

1. Cumbersome documentation, schemes of work and assessment that are too complicated for people to use. The French have a few pages in their primary curriculum, while our govt framework has 133, some of them with no more than a pair of inverted commas on the whole page. The reason for such poor communication puzzled me for some years, as the same mistake was repeated time and again, for example in the literacy strategy. The only answer is Blair's disguised New Left idea of "joined up government", in which everything the government does has to be loaded with its hiddent agenda.

 

2  No foresight of the need to train teachers and no provision to do so. Training institutions, like everyone else, are having to patch courses together with what they have.

 

3. No research, so no evidence of what does and doesn't work. The latest book on primary languages, by Philip Hood and Krustina Torbutt here promises research evidence, but does not really deliver it - the chapter on research is just a theory, which speculates that an approach that appears successful with older children - though again it needs proper investigation - will also work with younger ones. There is no solid evidence of children making better progress as a result of primary languages teaching, and we need some.

 

4. Too many competing initiatives, including social and emotional aspects of learning (SEAL), a complete new assessment system for primary schools, rehashed literacy and numeracy strategies - with the literacy strategy apparently abandoning its one successful idea (the use of word, sentence and text levels in teaching) - and new MA degrees for all teachers, as well as vicious and stressful pressure on heads from "New Ofsted" and the botched SATs. The result is that languages have had to fight to establish a toe-hold in teaching time, particularly for eleven year olds transferring to secondary school.

 

5. No progress (HMI), ten and eleven year olds doing same work as seven and eight year olds, and not progressing from words and phrases to sentences. No assessment in place in most schools to track progress. This has been accepted by national spokespeople at three conferences I've attended, but they have no solution to it. It is probably the most damning finding of all, and the only one based on genuinely independent evaluation.

 

6. An obsession with intercultural understanding rather than languages teaching - head of links into languages is an intercultural specialist whose CV lists no experience of languages teaching. Following lobbying by the Association for Language Learning, an attempt to force this into the curriculum for older children has been abandoned. It is an important issue, but it is not the key to learning languages.

 

7. Fudged guidance based on "expectations" and "entitlement" without making clear what was really required and when. Result -  the introductory date has been put back and back, and is now Sept 2011 - subject to Rose - and then for Y3 only. The result is that schools that don't want to introduce a language are under no obligation to do so. The response to my complaint that inpsection of languages is virtually optional has been interesting - the most HMI can do when a school says it has not made a start is to discuss what the obstacles are.

 

Overall, the introduction of primary languages has been beset by a lack of clear thinking and poor organisation. There has been an expansion in the number of schools that are at least doing something, but government claims of better progress are based on responses to surveys rather than hard evidence.  Primary languages need a clear place in national priorities, backed by clear thinking to enable schools to introduce language teaching without undue pressure and without abandoning key priorities. 

 

New Labour Electioneering.

One of the finer points of propaganda is knowing when to appear reasonable and pragmatic and even, on occasion, to tell the truth. A few popular decisions help too, like Alan Johnson's sacking of the aptly-named Professor Nutt. Johnson's point - that his constituents in Hull were in more danger from drugs than from falling off a horse - was well made. Likewise Mandelson's university review, here.  It sounds reasonable, and would be if it were not for the background of New Labour destruction of universities over the past ten years. When I was a student, I interviewed the Vice-Chancellor, who expressed the lofty view that the university had no obligations towards its students at all.  This is still the case, and needs to change. With Mandelson behind it, we can be sure that any change will be one that advances his agenda.