John Bald Ofsted and New Labour

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.

Yet More Imposed Ignorance from Ed Balls - and the Conservative alternative

Readers of this weblog will know my view that Ed Balls is an ignoramus who is keen on power. Ignorance plus power is a dangerous, anti-social combination. Warwick Mansell, here, shows that at the same time as setting up a pseudo-independent body, Ofqual, to oversee examinations, our heavy footed secretary of state is taking 15 new powers to tell it what to do, including directing it to "have regard to" - ie follow or get the sack - specific government policies - and a policy is just that, not a statutory requirement. Did Balls think that one up himself, or was it from his pseudo-Sir Humphry, the apparatchik David Bell?

Fortunately, the Conservatives are going to abolish the QCA, renamed the QCDA. Hurray. They will reform Ofqual. That is the second important policy change, after restoring the role of universities in examinations, that can be set against the charge that they have no new policies. The QCA under whatever name has been the engine of new Left policy in education, often far to the left of the government and intellectually corrupt. We will be well rid of it.

What New Labour Really Thinks of Teachers

Ed Balls announces £2 billion cuts in school expenditure, here. And what is this deep thinker going to cut? Politically correct propaganda masquerading as languages teaching? Building projects that are no improvement on what they replace? The ignocracy at the DCFS (Ducks Can't Swim Fast)? 

No. He is going to cut promoted posts in schools and headteachers' salaries (by giving one headteacher a lot of schools, so that the de facto head in a school is an associate or deputy). For all its talk of saints and heroes, New Labour sees teachers as a means to implement its social policies, which it sees as part of an international march towards equality. Cutting teachers' career prospects is just another step on the road to equal opportunity, which, in this case, means reducing opportunities for teachers. Balls doesn't care - like everyone else in New Labour, he's on a nice little earner himself.

A bigger scandal than Baby P and Haringey

The problem with an incompetent government such as this one - and the last Conservative government was as bad in many areas - is that the bunch of ignorant hacks who run most local authority services go unchecked. The education of children in care has taken some important steps forward under New Labour, with education officers in every authority and a responsible teacher nominated in every school. This gives something to build on, and is one of their most significant achievements. The activists in local authority social services departments criticised my own work in this area as putting too much emphasis on achievement, which was not appropriate for these children - political correctness, as if they are all "differently abled" rather than sharing the same range of strengths and weaknesses as the rest of us. At the same time, these people neglected their responsibilities, leaving many children to drugs and prostitution while remaining themselves responsible to no one except their own little circle.

Today's Guardian has them "losing" no fewer than 77 children from a home outside Heathrow. No doubt the Hillingdon social services have been targeted by a Mafia-type organisation they are ill-equipped to oppose. But why has Nulab not helped them, and why is the news even now "restricted"? The underlying problem is that there is no-one competent to sort out those who are not. New Labour was born out of a deep disapproval of Britain and its role in the world, and decisions it has taken on that basis have led to situations such as this.

Local Authorities and Education

A sad story in The Independent about a headteacher caught up in a religious dispute and receiving no support whatever from her local authority. This is entirely typical, and brings into question how we ever arrived at a situation in which activists, religious or political, could take control of education at a local level and wreck it. The headteacher in question recognises the religious convictions of her persecutors, but regards the local authority as "cowardly". There will follow a few examples of the cowardice, and above all the incompetence of local councils in education. They serve chiefly to illustrate the complexity of British education, and the way it is dominated by various power groupings, leaving the interests of children a long way behind. 

• Essex in the 1980s was dominated by a secondary inspectorate dedicated to protecting school hierarchies irrespective of right and wrong, and by a primary inspectorate with strong left-wing views. Councillors were useless, ignorant and well-meaning. Two of them once visited my advisory centre for reading. What, I asked, did they consider when appointing headteachers? We go by what the officers tell us, they replied. They're the experts.  The "experts" did their best to conceal a pattern of falling reading test scores from councillors until I gave one of them the precise questions he needed to ask in order to obtain them.
• When I started teaching reading in Lambeth in 1973, my head of department had just returned from a three week spell in hospital after being beaten up by a gang on school premises. The police knew who they were, but the Inner London Education Authority prevented any action.
• In 1999, I led an inspection team that decided that a Cambridgeshire primary school had serious weaknesses in the teaching of English and maths. The local authority representative led the governors in attacking me and the inspection team during the feedback, attempting to get us to name individual teachers (so that they could complain if we did) and taking no notice whatever of the points we made. They then sacked the headteacher.
• In 1996, I took part in an inpsection in Lambeth. The school failed because of two teachers whose work was graded consistently poor. The head had not been supported in any of his efforts to deal with this situation, and the local authority sacked him. Its chief officer, Heather Du Quesney, had stated publicly that in the event of a school going into special measures, the headteacher had to go. Very convenient for local authorities, who are never short of a scapegoat.
• Shortly before this, a former colleague, who had become special needs inspector for this authority, resigned after her superior had rewritten two reports to make them more positive, without consulting her.
• In Newcastle (before the appointment of David Bell to that authority), an inspector who had failed two primary schools was forced to resign.
• In the mid-eighties in Essex, the local authority decided that the next six secondary headships were all to go to women, irrespective of merit. This decision would be illegal now and probably was then, but the local authority's system of "pink minutes", which were seen only by senior officers, meant that the public never heard of it.

These are just a few cases of local incompetence. National incompetence, in the shape of Balls and Ofsted, is worse because its effects are more wide-ranging. But the essence is the same - people are not considering education in terms of maximising opportunities for children, but as a personal battleground for adults.

Verdict from New Labour's Kangaroo Court

So, New Labour's Kangaroo Court has found Alex Dolan guilty of misconduct, in that she told the truth, and has sentenced her to a year's suspension. The pseudo-arguments put forward by the ignocracy, through its minion Ralph Ullman, are pathetic. This luminary was until recently head of a public school, Wellingborough, and would no more have put up with the behaviour seen in Ms Dolan's film than take her place as a supply teacher. More in today's Sunday Times.

Mr Ullmann has been boasting about his school's inspection report in his magazine:

“Wellingborough is a good and improving school. Boys and girls in all three sections

are happy and proud to be members of their school. They mostly achieve good

standards, both in their academic work and in their extracurricular activities and

sport. They are polite, well behaved and eager to learn. The very hard-working

and committed staff provides pastoral care of a very high standard at all stages

of the school. The excellent relationships that the pupils have with one another and

with their teachers are based on mutual respect and support.”

 

 "Mostly achieve good standards" - not quite the Everest of professional achievement. Still, his prefects wear nice red gowns. How dare those whose parents can't afford fees complain if their children are sent to a hell hole instead of a school? And why should an uppity supply teacher be allowed to show up the shortcomings of senior staff? These are professional people, and make professional decisions on professional matters. Their decisions are right, or they would not have made them. Criticism of them is therefore unprofessional. Mr Ullmann is a professional person himself, though he probably never had to send children home when inspectors were coming.

 

He and his panel are a negative force in society. What kind of person is prepared to join in an organisation dedicated to the protection of substandard education from public scrutiny? The mentality of local authority hacks, who draw a large salary, promote Nulab politics, and do no useful work, is clear enough. But some of these people are teachers, and for teachers to join in this mild combination of inquisition and witch hunt puzzles me. They do not behead their opponents, or send them to gulags. They probably think they're being reasonable - a year's ban is no great hardship to someone who has already moved to other work, and who is unlikely to return. But they are as responsible for the conditions in rubbish dump schools as the people who are actually running them.

PS. Comments from The Guardian included the following. The second paragraph gets to the heart of the matter - the mess, according to the contributor, is typical.

I personally think that the GTC made the right decision. It was ridiculously unprofessional to breach the trust of her colleagues, and most importantly, her pupils in this way. I cannot fathom why, if she wanted to continue being a teacher, she did not do the documentary anonymously.

As for the documentary itself, it seems pretty humdrum. I recognised nearly every scene from my own days in an utterly average secondary. Supply teachers always get walked over. Ofsted exams are always abused. Pupils often behave dreadfully. What I find most surprising is that anyone was surprised by it at all.

Interlude. Notes from a Glaswegian - plus a PS from The Times

I was born in Glasgow in 1950. A fellow Weegie, as a Mr Ian Rankin of Edinburgh calls us, has today complained about "racism" from one of New Labour's ignocrats, who apparently could not understand her accent.  

Glasgow accents come in many forms, from Rab C (from Rabbsie, from Robert) Nesbitt, to what were known in my youth as "Wally close, gless door" types, the stairways of whose flats had tiles half way up the walls, and whose front doors were glazed, usually with stained glass. These people lived in different worlds from our family, who nevertheless occupied a nice flat -  a penthouse now - at the top of the Bank Building at Tollcross. Here it is 

I attended Newlands school round the corner, an establishment that owed much to the true seat of Scottish education, Lochgelly in Fife, where Mr James J Dick did well for himself by supplying schools with tawses. It did not do to cut your hair into crenellations if you attended Newlands.

Here is the front side. I can't read any inscription above the door, and will refrain from inventing one.

And here is the back

And here is the local library, where I was apprehended at the age of five or so for trying to use my father's tickets. I wondered a bit about the columns and portico when I saw it again, but why not pay some respect to literacy? The library is small, but these things say it's important.

We had never heard of racism, but we were brought up to be proud of being Scottish and to hold the English in contempt. The pride was based, to a degree, on a celebration of achievement, work and inventiveness, but there was never much reason given for the hostility towards the English.  The finest date in history was 1314, Bannockburn, the worst 1745, Culloden. Race did not come into it. This was nationalism.

Race still does not come into it. Glaswegians are not a race, any more than are the inhabitants of Birmingham. New Labour's backdoor totalitarians have taken racism and applied the term to any group, whether racially based or not. This again is Milliband's "lodestar" of equal opportunities. Nulab is trying to re-write the language as part of its attempt to reorganise society. But race is race, Weegies are Weegies, and Brummies are Brummies. New Labour are ignorant. Does that make them a protected racial group too? Or is their ignorance more a matter of faith?  I've come, on the whole, quite to like the English. They could be more open with people they don't yet know, but they make the best of friends, particularly in rough weather.  My offended compatriot should speak more clearly if she wants that nice Ms Harman to understand her. 

PS from The Times - high levels of violence in Scottish secondary schools. Food for thought for those others of my compatriots who like to think that Scottish education is better than English, usually on the grounds that it is Scottish. 

And a PPS. Some airline pilot is trying to sue BA for being called  "A Jock". Another consequence of Nulab's Year Zero. Being Scottish is not a racial matter. It may be good, it may be bad, but it has nothing to do with race, and only wilful perversion of the language will make it anything else.

Interlude - the New Left and Life's Lottery

The row over lotteries for school places shows the one-dimensional thinking of the Left more clearly than any other of their recent errors. Endorsed by such luminaries as the Deputy Director of the London Institute of Education, the lottery aimed to break the link between housing and education by sending children to schools through a version of Ernie. Education as premium bond.

But think of a snag - if there are five schools in a town, your child has only a one in five chance of going to the nearest one. Traffic turmoil every morning, and no chance of organising a decent bus service, because everyone will be travelling from different directions. And then, think of continuity. No one will be able to move to secondary schools with their friends - or even their twins.

And the next snag - if your intake comes out of a hat each year, how can you plan for it? What if you're geared up for a high proportion of children with English as an additional language, and Ernie sends them all someplace else? What do your specialist teachers do then? And what if you're excellent at A-level maths and find yourself with no students? Or if you haven't got a music teacher (a real example, by the way) and people come to you wanting to do GCSE music. A great thing lateral thinking - it led to the Dardanelles in the first world war.

The only solution is not to have poor schools, which means, as Estelle Morris knew but the rest of NuLab doesn't, that there is no alternative to the long hard road of improving the ones we've got or, if all else fails, as it sometimes does with Leftist governing bodies, tearing them down and buiding new ones - this is the real reason for the academies programme. But as long as the Left have so much control over educational thinking, we will not have solutions. We will just have more problems. Education is not simply a cash commodity, but a human process, with all the dimensions that entails. We cannot afford to be ruled by politically-motivated academic dopes.

Broken Britain, broken people

At the heart of New Labour's failure in secondary education is its profound ignorance of what education is about, how it works, and why it goes wrong. With the exception of Estelle Morris, none of their education ministers has had any serious experience of the work, and she was forced out because she would not go along with a key element of their New Left programme, university fees.

This week's Sunday Times has a story from a man who broke under the pressures at Harris Academy in Peckham. Every element of it is interesting, but the situation is reminiscent of that at Hackney Downs, before Sir Michael Willshaw turned it into a successful academy. But Sir Michael had been successful before, and using the same methods. It doesn't matter what the school is called.

This quote reminds me of my experience as a lead inspector:

The children,” he said, “were hungry to learn.” Sometimes he would stand in a class and see the faces of children in front of an inadequate teacher. “It was as though they were asking me, ‘What are you going to do about it?’.”

As a lead inspector under David Bell, I got just such a look from a child in a maths class, about to take GCSE, and being "taught" by someone who was completely unable to communicate because of a combination of muddled thinking and a very strong accent - it doesn't matter what the accent was, the problem was that no-one could understand him.  Most children had given up and were messing about - understandably, as they were not going to learn anything, whether they paid attention or not. The girl, understanding that her future was at stake, looked at me. If I could not do anything, who could? I will not forget that look. I wrote to tell Bell about it, but did not get a reply.

Our inspection team said that the school was not providing a satisfactory standard of education, and, as the handbook required, we said it needed special measures. Almost a fifth of lessons we saw were unsatisfactory, and many of these were poor or very poor, in one case to the extent of being dangerous. There was no complaint from the school, but the local authority abused me during the feedback, and David Bell overruled the team, without giving any reason.

The head said that if they had got rid of the poor teachers, the same ones would only be sent back by the supply agency as there was no-one else. The school's basic problem was a shortage of good teachers, a problem that was hitting a lot of schools at the time and making the government look bad. With no reason given for overruling our decision, I will suggest that the real reason was that too many schools had started to fail, and that this was making Nulab look bad. The HMI who told me that we had been overruled said that it had to be shown that the review process "had teeth". Ofsted has admitted to overruling just four schools during the period, but we will probably never know the true figure. Another HMI told me that a quarter of judgements had been overruled, and he was pleased to have been part of the process. He didn't put a figure on it.

The parents voted with their children's feet, and the school is scheduled for closure. A pity. If it had been given staff and support, it could have tackled its problems. Instead, they killed the messenger.

Behaviour in the news

The lying cheats of Her Majesty's Government have the brass neck today to praise schools for imposing discipline, to the extent of suspending pupils in large numbers in order to establish a baseline. In line with the ignocracy's spinning ways, the full report is not yet available, allowing ministers (Jim Knight in this case) to say what they like.

As every teacher and inspector knows, however, these policies fly in the face of the government's "inclusion" juggernaut, which has been penalising people who have insisted on creating the conditions in which education can take place. Ofsted, it seems, has rediscovered a basic truth. It now needs to restore proper inspection, so that those who are allowing bad behaviour to wreck education are identified and made to change.