John Bald/language and literacy

Professor Belinda Jack, Gresham College.

Professor Belinda Jack presents a series of lectures at Gresham College, where she is professor of rhetoric, at this link. Professor Jack is a French scholar, and illustrates her lecture on reading with a splendid film clip from Marcel Pagnol, in which we see the young child moving from decoding phonics to reading between the words or lines, and with neuroscience, which she treats with due circumspection, while using what it can tell us. For example, it seems that an original phrase stimulates more brain reaction than a cliché. Professor Jack understands the importance of taking nothing for granted - for example, I didn't know the origin of cliché, and, if you don't know either, I'll leave you to enjoy Professor Jack's lecture, and finish with a quotation from Alan Bennett on HM's introduction to personal reading, and her response to a private secretary's suggestion that she rely on his briefing. "Briefing," said HM, " is terse. factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject. Reading opens it up."

Brilliant. And congratulations to Gresham College and the Museum of London for presenting the lecture so clearly, with a transcript and powerpoint.  More to come - next lecture 28th January, and all on You Tube. The thinking person's television.

Oh to be in Blackpool...

Three cheers for Blackpool council, putting education before ignorance and investing in libraries, which people need more than ever - both for education and to look for work. Ignorance elsewhere is still having too much its own way. 

Michael Gove on inspection - and David Bell's poisoned chalice.

This report on Michael Gove's new approach to school inspection shows that he understands the damage that was done by changes to Ofsted in 2005, which moved inspection away from its true purpose and made it the enforcer of New Labour's agenda of virtual education. The damage done by this, and especially by David Bell as chief inspector, has been thorough, delibrate and devastating, so that no credence can now be placed on an Ofsted report unless it can be verified from other sources.

One result is that many schools rated outstanding are not, which devalues the judgements made on those that truly are. We need a return to the seven-point evaluation scale, in which excellent meant excellent, an example to the country, and not just very good. The New Labour term outstanding is a fudge, introduced after pressure on Ofsted to go a bit easier on state schools that were doing well, but had staffing problems and faults.

I know of at least two schools that have been judged outstanding even though children's books were not properly marked, and where judgements on support for children with special needs have been based on paperwork rather than observation. These faults have not been addressed in either of them, and one has been given a further outstanding report without even being visited. A pupil at one of them has told me "They don't look at the books much". These are not isolated examples - a parent I know is outraged by a recent good report on a school in which even GCSE science books were never looked at, and where her daughter was punished for writing on her book, marked in a hurry before an inspection, "This has only been marked because Ofsted are coming". I'm pretty sure the inspectors never saw the book - it's not hard to take one out of a pile.

At the other end of the scale, unsatisfactory - not good enough, but capable of improvement - is no longer distinguised from the poor and very poor teaching (egs children in a science lesson flicking acid in each other's faces and not wearing their protective goggles, children swearing at teachers and even assaulting them with impunity - also a sign of poor backup from senior management) that need to be cut out immediately. Sir Michael Tomlinson put it succinctly -"Poor teaching should not be tolerated."

The next HMCI will have to work hard and well to reverse David Bell's mistakes. Above all, he or she will need to understand inspection, and how to make it work in the interests of children. Not an easy appointment for Mr Gove to make, and I hope he takes his time - we have had two disastrous chief inspectors in a row, and cannot afford a third.

Carol Vorderman - one cheer.

Carol Vorderman's report on maths has the excellent idea of separating the arithmetic needed for adult life and work from the more abstract pure maths that is needed for other purposes. Unfortunately, it doesn't say enough about how skills in arithmetic develop, or about how they are best taught.

Above all, I can find no mention of multiplication tables. After accurate addition and subtraction, multiplication tables are the key to accurate calculation. Without them, people can only add and subtract one digit at a time. How tables are best learned, and their contribution to calculation, requires research. The reason we  have no research evidence is that large numbers of academics don't consider arithmetic to be the basis of mathematics, and don't consider tables to be important. They are wrong, and we need some proper investigation of the issue. 

Bullying and cyber-bullying of teachers.

After the Mail's account of a teacher being punched in the face with no action by the ignocracy, here, we have this from the Telegraph on cyber-bullyng of teachers and headteachers. One of the worst elements of the internet is the opportunity it affords for people to abuse, hurt and libel others while remaining anonymous. This is a subtle form of sedition. Sedition was only tackled during elections by having people include their name and address on everything they published. We probably need something similar on the interenet to stop people using anonymous networks to organise riots and damage innocent people they happen to dislike (much as we might approve of the anonymity afforded to people in unfree countries). At least the Telegraph piece includes a helpline.

The worst thing about the Mail piece is the outrageous action of school management in suspending a teacher who later resigned, after a malicious allegation that the pupil later admitted was made up. There should be compensation for teachers in such cases. I have a friend who resigned from an FE college after a recalictrant 16 year old girl told her that if she didn't stop annoying her she'd make something up and get her sacked. Again, no action against the student, whose human rights included the right to abuse teachers. Too late for helplines after people or their careers have been destroyed. No doubt the idiots in the last government and New Ofsted who set up this system are pleased with their work.

Michaela Community (Free) School, Katharine Birbalsingh

Katharine Birbalsingh, here, is very good on the trials of setting up a free school, picketed by the NUT and various furthe Left groups. How teachers can picket an information evening for a school is puzzling - unless it were a fascist school or some other extremist organisation - until you see that some people do not see education as primarily about teaching people things, as Ms Birbalsingh and I do, but about leftist politics. Good luck to her, and to the "have not" parents who want to sign up to her school, named after a teacher, Michaela, whom Ms Birbalsingh admires. A change to have a school named after a teacher rather than a self-important local politician.