The Education Continuum

Tom Bennett live on TES to help you to prepare for the new school year

Experienced teacher and behaviour guru, Tom Bennett will be available 3-5pm Wednesday 31 August to answer any questions you've got about getting ready for the new school term. Questions from NQTs, trainees and qualified teachers are very welcome.

http://newteachers.tes.co.uk/node/46023&s_cid=Mon_News_RES

 Tom is author of The Behaviour Guru and Not Quite a Teacher.

Melanie Wilson
Commissioning Editor (Professional Education)

Getting Ahead and Making an Impact

I've been sent links to two interesting articles in the last couple of days that I wanted to share with you:

London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) recently published a handbook exploring how social scientists can maxise the impact of their research. To find out more, check out the LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog and handbook here.

The Guardian ran a live Q&A chat titled 'how to get ahead in academic publishing' earlier this month and the 'best bits' can be found here.

Alison Baker
Senior Commissioning Editor (Academic Education)

Most young people did not riot, but can the ‘Lost Generations’ find their way?

Martin Allen and Patrick Ainley, authors of 'Lost Generation? New strategies for youth and education', have written an excellent blog on the recent student fees protests and London riots that I would like to share with you.

'There is more than one ‘lost generation’. We have seen at least two in the past months as young people have taken to the streets. Students have protested against fee rises and now a hard core urban youth have taken the stage. On both occasions, the media have focussed on the violent scenes – clashes with police and attacks on property, claiming student protesters were infiltrated by anarchists and that rioters were ‘classless’; but  these two groups would seem to represent very different constituencies.

On the one hand, the student protestors can be defined as middle- or  ‘aspirational’ working- class. They’ve played by the rules and worked hard at school but quickly became politicised in response to higher education being put beyond their reach and that of their younger brothers and sisters. Despite government and opposition promises, they realise their generation will be the first to be worse off than their parents. Even if many will eventually find work, in many cases it will not be anywhere near commensurate with their hard earned qualifications and may be part-time and ‘para-professional’ at best.

On the other, the urban rioters – The Guardian (16/08/12) reported 75% of those in court were under 25, the ‘criminals who shame the nation’ as The Telegraph called them (10/8/11) – have become marginal to society. Failed by an academic education system, without work and without hope, they no longer play by any rules. Not having any commitment to ‘fairness’ or any faith in ‘justice’, they were referred to by the New Labour acronym of NEET (Not in Employment Education or Training). They have become youth’s new ‘underclass’. Not ‘political’ compared to the students, according to some Manchester youngsters  interviewed by BBC News (11/08/11) – though not we assume, charged with any of the violence – the riots were ‘the best protest ever’ against a system that denied them access to the consumer goods they see flaunted around them.

There have been opportunities for these two groups to come together – working-class FE students joined the student protests against fees and to demand the restoration of Educational Maintenance Allowances – but it’s difficult to imagine them ever being united. Even though they often live next door in the same neighbourhoods, ducking and diving at the same part-time McJobs – if they are lucky.  Also, the number of young people who have taken to the streets still remains comparatively small. Most haven’t!

Nor have most young people’s woes been immediately caused by the recession or by the cuts that followed. As our book argues, they are the result of long-term socio-economic changes in the labour market. Nevertheless, recession has certainly worsened the situation of all youth. Their return to the streets has also coincided with the arrival of a government with little more than a ‘free market’ approach to youth employment that leaves the NEETs to rot in gangland.

For all its limitations, New Labour at least introduced the Future Jobs Fund, reduced the number of NEETs to a claimed 8% of school-leavers (now 15%) plus introduced the EMAs that the Coalition have all but abolished. The number of university places were greatly increased to nearly reach Tony Blair’s target of 50% of the age-range  –  47% of young women (42% of young men).

Now as the economy flat-lines, youth unemployment remains at the highest level since records began and  an estimated 600,000 people under 25 have never had a day’s work in their lives. So nearly all young people face bleak futures and stark choices. Despite wanting to be seen supporting ‘the squeezed middle,’ Cameron and his Education Ministers, Gove and Willetts, clearly believe too many working-class people have gone to university. So the Coalition are pricing them out – offering instead ‘apprenticeships without jobs’ and more unpaid ‘work experience’.

Tory supporters like The Telegraph editorial above and the ubiquitous star of Tory conferences, one-time teacher Katharine Birbalsingh, have also accused the school system of being at least partially responsible for causing the riots with Cameron and Gove calling for more discipline in classrooms. As in the 1970s, when industrialists declared ‘I blame the teachers’ for the unemployment they were themselves creating, schools and colleges are being blamed for an employment crisis not of their making.

Fortunately, the vast majority of ‘ordinary’ youngsters will not riot; but without economic policies that ensure reasonable employment prospects and at least a sniff of prosperity, will they continue to cram for exams when they have little chance of getting into the top universities? Or will they be tempted by cut-price ‘apprentice-degrees’ in FE or dodgier training agencies?

It may be that the riots will tip them towards the worst of both worlds – getting even more into debt (‘a small mortgage’, as the new NUS President describes degrees estimated at £60,000) in desperate hopes of a secure job in three or four years, ‘when the economy has picked up’. Thus they may continue to scramble up the down-escalator of devalued qualifications so as not to fall into the ‘underclass’ beneath;  but they may not be so far from them as their parents think!'

Peter Worley: School Innovator

Continuum author, Peter Worley, is now an expert on Innovatemyschool.com!

You can read his latest article, Socratic irony in the classroom: Clouseau or Columbo? online now.

Pete is author of The If Machine - Philosophical Enquiry in the Classroom and his forthcoming title The If Odyssey - A Philosophical Journey Through Greek Myth and Storytelling for 8 - 16-Year-Olds is out next year.

 

Melanie Wilson
Commissioning Editor (Professional Education)

A Lesson in Literacy

Staff and pupils at Chenderit School in Northamptonshire were delighted and humbled to be awarded the TES Outstanding Literacy Initiative Award for 2011 having been a finalist last year. This tops a stellar year in which OFSTED recognised the school as Outstanding. Headteacher and author of Learning to Lead - Using Leadership Skills to Motivate Students Graham Tyrer said, ‘It gives us pause to reflect on where next for literacy in our national system. So, here are a few thoughts:

Literacy is at the heart of all things: it launches spacecraft, it allows us to start and solve wars, and it brings to life and enriches emotions and relationships; with it we can nuance and make sense of who we are and who we might become. The more complex and fine the craft of our words become, the more likely it is that we can live in a world championing justice, fairness and peace.

So, as the Department for Education in the UK makes plans for the new curriculum, here is my wish list:

Dear Mr Gove, Please make sure that we have schools where talk and listening develop skills of interdependence, debate and innovation. Young people are alive with invention and compassion and energy. Their talk is vibrant, assertive and often expresses their confusion with their endlessly complex lives. So be ambitious for them. Expect them to be able to talk poetry, science and justice. Be rightly wary of the sterility of functionality.

Help every teacher to believe in themselves as a teacher of words. Every aspect of every source of knowledge is crafted in language. I hope all classrooms celebrate, take risks and invent new ways of speaking, listening and writing. Words are so precious, vulnerable and robust. We must help all teachers to lead language learning with their students. Language doesn't stop at the door of the English classroom, it must be treasured and exemplified and experimented with in every part of the school and given as much status as so called subject content, most of which – if we are honest – will be ossified within a year or two.

If there must be assessment, keep it simple. Prioritise accuracy and flair in equal measure. An individual’s background is irrelevant; young people, their families and the people that make up the schools they attend are capable of the most astonishing insights and sensitivities. And to do that, no child should be left to drift through the system without being able to enjoy and feel confident that they have achieved core basic standards.

And have our students become expert in the discourses of learning. Have our students able to talk about, debate and invent new ways of becoming exceptional electricians, poets, plumbers, space explorers and medics. We become adept at skills when we learn how to learn, when we enjoy learning, when we feel ourselves leaders and inventors of learning.

Help us to open students' minds to texts they may never have heard of. Give us the freedom to choose texts that excite the children we teach and not drag them through a programme of medicinal reading. Let students see why some writers have gained status and others have not. Give them the choice as to what they want to use to make change and to be the poets, and innovators of tomorrow. Of course, they should not be allowed to journey past writing of the most extraordinary influence and beauty: but force march them and they will resent the very names of Shakespeare, Keats, Hardy, Pullman and Morpurgo.

Make the acquisition of skills personal, not linked to age. Allow students to accelerate through the craft of reading and writing and speaking at a pace that excites and liberates them. If language is important, expand the time they study, invent, refine and grow their linguistic skills. For at least an hour each day, students should be learning and inventing their language in secondary schools.

We want our young people to be whoever they want to be. Only if they are excited and skilled in the art of language will they be able to invent with others a future they deserve. So, describe rather than prescribe. Don't prevent invention: the language of innovation is the language of freedom.'

This guest post was written by Graham Tyrer, Headteacher of Chenderit School and author of Learning to Lead.

Melanie Wilson Commissioning Editor (Professional Education)