The straw man to end all straw men

I am dismayed by the English & Welsh vote to leave the EU. I am not surprised by the English vote, indeed I have been worrying about it for the last six months.  The Welsh I had thought would see which side their bread was buttered on... But alas no.

I will be angry for some time as this is electoral self-harm on an epic scale.  

But I am just as angry at the reaction of the remain lobby who jump to label all those who voted to leave as fascists and racists.  This is as stupid as that which they accuse of their opponents. 

I can completely understand why people voted at they did:

And it starts with this marvellous maths meme on the Iceland football team who recently beat the English (which is very funny)

I keep asking myself how on earth did 17.4 million people vote to leave the European Union. And of course the answer is that they didn't.  

Utterly invented but indicative tally of people who voted leave:



And before anyone gets upset the same thing applies to those who voted remain (ie there were lots of different reasons that added up to slightly fewer than the above).

The point is that plebiscites are the tools of politicians who don't actually care what the people think but just want to manipulate them (this is probably still part of the GCSE History curriculum).  They are the tools of demagogues and dictators.

David Cameron didn't have the courage or the decency to put remaining in the EU in the Conservative manifesto.  He thought he could split the vote and win or narrowly win the election and then either avoid altogether or manage the electorate through a referendum. But people don't like being managed or patronised or talked down to.  

Jeremy Corbyn is almost as responsible for his abjectly wet attempt to support remain. But so is Nick Clegg for destroying the Liberal voice in the UK. So is Tony Blair for not introducing Proportional Representation and making people in non-marginal communities actually think that their vote mattered (oh and for invading Iraq). Likewise the entire union movement for giving us Ed Millband and then Jeremy Corbyn.  Likewise Margaret Thatcher for undermining society as a whole. And so on through Callaghan, Wilson, Heath etc. Likewise the fourth estate for the most pathetic failure to hold both sides of the campaign to account for their shocking lies and exaggerations.

This is not a triumph of democracy. It is an abject failure.

We might as well have a revolution...

Well he would say that wouldn't he...

This will be my last post on the EU referendum.

It is probably the most important choice put to the UK electorate in the almost 50 years I have been a British Citizen.  But regardless of how passionate and scared I am about the outcome on June 24th, I know you can go too far in trying to convince people and end up simply alienating them; as Eddie Izzard did on question time last week...

[when you are sitting next to Nigel Farage in a debate and Nigel starts to look measured you must know you are doing something wrong]

My parting shots to the debate all come from conversations I have had over the weekend and sit under three broad headings.

Question people's motives
I spoke to someone on Friday night who told me that his mind had largely been made up following a conversation with an affable city trader (a decent sort of bloke) who had reassured him that the UK economy would be fine following Brexit.  The city would go on making money and based on this he favoured Brexit.

I got the distinct impression that this was a remain own goal.  If the campaign hadn't been so relentlessly negative about the UK spinning into an economic black hole of its own making (which of course it won't) then he might have opted for the status quo.

I think this highlights the importance of motives.  I am sure that the city trader my friend spoke to came across as friendly, credible and reasonable.  But he had a significant vested interest in my friend believing him.

[incidentally if you want to know about where we should be directing our anger, rather than against immigrants and foreigners, you might be interested to know that banks and hedge funds have commissioned exit polls so they can make a profit from the referendum because the broadcasters are not doing any]

So, whichever way you lean or vote please ask yourself what does this person stand to gain by my believing what he has to say?*

Look behind the first line of argument
The second conversation was with my plumber.  Who, incidentally, is about as wonderful a plumber as you could wish for. He is British, although his girlfriend is Polish and his concerns are all about the unelected eurocrats who tell us what to do.

Sovereignty has been put front and centre by the Brexit campaign.  They argue that British people should make decisions about British laws, which of course sounds like a good thing. Although the argument does hide the, 'nasty foreigners who can't be trusted idea' inside itself.  I would suggest that it is not about reclaiming sovereignty, it is about concentrating it in someone else's hands.

Brexiteers are not arguing to reclaim the power over your life from Johnny Foreigner to give it back to you.  They want the power for themselves.  And having left the EU, there will be significantly less counterbalancing power.  They argue that if we can take back power from the EU at least you will be able to kick them out at the next election if you don't like what they are doing.  But they make this argument knowing that we don't actually live in a democracy. The power to influence a British general election is concentrated in the hands of a terrifyingly small group of people and that group includes Rupert Murdoch.

I would never claim that the EU is a beacon of democracy, it isn't.  It's what you get when you build compromise on top of compromise.  But I would argue that the EU is significantly less vulnerable to minority control than a Brexited UK.

The concept of Boris Johnson claiming to be 'for the people against the elite' ought to make your brain leap outside of your head at its sheer nonsense.  Yet we let him get away with it only because the Prime Minister is even more privileged and lacks Boris's self-deprecating charm.

Above all do no harm
The third conversation was the only argument that I had some sympathy with.  Over a delightful game of mini-golf with my wife and daughter, my wife's oldest friend explained to me that he was backing Brexit because it might be the first step towards bloody revolution.

He argued that the current state of the nation is so terrible we must do something.  The rich are getting richer. The poor are getting poorer. What little social cohesion remains is evaporating faster than the ice-caps.  Why not blow the whole thing up and start again? It's not as if it could get any worse.

Could it?

Well, yes it could. Because if we vote to leave, we will effectively be voting to transfer power from one group of elitist, greedy, selfish %$#@ers, without moral compass, who have no understanding of or interest in what life is like for normal people...

To another group of even more elitist, even more greedy, even more selfish but also racist @#$%ers who are simply pretending to care about you because they want your vote.

You don't believe that Donald Trump actually cares about anyone other than himself.  Why would you believe them?

Take a tip from doctors.  If you are unsure what is going on,  first be sure to do no harm. Please vote to remain.

I'll give you a hug if you do.

_________________________
* Personal disclosure so you can question my motives.  I don't think that my family will benefit financially one way or another.  My elderly mother's house in France may actually go up in value if Sterling collapses but the value of our house may also go down. I have no shares. My pension will probably be unaffected either way in that I will never be able to afford to retire.

Attempt #2 to raise the quality of debate in education

With a nod to my earlier post on creeping stupidity... I should declare in advance that I am CEO of an Academy Sponsor (the Elliot Foundation) and I have helped a number of of academy chains and groups of schools who are considering whether becoming an academy is in their interest.  But I'm getting a little bored with the spectacular inaccuracy and prejudice presented as fact on all sides of the education debate.

Yesterday the Times published an article under the title 'Huge Gulf in Academy Standards Revealed' (and I'm not having a pop at the Times as this is representative of the reporting on the sector as a whole and they have at least tried to inform).  They had commissioned Price Waterhouse Coopers to analyse national school results and had produced a league table that I have pasted below:

You might think that I would be chuffed to bits to be running the second best primary chain in the country.  Particularly since I was in the media a fortnight ago calling for league tables of academy sponsors and for OFSTED to inspect academy chains.  But actually I think the whole table is probably rubbish because it doesn't give you enough information to decide whether it is meaningful. And I'm hoping that, because it says we are great, you might believe me when I pick it apart.

It would appear from the table that what PWC has done is to take the publicly available school performance tables (that were published last November) and stick them into a spreadsheet to work out collectively what percentage of children in each Multi Academy Trust achieved the expected level (in primary) and their average point score (in secondary) and then ranked them.

If this all that PWC has done (and it could be a big if as the Times has not published the actual report and the rankings are not in strictly numerical order at the bottom so they probably haven't) then it is so criminally simplistic as not to bear thinking about.  It's like comparing Havant Town Football Club with Real Madrid...

Not all primary schools are created equal.  This is not some pathetic, wet, lefty moan about unfairness.  It's blunt and simple.  Some primary schools deal with children who arrive at the age of four still in nappies and unable to communicate. And some don't.  To compare them simply in terms of the levels their children have reached at the end of the schooling is dangerous.

So if you are going to publish tables, and I believe we should because otherwise no-one will trust you,  then you need to publish them with some form of context data and seek to inform people about it.

English as an additional language Pupil Premium Index of Multiple Deprivation Times/PWC score Harris Federation Primaries 23% 36% 57% 84% Elliot Foundation 47% 45% 78% 78% Wakefield Diocese 37% 45% 79% 63% National average 19% 27% 50% 80%

In the above table I have quickly pulled together some of the more common measures that indicate challenge in schools for the top two and one of the bottom three (of the table above) and given the national average (source DfE data and ONS data but figures not in bold are my calculations so may contain errors) and you should immediately see that there is significant variance in all the levels of challenge (incidentally the Index of Multiple Deprivation ranks the post codes in the country from 1% least deprived to 100% most deprived).  So a blanket sponsor x is better than sponsor y is not immediately apparent.

And this is before we factor in the level of transience, which is pupils moving in and out of schools or other issues affecting performance.

If you want to have a reasonable comparison, you are much better off looking at pupil progress or value add rather than attainment .  But to do that you have to assess children very early in their schooling and that is a whole other debate...

So just to summarise:

• Making a school into an academy doesn't improve anything unless it comes with significant other changes to the way that school is run or children are taught (otherwise you are simply changing the name)
• Most of the most challenged schools in the country (particularly at secondary level) have already become academies so like-for-like comparisons with schools under local authority control is impossible
• Equally many sponsors have not had their schools long enough to claim that any improvement or deterioration was their fault or to their credit
• It could simply be regression to the mean (ie on average things are average)
• Although it is only human to want to simplify things into good and bad
• It is usually too complicated to give such a simple answer

Don't rush to judgement.  

Teachers and school leaders want to improve outcomes for your children.  

I wish I could say the same about everyone else.

Enough already! Can we stop the stupid please...?

Unfortunately, complete ignorance does not prevent strongly held opinions.  In fact the opposite is true.  He who shouts loudest, generally shouts stupidest.  And those who know more, generally doubt more...

In the past this was less of a problem.  You could walk away from the drunk in the pub or the nutter on the bus.  But the rise of social media has just given lots of idiots a megaphone and a soapbox. Moreover, we seem to have forgotten the caveat to the most common justification for self-endarkenment,

"Everybody is entitled to an opinion...."

Yes they are.  But they're not entitled to have that opinion taken seriously unless they can marshall evidence in its defence.

If you want to be taken seriously you must cite your sources and declare any interest so that other people can evaluate you opinion.

Rant over. Sorry.  

The trouble with the Brexit debate is it's all too negative

It is generally acknowledged that fear and greed win more votes than anything else and fear tends to win more than greed.  The added difficulty with referenda is that they are rarely about the question on the ballot paper as the opposing camps, aided by the media, attempt to reframe the question into ones they think that will resonate with more voters.

Which is really depressing...

The current Brexit arguments appear to be:

• The only way to control immigration is to leave the EU and regain control of our borders
• The only way to stop benefit tourism is to leave the EU
• We need to reclaim our sovereignty and have British laws for British people
• We need to escape from the waste and insane bureaucracy of the EU
• We can reclaim the £8.5bn a year that is the UK's net contribution to the UK (£7.9bn a year forecast from 2016-20 source Parliamentary briefing)

Well, let's take a look at some of these.  "Immigration is undermining British society and the only way to control it is to leave the EU".  The second half of that phrase has a shred of truth in it in that as an island nation it is easier for us to pull up the drawbridge and set our own rules if we leave the EU and withdraw from the collective responsibility to aid refugees fleeing wars that we helped to start.  But the idea that immigration is undermining British society is utter nonsense.  British society was built by immigration. We are a mongrel nation.  Our comparative economic success and any growth over recent years is almost entirely funded by the population growth from immigration.  

We need to stop benefit tourism.  Don't be absurd! The number of EU nationals currently claiming JSA is c. 60,000 which is a number so small as to be almost statistically insignificant.  Study after study has shown that immigrants to the UK are net contributors to our society (this one is quite easy to digest).  This is an entirely fictitious bogeyman invented by the xenophobes to make you scared.  The benefit scroungers if there are any (and the term is offensive in itself) are mostly indigenous (think Jeremy Kyle Show).

We need to reclaim sovereignty.  Why? Can we be trusted with it?  Distributing sovereignty across a wider base strikes me as quite a good way of ensuring that minority interests can't manipulate the system in their favour (either to the extreme left or the extreme right).  In the main the regulation that has come with EU membership has been a good thing.  

We need to escape the madness of straight bananas and absurd fishing restrictions.  Yes the EU does have some silly rules.  But so do all bureaucracies and the British are just as good at stupid and unnecessary regulations as anyone else.  Think of it as the cost of doing business.

We pay more in than we get out.  Let's reclaim the £8m a year that we pay into the EU.  Let me come back to that one because I think that is the crux of the whole thing.

What the EU thinks of the Brexit Debate Source (thanks to my aunt for sharing) 

But the thing that really depresses me are the reasons that the Better In Campaign have selected as being the best to win the argument. "More jobs, lower prices, safer streets", "A leap in the dark", "A decade of uncertainty".  Well that's got me really excited and positive about Europe... See what I mean about greed and fear?

I know it's an ad hominem argument and I shouldn't.... But just look at the standard bearers for the Out campaign: Nigel Farage, Michael Gove, Christopher Grayling, Pritti Patel, The Daily Mail, The Sun...

There's more empathy and concern for other people in my toenail clippings than all of them put together.

And that brings us to the heart of it.  Left to our own devices the English can be nasty, xenophobic and greedy with a side order of misplaced arrogance.  Our membership of the United Kingdom and the European Union mitigates the worst of our character.  By being part of these clubs we are forced to abide by some rules and show some concern for other people.

The reason that we should continue to pay roughly £8bn a year more into the EU than we get out is because we can.  Because it has brought peace, stability, moderation, perspective, easier access to vitamin D and much much better food and wine.

We should stay in the European Union and the United Kingdom because doing so makes us better people!

"Early years fascism"...!?

Earlier this week I attended the "Lifelong Learning and the Power to Create" event at the RSA which had an an impressive panel of Dr Vince Cable, Lord Willetts and Lord Blunkett.  At the risk of reducing to the absurd, the theme of the event was, "Lifelong learning is really important; what a shame the treasury doesn't agree."

Lord Willets spoke last and unless I have completely misunderstood or misinterpreted what he said, he made an assertion so jarring that I had to put it down here.  He was bemoaning the 'early years tyranny'.  This made me sit up with a start.  I must have missed the pitchfork wielding mobs of nursery nurses and primary teachers who had so successfully held the public purse to ransom for so long... [another missed opportunity for the withering sarcasm font I wish someone would design].  

He then said that with the developments in neuroscience and our understanding of neuroplasticity, which is almost always a precursor to some appalling piece of quackery, it was entirely possible to 'teach old dogs new tricks' such that: 

"the Return On Investment for retraining a 50 year-old was higher than funding early years education"

I got the impression that he believed that funding should be shifted from teaching babies and children basic skills to adult education.  I think we should pause for a moment for that one to sink in...

...

...

...

Just in case that didn't immediately set off a klaxon in your head as being worthy of the prize for this year's most spectacularly unsubstantiated argument from authority (and we have some genuine competition from all the rubbish currently being spouted about Europe) consider this...

And let's be generous...

• If we assume that 5% of children in Lord Willets' imaginary world don't survive to an employable age
• And 5% die before they work for 20 years (which is about 10x the actual mortality rate)
• And we assume that 100% of 50 year olds who are retrained by his scheme live to work for a further 20 years (which is just nonsense)

I said let's be generous...

Then 90% of children are going to work for at least 2.5x the length of time of the 50 year olds in his silver-surfer utopian experiment.  Which makes it practically impossible for the ROI of retraining 50 year olds to be higher than early years education.

As my heart rate returned to normal the CEO of the RSA Matthew Taylor summarised the debate in his urbane and witty manner.  Until he thanked Lord Willets for raising the issue of,

"Early years fascism"

At which point my chin hit the floor and a man behind me involuntarily coughed up his own spleen. Now, as I said I'm prepared to accept that I might have missed the pitchfork wielding tyrannic mob of nursery nurses and primary  teachers but I think I would have heard about them donning blackshirts and swastikas.

I'm not against adult ed. I'm all for it.  But the best way to improve adult education is to concentrate on teaching children how to learn.  

That is a gift that just keeps on giving.

We need to start telling the truth about education funding

Having had a little more than 24 hours to reflect upon the chancellor's autumn budget statement for 2015, I thought I would let off a little steam here.

You cannot claim (as they do in section 11.8) to be,

"protecting the schools' budget in real terms"

when in the next line you are, 

"making around £600 million savings from the Education Services Grant (ESG) and supporting schools to realise efficiencies"

That is the same as saying that you are protecting the NHS and ensuring that staff salaries rise with inflation... but henceforward doctors and nurses and patients will have to pay for their own scalpels, dressings, medicines, training, management, financial control, audit etc. etc.

You see there is a lot of detail in those three little letters E, S & G which currently represent about 2.5% of the budget of all of the academy trusts in the country.  It's the money that LAs and MATs get over and above the School Budget Share which is supposed to pay for the school-led system that we are all building.  It works out at £87 per pupil per year and in return for it people like me are personally and criminally liable for keeping children and schools: safe, solvent, legally complaint, structurally sound and educationally improving.  It compares with approx £18-34 per child per day (between £3,500 and £6,500 per year) that we are funded to actually teach children and run primary schools. So it is a very small sum but an important one.

The statement goes on to say that the DfE will consult on reducing, 

 "the local authority role in running schools and remove a number of statutory duties. "

But I notice they are not going to look at a significant reduction in the obligations upon academies.

It's not that we didn't know that austerity was coming.  It would just be nice to be told openly.  If we have to take 8-10% out of education over this parliament then say so and don't dress it up as an increase.

We seem to be heading from a school-led system to a school-funded system...