What the F & F?!

This morning the House of Commons Education Committee published its report into exclusions and alternative provision. It is quite lengthy and I have only skimmed it but Martin George at TES does a summary in his article here. He picks out for his first paragraph the accusation from the Committee that, 

"There appears to be a lack of moral accountability on the part of many schools"

To which my immediate response is how very dare they!!!

The rise in fixed term and permanent exclusions is an entirely predictable consequence of the fragmentation and funding (or lack thereof) of the English school system!

• Local authorities who have the statutory duty for safeguarding and ensuring sufficient school places have been eviscerated by the chaotic and unplanned rollout of academies
• Multi-academy trusts are not paid anything to meet the system costs of running their schools
• MATs and LAs are often set up as adversaries in the system fighting for resources that neither has access to, rather than collaborating in the interests of children
• Advances in obstetric science have meant a massive increase in survival rates of premature babies (up 33% for babies born between 22 and 26 weeks between 1995 and 2006), these children have a significantly higher incidence of SEND and behavioural issues that schools are often unable to cope with
• There is a creeping preference for a command and control approach to education that prejudices against the disadvantaged, dehumanises children and puts society at risk (see previous post about Hannah Arendt)
• It also only favours those children who are lucky to have informed advocates (pushy parents) who fight for them

Fragmentation and Funding (hence the title of my post) are the causes of this problem and oddly the former is not even mentioned in the report. Don't have a pop at schools, LAs, MATs or anyone else who is doing their absolute best to mitigate the damage of this extended experiment in self-harm.

Some suggestions:

• Consolidate the system into fewer entities (either by turning LAs into MATs or merging MATs) but 1,370+ different legal entities more than half of whom are non-viable in the medium term is just a waste of time and money
• Create a mechanism for mediating between schools and LAs on referrals to places in AP to address the degree to which fixed term exclusions and permanent exclusions are chips in a high stakes gamble that benefits no-one
• Embed more specialist provision units in main stream school to support children with medical and other needs and fund them properly: this will cross pollinate specialist teaching practice into the mainstream profession 
• Attempt to understand the massive and often unreasonable efforts made in mainstream schools to retain children often to the detriment of other children because of the moral purpose they are accused of lacking
• Understand that this is a problem that starts in Primary schools not a Secondary one. Experiment with a more fluid approach to behaviour management provision that resists labelling a child 'excluded' or 'failed' when it is the behaviour not the child that is the issue 

Rehumanize ourselves: what is the threshold of materiality for society?

I was at city hall this morning with the Deputy Mayor for Crime and Policing and a number of other MAT CEOs and Chairs to discuss knife crime. The event was in part to discuss issues and in part to raise awareness of the Mayor's 'London Needs You Alive" initiative for schools.

I may have mused in this blog before about Hannah Arendt's theories on the dehumanising effects of bureaucracy which are a precursor to totalitarianism. But it wasn't until this morning that I made the connection with the rise of the internet.

Freud said, "Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness". Arendt in the 'Human Condition', took issue with Karl Marx over the difference between 'labour' and 'work' and explored the impact of automation removing the sense of purpose from work. Both were addressing the very essence of what it is to be 'human'.

The difficulty when applying complex philosophical ideas to the messy construct of reality is that they often don't fit.

People want to matter. But it is increasingly clear that many, indeed perhaps most, feel that they don't. This sense of disenfranchisement is behind Brexit, Trump and the rise in knife crime. If you feel that you don't matter, you are going to struggle to create an identity.

I have railed in these pages before about the depressing and negative impact of bureaucracy upon people and society. As Arendt explains if you reduce a person to a statistic, it is much easier to do terrible things to them.

But the parallel dehumanising process is our move via our devices into alternative unreal spaces that are very different from the alternative realities of books and films. New spaces in which we can kill and violate others under the pretext that trolling, hate-speech and violent gaming are somehow only metaphorical they do not have very real consequences. In doing this we normalise the abnormal.

It is therefore easy to see how an inner-city minority ethnic youth or indeed your child may be so convinced of their own worthlessness that they cannot be expected to value the lives of others.

I have said for years that communities are built at the gates of primary schools. But we cannot leave Primary headteachers to carry this burden alone. We need to show them that their children, staff and schools matter to us. As how else will they create this construct in our young people? This is as important if not more important than teaching children how to read and write. Because if children do not feel safe or valued they will learn very little.

As we head into the accounting year end for academies, conversations will be held with auditors about the 'threshold of materiality'. How can we as a society have a broader conversation with those people who are completely convinced that they don't matter?

If you do anything today, make someone else believe they matter to you and to others.

P.S. Apologies to the Police for the mangling of their song title.

Echoes of the past and judging fishes by their ability to climb trees...

One of the things that I've always had difficulty articulating is the size and scale of the unknown unknowns that are the unintended consequences of structural reform in our fragmented education system. 

Taken together with the fallacy of understanding (i.e. just because I think I understand the problem doesn't mean that I do; just because I am clear about what I think I said doesn't mean that you understood me; just because you say you understand etc. etc. ... you get my drift)

There's an adage used in education circles which is often misattributed to Einstein, 

"Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." 

The 'quote' is rolled out when discussing the utility or lack thereof in testing children. But I think there is more mileage when thinking about the system as a whole. I spent a significant portion of the 1990s living and working in Moscow when the former Soviet Union was completely reinventing itself under Yeltsin. I have made comparisons before on conference platforms between this period of furious making-it-up-as-we-go and the ongoing process of structural education reforms in this country.

The contrasts I drew were that in a self-reinventing system, control and oversight is often knee-jerk and self-contradictory. But the analogy also works elsewhere.

I remember with great fondness the introduction of Western financial services products to Russia when Russian citizens had absolutely no concept of what 'insurance' or 'bank loans' were in much the same way as a fish lacks the construct of what a tree is and whether it should climb it. Russians would take out a loan to buy a car and then refuse to make any repayments and be utterly bewildered by threats from hastily invented bailiffs who lacked the legal authority to proceed.

Turning a school into an academy is entirely analogous with this in that both the headteachers to whom we are entrusting the management of the system and the self-multiplying central bureaucrats who are running to keep up with the inevitable chaos that ensues lack the constructs to deal with it and often lack an understanding of each other's behaviour. So genuine mistake begets overreaction begets mistrust begets centralisation and control begets waste...

Oddly this though rhymes with another conversation I had last week with a fellow linguist about Allophonia. We were talking about synthetic phonics and the weaknesses of separating sound from meaning in the teaching of language. I remembered with fondness Anthony Burgess's book, "A mouthful of air" which I had loved when I was young. In it Burgess explains the problem of Allophonia as being unable to distinguish between two phonemes because one does not know how to make them in one's mouth.

He describes the classic English speaker's complete inability to distinguish between the French words 'dessus' and 'desous' (above and below... which is kind of important). And then explains how to make a French 'u' sound by using English phonemes. First arrange your lips teeth and tongue to make the sound 'ee' as in bleed and then keeping the tongue and teeth in that position round your lips to make an 'o' as in blow. Practise that for a bit and you will start to hear the difference between 'dessus' and 'dessous'.

This fundamental weakness of blaming people for not being able to distinguish between things of which they have no experience and then overreacting to their failing plays itself out across the sector daily.