I had an interesting exchange with an old friend at Christmas, who wished me "hope and optimism" for 2020. I told him that I hadn't found the hope at the bottom of the box yet as I was too busy dealing with the demons unleashed by Pandora's Brexit.
But on reading that blog post by Dominic Cummings, in which he sets out his plans for the revolution in the Cabinet Office and invites assorted weirdos to come and join his team, perhaps I discern the first glimmer of hope.
The blog post is classic Cummings, confident, opinionated, vigorous and chaotic. I have long worried that given the keys to power, he will do as much harm to the country as a whole as, together with Gove and other SPADs, he was allowed to do to our education system in 2010.
In his non-traditional job advert, Cummings appears to highlight a decline in civil service capacity over the last decade, which he is addressing with his call for, "wierdos". The slant towards maths, programming and AI post-grads who will push forward evidence-based decision making should be welcomed. We have seen the damage that overconfident and superficially competent PPE graduates can do.
Provided that it is genuinely evidence-based decision making that is sought as opposed to massively complex post-hoc data taken into the basement and beaten until it agrees with the ruling narrative.
I remember many years ago being taken into the confidence of the stats team at the DfE who told me that any time they had to 'retire' a statistic as being patently untrue, they were under standing orders to 'produce' two stats that sounded at least as good. All of which goes to support the old adage that you can get statistics to tell you anything you like if you torture them long enough.
But as the transparency on education data has significantly improved over the last few years both with the compare schools and the financial benchmarking sites, I am going to chose to believe this is a sign of hope.
In his non-traditional job advert, Cummings appears to highlight a decline in civil service capacity over the last decade, which he is addressing with his call for, "wierdos". The slant towards maths, programming and AI post-grads who will push forward evidence-based decision making should be welcomed. We have seen the damage that overconfident and superficially competent PPE graduates can do.
Provided that it is genuinely evidence-based decision making that is sought as opposed to massively complex post-hoc data taken into the basement and beaten until it agrees with the ruling narrative.
I remember many years ago being taken into the confidence of the stats team at the DfE who told me that any time they had to 'retire' a statistic as being patently untrue, they were under standing orders to 'produce' two stats that sounded at least as good. All of which goes to support the old adage that you can get statistics to tell you anything you like if you torture them long enough.
But as the transparency on education data has significantly improved over the last few years both with the compare schools and the financial benchmarking sites, I am going to chose to believe this is a sign of hope.
The trouble is that there is a whole world of difference between being able to identify a problem and being able to solve it. This is what happened in 2010 when identifying an ineffective and inefficient education system, the half-implemented solution was to blow it up and start again.
2 comments:
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