The endarkenment chapter IV: a new hope

How intriguing that I haven't blogged for four months... [1] It's almost as if there have been some unforeseen events that society has had to deal with. I trust my reader will forgive me. Although he or she may not forgive me jumping from, "Endarkenment II" to, "Endarkenment IV" just so I can make the weak Star Wars gag in the title. Shall we assume that III would have had too much Jar Jar Binks in it and leave it at that? [2]

I was talking recently to my rather wonderful and unlawyerly lawyer Nick Mackenzie for a Podcast, in which he asked me to find a positive from the Covid-19 crisis; to look for hope at the bottom of the box. I answered that maybe the pandemic would finally dispel the myth of control. I know it doesn't look possible now, as we are globally beset with moronic 'alt right' leaders who demand our fealty above everything. As their incompetence and bluster is exposed, they clutch tighter to the idea of of command and control as the only solution; banging the drum of flag, tradition and tribe. Let's pray it crumbles to dust in their ever tightening grasp.

My hope is that if we can help the scales fall from enough people's eyes, then maybe we can make education and society better.

What most people and still too many educators are yet to grasp is that whilst the requirement for social distancing remains our schools can probably only receive 44-51% of pupils back into classrooms, depending on school size and staffing. This means that education as we understand it will fail. We will simply not be able to get enough children back into schools in the traditional 30 bums on 30 seats way. This in turn will force us into some form of innovation involving digital technology. Whether it be splitting years groups into A & B cohorts for week on/week off schooling with the off weeks supported by virtual lessons at home, or the extension of the school day and school year into holidays and weekends to allow for catch up, or exam year groups being prioritised back to schools, while others learn from home. All of the options require a massive contribution from Ed Tech.

If we are moving to a space where the average pupil to teacher ratio in school is going to drop from just over 20 to just over 10 (in the primary sector with and without social distancing), then this can only be solved by a massive influx of teachers or a significant re-imagining of how pupils can learn when they are not in school.

I use the verb "learn" deliberately because when children are not in school we cannot "teach" them. However upsetting this will be for the starched collar, new-Edwardian, uniform, discipline, Empire and repetition brigade. We cannot metaphorically throw a board-rubber at a child at home who has got bored of the tedious video their teacher has sent them and is looking out of the window. We have lost control...

Likewise headteachers, who have been ground into submission by decades of accountability without authority, clinging to their false 'autonomy', need to realise that the only way we can make the system work is by children from their school having access to subject matter specialisms from teachers in other schools. And I don't mean the wet superficial collaboration that our sector bleats about where 'experts' with a badge drop in on another school for a day or two to lord it over their less fortunate peers. I mean genuine co-innovation at a system level. 

We need to start thinking seriously about the creation of inspirational learning environments outside of school that draw on the deep knowledge held by teachers about their pupils but also look for efficiencies in content creation and curation. We must avoid absolutely the 21st century equivalent of plonking the children in front of the TV to watch an 'educational programme', even if that programme is high quality and based on a curriculum sanctioned by Minister Gibb himself.

The problem with all virtual learning is it spends too much time and money at the curriculum end of the challenge and almost none at the delivery end. If the only reason that children were learning in classroom is because you've metaphorically locked them in, how are you going to cope if they can play Fortnite instead?

Unfortunately, as a nation we are in about the worst possible place for this to happen having blown up our school system into the structurally incoherent mess it is today. If ever there was a moment for school trusts, groups and cooperatives to step up and show how the creation of a learning environment goes way beyond sitting up straight in class and listening to teacher but into the minds of each child, it is now.

'Education is the lighting of a fire not the filling of a pail'

Let's start building learners.

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Notes

[1] I started writing this blog before the rant I published on Friday

[2] Yes, I know that Jar Jar Binks only had one line in 'Revenge of the Sith' but that was one line too many.

How bad does it have to get to change your mind?

In a week when one day the UK "Covid deaths exceeded the whole of the EU put together" and President Trump plumbed new depths stoking racial tension in the US, I am forced to wonder just how bad does your leader have to be before you disavow him (or her)?

I know that it is only human to believe that one makes good choices. In exactly the same way that nearly all of us believe that we are better than average drivers. This is ordinary cognitive bias. I also understand the most of our political opinions are emotional rather than rational. We retrospectively allocate reason to defend positions we instinctively already 'feel' are correct.

But surely there comes a point when you say, "OK this is nuts, that's enough" 

For those still clinging to the idea that Boris Johnson is doing a good job, how can you read that headline above (specially selected from a rabble rousing right wing red top) and not have your brain try to escape from your head? 

You can't read that and hang on to, "It's too early to make international comparisons" or, "You can't compare as the UK's population is much denser" or "We're the only people accurately recording our death rates, the others are hiding things".

That's some fairly extreme mental gymnastics. If you have to create an alternate universe in your head where simple rules of mathematics no longer apply and the entire world is engaged in a conspiracy against the plucky Brits, who are the last bastion of truth and decency...

Then you deserve this bloody shambles of a government. Better still, why not buy some cammo gear and an assault rifle and move to America. You'll fit right in.

I gave up on Labour less than a week after Corbyn took over and he never saw power. These guys are letting people die.

The Endarkenment II: Ideological trench warfare

One of the things that working with Dr. Caroline Whalley has taught me is the value of revisiting old ideas. The below are ideas for a think piece I put together for the Times Ed just over a year ago that got forgotten about and never saw the light of day. Although the angle on the ideas is now 'out of time', in that the parallels with WWI don't work, the ideas are still relevant.

Ideological trench warfare
December 2018

More than a century after the end of the, “War to end all wars” it is alarming to note the increase in trench warfare. Although today’s trenches are metaphorical, the degree to which political debate has descended to the defence of positions in defiance of reason is entirely analogous. We no longer sacrifice the youth of a continent in the mud of no man’s land, we merely sacrifice truth and morality in the grime of ignorance, dishonesty and self-interest.

That’s a grandiose opening. How the hell am I going to relate this to the UK’s education sector? Well, if we wish to save the enlightenment, we need to get out of our trenches. To get out of them, we need to recognise that we are all digging them.

Ideological Trench #1 - There is never enough money

There will never be enough money to provide the quality and diversity of education that most educators believe all children deserve. But if the noise in the sector is anything to go by, we are about to compound this problem by having a big fight about funding when no-one has any money.

It is disingenuous of the government to maintain its current position that we currently spend more on education than we ever have or that per pupil funding is more than twice what it was in 2010. Yes, we do spend more in total but only because there are more children in school than ever. Yes, it is true that we spend more per pupil than in 2000 but unfortunately it is also true that we spend less per pupil in real terms than we did in 2010.

But for the unions to choose now to fight this battle is equally disingenuous. The impact of Brexit is guaranteed to be negative on the public purse, the only thing that is unsure is how big the ensuing recession will be. This is a pointless fight unless someone wants to make a big political leap and reallocate money from the Defence, Environment or Justice departments to education, which I suspect is not on the cards.

If we reframe the question as, “Can we find efficiencies in education without sacrificing pupil outcomes or breaking teachers?”, then we might get somewhere. And in the spirit of getting out of my trench I will venture that this is what Lord Agnew was trying to say, albeit failing gloriously, when he recently bet the profession a bottle of champagne that he and his team could find savings in any school. But it should go both ways, I bet I could find efficiencies in the DfE and ESFA and I wouldn’t need a team to help me find them. You could start with regulatory overlap and the duplication of audit and ESFA costs.

  

Ideological Trench #2 - Burn the straw men

If I may be permitted to mangle a metaphor, ‘The Blob’ was a straw man. Together with ‘the enemies of promise’ it was the exaggeration of an opposed position for rhetorical purposes. The Blob didn’t actually exist any more than evil Tories slashing funding for education exist. The problem with using straw men in debates is that we end up fighting enemies who simply aren’t there. They also antagonise those with whom one might otherwise work to improve a system.

Despite my disagreements with politicians to the right and to the left, I do not doubt their commitment to improving outcomes for children. But we often expend too much energy being angry at people with whom we don’t entirely disagree.

Your enemy is not your enemy.

“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” [Hamlet 2.2] 

Improving outcomes for children is hard work. In disadvantaged communities it can feel like a Sisyphean task. Every September the boulder has rolled back down the hill and each of us is 'another year older and deeper in debt'. It can be easier to bear if one has someone to blame for this unfairness. I’ve lost count of the times when I have railed against a faceless bureaucrat-jobsworth and found some comfort in the idea of an evil plan to frustrate all the good I have convinced myself I am trying to do.

But that evil plan does not exist either. Between cock-up and conspiracy, you should always favour cock-up. It is simply more human. Even if you don’t get the satisfaction of self-righteous anger.

Ideological Trench #3 No battle plan survives contact with the enemy - Nothing is that simple

I don’t know Nick Gibb MP, although I have met him once. My instinct is that his mental model of the education system is oversimplified. In my head, his persistent championing of synthetic phonics and Singapore maths is an oversimplification of a terribly complex problem. My Nick Gibb homunculus is on a grail quest for the perfect text books. Get these text books right and he will scaffold weak teaching in a way that all the CPD and training in the world could never achieve. He has copied and pasted approaches from Singapore without understanding the context in which they appear to work. Consequently, he mistakes better practice for best practice and stretches it beyond its domain of applicability. This will only lead to an absurd concentration of power and risk at a ministerial level that ultimately fails the poorest in society. Because when the minister choses the text book, what happens when he picks the wrong one?

I like to believe that my approach is better. Keep expertise, money and decision making as close to children as possible. Manage education as a complex adaptive system....

But here’s the thing. People whose opinions I respect have told me that Nick Gibb is not like this at all. This is deeply inconvenient for my mental model. Maybe I’m the one who is oversimplifying, projecting my own bias onto someone who is equally committed to improving outcomes for children.

At the bottom of the box

I wrote this a fortnight ago but forgot to hit 'publish' 

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.

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.

Raising the debate (or trying to)

I started writing a response to a post on Facebook this morning about the election but it got a bit long so it turned into a blog post.

The bit about truth and belief:

Ah Danny and Paul, here lies the problem. Elections are not about truth. They never have been. Elections are about what you can get enough people to believe enough. And as you both know, “A lie told 1,000 times becomes the truth.”

So, I’d like to politely challenge some of the beliefs in this thread and elsewhere on social media. For each challenge below, I will submit evidence and indicate where there is also challenge to that evidence. If you would like to persist with your beliefs because they make you feel better, that’s fine.

But at least I tried.

1. Uncontrollable and uncontrolled immigration is not and has never been the problem
2. Labour didn’t break the economy and the Tories haven’t fixed it
3. The Tories' election promises are as financially unreliable as Labour’s
4. Brexit did not receive the biggest mandate in UK electoral history
5. Brexit is not even in the top 5 problems currently facing the UK

The evidence bit

1. Uncontrolled immigration is not and never has been the problem
• Research commissioned by the current government demonstrated that EU migrants are net contributors to the UK and they contribute more to our economy per head than native UK citizens
• So they aren’t coming over here stealing our jobs and services they are coming over here and propping up our economy, paying our taxes and keeping us alive as anyone who works in the NHS knows (where 1 in 5 doctors come from outside the UK – although I accept that other sources cite this as lower)
• The idea that EU migration is uncontrollable is a myth. The UK already has the power to repatriate EU nationals if they don’t find work within 3 months. It doesn’t use this power because it knows a) and b) above and also because it would cost too much to implement
• Despite having this power, the current government and its coalition predecessor have done nothing to limit immigration and net migration has risen. 
• If you follow the evidence above you should be asking yourself why. The simple answer is that EU and the perception of uncontrolled immigration was a convenient stooge on which to blame all the ills in society
2. Labour didn’t break the economy and the Tories haven’t fixed it
• This is not the place to explore the causes of the 2008-9 financial collapse many whole books have been written on the subject
• But I think it is safe to say that the Brown-Obama approach of Quantitative Easing to shore up Western capitalism averted a significantly greater disaster
• Labour handed a net debt burden of 63% to the Tory-Lib Dem government in 2010 (it having risen 14 points from 49% that year)
• Despite professing a preference for austerity the Tories have taken net debt to 82% (although it has reduced slightly from its high of 84%)
• And yet we still talk about the memo Liam Byrne left at the treasury saying there is no money left because it plays to our beliefs
3. The Tories election promises are as financially unreliable as Labour’s
• Most people, even die hard Momentum members, will realise that John McDonnell’s £400bn spending plans represent the “moon on a stick’ to get you to vote Labour
• But even though his rationale that borrowing that much money to spend in order to grow the economy sounds like going on a credit card binge and expecting it to increase your salary. There is significant evidence that public sector borrowing for infrastructure investment does promote GDP growth
• At the same time Sajid Javid has laid out plans for £300bn but his sums are as creative as McDonnell’s economics is optimistic. He is not spending anywhere near that much as he has compounded multiple years. Moreover, the promised education spending is going mostly to Tory marginal seats and not to the most disadvantaged communities
• Bluntly they are as bad as each other
4. Brexit did not receive the biggest mandate in UK electoral history
• I am so fed up of shameless will-to-power morons like Boris and Jacob parroting the, “biggest mandate in UK history” in their, “will of the people” dog-whistling
• Yes 17.4m people voted to leave the UK in the 2016 referendum
• But the turnout was only 72.2%
• Very interestingly, if you look at the voter turnout over the last hundred years, you will see that every single post war election in the 20^th century bar two had a higher turnout
• And hence a bigger mandate than Brexit (a larger percentage of the UK electorate voted for John Major for Christ’s sake)
• Equally interestingly, voter turnout has collapsed in the 21^st century and it is this disenfranchisement that is behind Brexit and our current troubles
5. Brexit is not even in the top five problems facing the UK at the moment
• It is just an argument that allows a very small political group to draw a different dividing line through the electorate to increase its chance of obtaining power from a minority position
• You must know that Boris doesn’t actually believe in Brexit – it’s just his way of obtaining and retaining the keys to No. 10
• If you don’t, just ask yourself the following questions:
• Is Brexit more important than the social care crisis in our country
• Is Brexit more important than rebalancing the NHS for the 21^st century?
• Is Brexit more important than the global climate emergency?
• Is Brexit more important than rescuing our education system from a decade of neglect?
• Is Brexit more important than fixing the criminal justice system?

Because you know that it isn’t. And you know that Brexit has nothing to do with those problems whatsoever. It’s just because you voted for it and you think you should get it. All the rest is noise.

Brexit is simply not important. 

But this election is... and I’m buggered if I know who I’m voting for.

False dichotomies and false premises

Reflecting on a number of recent conversations with people in the education world I rediscover the importance of starting points in debate and just how much opportunity to improve a system is lost by failing to examine the premise.

The challenge is best illustrated by Andy Zaltzman joking about Brexit on BBC Radio 4's News Quiz recently

"Is reducing massively complex political and economic issues to oversimplified binary choices right or wrong?"

But this is not a blog about Brexit, I've done more than enough of them. It's about solving social problems and getting beyond everyone's initial endowment bias and confirmation bias - the entirely natural human traits or [1] overvaluing your own beliefs and ideas when compared to other people's and [2] tending to notice or even look for data that confirms your existing beliefs rather than challenge them.

What this means in practice is that we often start discussions in the wrong place. I start with my prejudice and lived experience and you start with yours and we take an average between the two positions and then have at each other. When this happens often, between lots of different people, we create argumentative habits. We repeat these short-cuts (or tropes) over and over again to the extent that they become worn paths in our minds and they prevent us from properly listening to each other.

One of them exists in the academy space and is a revisiting of the old Keynesian dilemma, can the private sector be trusted to deliver a public good? It's also known as the "Free rider" problem.

This plays out as follows:

A) Those who swing to the left:
There is no place for profit in education. Business can't be trusted to deliver for the vulnerable and the poor. Greedy fat cats will fill their own pockets and cut services siphoning money into offshore accounts and their friends' pockets. Those that most need support from the system will get none. Teachers will be forced to fill the gaps without proper funding or support.

B) Those who swing to the right:
How long can you keep pouring taxpayers' money down the drain without delivering any improvement? Government cannot be trusted to improve education because all civil servants do is create endless regulation and red tape that achieves nothing. If you want to improve outcomes all you need is robust accountability.

Group A see the academy sector as confirming all their worst fears about the sell off of public assets and the undermining of support to the needy. They see education being taken over by business people who know nothing about teaching. They see increasing high profile cases of misuse of funds as proof of endemic corruption and moral vacuum. They see Group B (and most of the academy sector) as heartless, greedy Neo-Cons.

Group B see the academy sector as a breath of fresh air bringing energy, conviction and purpose to a sector desperately in need of reinvigoration. They see long term under-performers leaping ahead and negative vested interests being challenged. They see group A (and most of the previous education sector) as moaning Marxists uninterested in children and pursuing their own narrow political aims.

Although both groups are partially right, they are also significantly wrong in what they chose to see. Consequently as their mistakes compound each other nearly all debate is in the wrong place. To whit:

Academies introduce profit to education:
No they don't. It is illegal for multi academy trusts to make a profit from their charitable work. They are also tightly bound to proving they spend public money properly

Business people who know nothing about education are taking over
No they aren't. The vast majority (probably >95%) of Trust Leaders are serving or former headteachers.

Some high profile cases of fraud are proof of systemic corruption
No they aren't. They are the product of a higher regulatory standard than that which exists in maintained schools. So more people get caught. This is evidence of system working not failing

Local authorities were failing children for too long
No they weren't. They were dealing with immensely complex issues at the same time as dealing with massive funding cuts.

Academy reforms have introduced freedom and energy to a stagnant sector
No they haven't. They have massively fragmented a sector that was largely successful (if inefficient in some areas). There is almost no freedom as the programme is excessively over-regulated due to the concerns of group A above

Academy reforms have led to significant improvements in long term under-performers
It is far too early to say whether the improvements delivered are sustainable or scalable or significantly above normal regression to the mean. There is some evidence that the sector has become marginally more efficient but most of the savings have been taking in reduced government spending rather than increase in performance.

The challenges are not addressed by Group A and Group B screaming at other across a divide. The system is much more complex than that. And if the last two years are anything to go by, the less politicians are involved in education the better.

The burden of optimism

Teaching is an optimistic profession. The endeavour is predicated on a construct that things we do today will yield a better tomorrow for all to enjoy. It is not easy. For those working in challenging communities September is difficult because we have to start again all the way back at the beginning. Children, many of whom will have been malnourished and neglected over the holidays, arrive back at school behind where they were at the end of July. And deprivation is writ large across the rising percentages of children who start their reception year non-verbal and still in nappies.

Teachers and school leaders who confront these challenges with optimism and positivity, who don't blame the parents or the wider society for the extra work, deserve better from their politicians. It's hard enough already in education to build a better tomorrow without the fault-lines and fissures in society being nakedly exploited to the pursuit of power.

I would like to think that I have some empathy but I simply cannot compute how anyone could watch Boris Johnson on the news and not see him for the shameless, deceitful opportunist that I perceive him to be.  

At the same time I understand just as many others look at Dominic Grieve, Yvette Cooper and John Bercow and see the 'enemies of the people' as they are portrayed by the tabloids. I also know that these divisions are being deliberately exploited to allow smaller and smaller extremist groups at the right and left of British politics to drown out the reasonable centrist voices.

I wonder if to help us that there may be a political equivalent of Occam's razor - which simply states that where there are two possible explanations for something you should prefer the simpler. 

Where there are two politicians suggesting contrasting ideas we should prefer the more selfless.