A bang and a whimper

On the day that Russia invaded Ukraine, it seems important to put down some contemporaneous thoughts. I am no expert and my opinions deserve no more attention than they merit. I am entirely prepared to listen to and even concede to other people's opinions, particulary when they are more informed than mine.

I am deeply saddened and not at all optimistic about how this will play out. To mangle a metaphor, these are chickens coming home to roost, whose antecedents stretch back many years in many directions. Yet we seem to have little regard for how we got here. The internet is full of people screaming certainties at each other with little regard for nuance or the contradictory and multiple truths. The first casualty of war is the truth but we’ve been killing the truth for some time now.

Before you assume that, given my time spent in Russia in the 1990s, this is an apology for Putin, it is not. Putin is a grubbly little narcissist [1]. But he is significantly more intelligent than Johnson or Macron. Like all narcissists, rather than confront his own shortcomings, he attempts to reshape the entire world to fit his view of himself. Unfortunately, he may be clever enough, his opponents naive and fickle enough, and his timing fortuitous enough to benefit significantly. I suspect much will depend on how far China sees this as an opportunity to advance its own position.

First to the idiots like UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, who yesterday said, "we'll kick Putin's backside", like the Scots Guards did in the Crimea in 1853. It's charming that Ben was literate enough to read his regimental history when he served in the Scots Guards. But I suspect he struggles with any real history or his own departmental papers. The relative strengths of the British and Russian armed forces in 1853 bear no relation to today. You probably only need primary education to understand the differences. This is the empty bluster of English exceptionalism. We are not a first rank world military power anymore, we are barely a first rank economic power. Although it is an established principle of international law that might is not right, we should have had that argument when Russia invaded the Crimea much more recently in 2014. 

Second to those on the left including the Corbyn and the Stop The War Coalition, who blame NATO and Western aggression for provoking Putin. If you oppose imperialism you need to be consistent in your opposition because Putin seeks nothing more or less than the restoration of a lost empire, as George Monbiot commendably pointed out earlier today.

Third to those on the right screaming 'imperialist aggression' at Putin, check your own recent history before proceding. The second Iraq war was almost certainly imperialist and economically, opportunistically aggressive. Likewise Putin has at least as much, if not more, claim to sovereignty over Ukraine as the UK has to the Falkland Islands or Gibraltar. Unless you want to stand on the principle of self-determination.

Fourth, to the libertarian little Englanders on twitter who claim we have no role in this crisis and that Putin is entitled to invade Ukraine; equating its relationship with Russia as being that of the Isle of Wight to the UK.  If the Isle of Wight or the Falkland Islands or Scotland, Wales or Northern Island for that matter wished to secede from the United Kingdon as independent states, then they can. 

It would appear that the majority of the 44 million Ukranians do not wish to be reattached to the Russian yoke. The Ukranian identity reaches back to the 9th century at least and its relationship with Russia and the Rus is fractious, complex and equally long. If you do not know what the Holodomor is, look it up. Surely there is a moral obligation to defend another sovereign country's right to self-determination? That is after all what most of the people holding this view used as their justification for supporting Brexit.

Fifth, to those who cry moral outrage, nothing can justify this aggression. What did you say when the World Bank and IMF made Russia grovel at the end of the Cold War? Russia was humiliated by the West. Instead of taking the farsighted nation building of the post WWII Marshall Plan (arguably one of America's greatest contributions to world peace) we effectively bankrupted Russia and destroyed its burgeoning and outward looking middle class twice. The parallels between the vindictiveness at the Paris Peace Conference and the subsequent rise of National Socialism are alarming. And I use the term National Socialism deliberately as Hitler's appeal was to nationalism, unreasonable poverty and unjustified shame.

Sixth, we have no place making moral arguments when we have been money launderers in chief to the Russian kleptocracy for the last 25 years. We have no place making moral arguments when our own Prime Minister is a moral vacuum.

But where does that leave us. If we are not strong enough to challenge the idea that might is right on behalf of the vulnerable. If we have no right to cast a stone against imperialist aggression when we are amonst the most aggresive imperialists of all. If we have no moral place to stand because we have no morals...

The only path is a multilateral one. However difficult or slow or painful. And to take it we must accept our share of blame for letting this happen. We must allow multiple conflicting and contradictory views to co-exist rather than rushing to oversimplify or blame.

As has been said many times in the Northern Ireland peace process, there is no hierarchy of suffering, there is no difference in a mother's tears.

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[1] Johnson and Macron are probably the ranking narcissists of the current UN Security Council after Putin but I breathe a huge sigh of relief that Trump is a former rather than current President of the USA. This relief is immediately tempered by the dread realisation that Johnson is perhaps the least suited or capable of British Prime Minsters of the last hundred years to deal with this crisis, with the possible exception of Anthony Eden.

SEND and moral decline

Populist politics undermines truth; preferring certainty over doubt and simplicity over complexity. This is visible in three word slogans like, “Get Brexit Done” or the many variations of “Build Back Better”. The oversimplification conceals dangerous trends that rarely get discussed. In particular the education provision to children with SEND, which is in crisis.

The complexity starts with a pincer movement of legal obligations. Although the education system has fragmented under successive governments, Local Authorities retain the statutory responsibility for pupil place planning. This means that LAs have to ensure there are enough school places of specific types to meet the needs of the population in their areas. 

For mainstream schools, this is simple. You need to ensure that, across a region, you have sufficient primary, secondary and FE classrooms to accommodate the needs of the population. For efficiency, you want your schools to be as full as possible.  Below an average of 24 children per class, it gets more difficult to provide ‘good’ education.

When you start to think about children with SEND, the other arm of the legal pincer is revealed.  The Equality Act (2010) says that you cannot discriminate against anyone with a protected characteristic. This includes disability and the penalties for non-compliance are significant.

Most educators are inclusionists. They believe that if a child can be in mainstream schooling then they should be. Those who support grammar schools or talk about selection are not talking about improving education. They are describing ways to limit opportunity for some. Because it is too expensive to give the same chances to all. This selection process is dressed up as something else, otherwise it falls foul of the Equality Act.

In an ideal world public education would be tailored to the needs of each child. But any rational person can see that the costs of this are prohibitive. The minimum funding guarantee for English primary schools in 2021-22 is £22 per child per day (or £4,180 per year). But for  young people with profound and complex needs, the cost of special schools can reach 20-30 times as much.  If there isn’t enough money in the system to give everyone their entitlements, all you can do is:

• Keep people in the dark about their entitlements
• Delay people’s access to their entitlements
• Add barriers to people obtaining their entitlements
• Shift responsibility onto someone else and blame them
• Illegally redefine people's entitelments and
• Hope that the number of times you are found guilty in court of any of the above costs less than doing what the law requires

...this is exactly what many Local Authorities are being forced to do.

The government’s own data shows that the incidence of Education Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) has risen from 2.8% in 2015-16 to 3.7% in 2020-21. Despite the fact that over the same period the threshold of needs (the fifth bullet point on the list above) has also risen. At least one LA no longer issues EHCPs for Down’s syndrome; many LAs make families wait over two years for EHCPs; and most issue significant numbers of EHCPs without any additional funding for schools. 

Before you start getting angry at LAs, the blame is not theirs to shoulder alone. Over the last decade, LA funding from central government has halved.  High Needs Funding is based on historic levels and has not adjusted to increased demand. Moreover, LAs  are not allowed to use funding for other purposes to meet this rise in SEND needs. The DfE restricts them to a maximum of 0.5% of virement (to be taken from the schools funding block) in any given year. If they break these rules they are required to sit on the financial 'naughty step' and submit regular budget refinancing plans. And remember this is to meet their legal obligations not spending on 'nice to haves'.

Despite next year's increase of 8%, central government funding is still inadequate to address the scale of debt run up by most LAs. Equally, the £2.6bn announced in the Chancellor's autumn spending review, to create additional places for SEND children, sounds like a lot. But it is only capital funding to build the new schools or extra classrooms. There is no commitment to pay for the  education that the children taking up these places will need. Some LAs have between 50-100 children with EHCPs requiring specialist provision but with no named special school. These same LAs are being shamed for overspending their High Needs allocations. They are being encouraged to cut other services such as refuse collection, social care or early years provision.

The government has created a situation that encourages LAs to sweep the problem under the carpet. LAs are being forced to ignore or misdiagnose need. But they retain the risk if they are caught doing so in the courts. And an increasing number of them are being cuaght. In 2019-20 SEND Tribunals were up 13% on the previous year and LAs lost 95% of the claims brought against them. Indeed LAs have lost 91% of all actions brought against them since SEND reforms became law. This strongly suggests that the claims which come to tribunal are likely to be the tip of the iceberg with many thousands more children and families being deliberately kept in the dark and denied their entitlements.

This is further evidence of a nation in moral decline.

Prisoners of our past

We are all prisoners of our past. We view events through the lens of our previous experiences and often project onto others opinions and motivations they simply do not have. These imperfections in our understanding of the world around us are exacerbated rather than mitigated by social media and the internet. Evolution has favoured pattern recognition skills over complex analysis.  Consequently, we are vulnerable to seeing things as we think they are rather than in their complex, messy and contradictory reality.

Mark Twain said, "I've lived through some terrible things, some of which actually happened", succinctly highlighting the unreality and unreliability of both anticipation and memory.

There was an interesting example of this last week when HMCI Amanda Spielman attempted to articulate complexity, 

Her thoughts were 'reported' by TES and 'rereported' in the Twitter echo chamber, which jumped on this as further evidence of 'horrible Ofsted' not caring about hungry children or not caring about teacher workloads or just not caring. I suspect she was trying to say something much more nuanced.

It is perfectly possible to care deeply about all of the following:

• the loss of learning from Covid
• the loss of livelihoods from Covid
• the dispropotionate impact of both of the above on those already disadvantaged
• the huge and unjustifiable variation in education offering between schools in similar contexts, largely due to an absence of planning at both governmental and local authority level but also at school level
• the impact of all of the above on teacher workloads
• the sheer scale of the recovery work needed over the coming years and the complete failure of the DfE to acknowledge and fund this

These are not mutually exclusive or contradictory ideas. In fact they are largely interconnected. The messy truth is that some schools prioritised support to their most vulnerable families, some schools prioritised remote learning, some schools did both, some schools did neither, some schools prioritised in school support to key worker and vulnerable children and some schools prioritised the wellbeing of staff. But all children have lost significant amounts of learning and all schools must be involved in the long and slow process of rebuilding for all children.

Schrodinger’s appraisal

As far back as 2009, I wrote an article for the Training Journal about the ineffectiveness of appraisal processes in organisations being rooted in their compression ratios. We try to compress a year's worth of work into an hour's worth of feedback and fail because this is beyond the tolerance of human communication. 

Appraisals don't work because appraisees arrive as a hot neurotic mess of hyper-vigilance, 

"Do you love me? Tell me you love me. Purlease.... tell me you love me. Oh God, you hate me, don't you?!" 

They over-interpret every available clue whether visual, verbal or otherwise from their line manager until they decode the central message as either good or bad. At which point they stop listening. If they perceive the negative, they either turn in on themselves in an auto-perpetuating spiral of self-loathing or they launch a counter offensive to rewrite the wrong that their manager is peddling. If they perceive the good they also stop listening and bask in self-satisfaction or start positioning for a pay rise.

Compare this with lesson observations for trainee teachers. Feedback sessions almost always occur directly or soon after the observed teaching. The feedback can sometimes take longer than the observed teaching itself. The student knows that they can improve and actually wants to be helped, so often the feedback doesn't feel like criticism and is thus welcomed.

The difference between the two approaches has parallels with Erwin Scrodinger’s famous thought experiment involving a cat, a radioactive source and a flask of poison. At the risk of an epic oversimplification only possible from a historian talking about quantum mechanics, Schrodigner’s cat inter alia articulates the superposition, in which the cat is both dead and alive at the same time. It is only when we open the box to observe, thus collapsing the waveform, that we establish the reality of whether it is alive or dead.

In the common or garden annual organisational appraisal described above, the appraisee tends to collapse the waveform very early on in the appraisal into the binary choice of either good or bad. Contrastingly, in the trainee teacher feedback session both trainee and mentor tend to maintain the superposition of both good and bad at the same time for much longer.

When we feedback about teaching we tend to reinforce and amplify positive behaviours e.g. “It was really good when you did X Y Z, you could also try using that approach in the following situations…”. We also tend to suppress negative behaviours with positive substitutions e.g. “Did you notice it went a bit flat when you did A B C, next time you could try D E or F”. The conversation holds onto the idea of both good and less than good teaching behaviour as being present in all lessons.

It’s odd that we don’t always take what we know from one domain to another.

Mistaking authority for control

I was unsurprised but nonetheless disappointed to read that giving evidence to the Education Select Committee yesterday the National and Regional Schools Commissioners argued that there was no need for Ofsted to inspect MATs because, together with the ESFA, they are in control.

In fact the converse is true, there is every need for Ofsted to inspect MATs precisely because RSCs and the ESFA are not in control. 

The reasons the RSCs and the ESFA are not in control I have set out at length in the chapter I co-wrote for Education System Design: Foundations, Policy Options and Consequences (Hudson, Leask, Younie et al) last year. But in short the gearing ratio is too high. RSCs have less than half a day per year to think about (let alone act upon or seek to improve) each of the different organisations over which they have authority. As a result all they can do is perform a bureaucratic function that points at failure. Pointing at failure is Ofsted's job, one which it does well and, on the whole, fairly. 

The ESFA is currently the principle funder and primary regulator of the academy sector a dual position it cannot and should not continue to hold if we seek a self-improving system. Regulation must be separated from funding if you want your system to function. 

This is not the first time the RSCs have made a grab for the reins of the ESFA but it should be resisted because it further confounds the process of accountability and improvement. Regulation and accountability are by their nature process-heavy functions. Whereas system improvement requires flexibility, innovation, experimentation and fleetness of foot. These ideas were part of the genesis of the academies' movement but have long since been on the wane.

Slow down and do it better

Although a significant number of the posts in this blog over the years have been "Get it off my chest" rants, so that I can keep on doing the job, I am at heart a postive and optimistic person. It's just that sometimes it is hard to find the appropriate voice for constructive critcism in the education sector. Speaking the truth to power is essential but when power doesn't really listen for the best part of a decade, frustration can creep in.

• The DfE contains highly skilled, highly motivated and highly dedicated civil servants who have been rushed off their feet throughout Covid trying to issue guidance to support school
• Unfortunately due to the massive fragmentation of the education sector, the DfE no longer actually knows what is actually going on in schools [see many other posts on this blog on fragmentation]
• Political leadership at the DfE and in No. 10 appears to believe that the role of the department is to strongly assert certainty and ‘best practice’ when only uncertainty and emergent practice exist 
• This is why there have been so many ‘U-turns’ as information comes to light that overtly contradicts the department’s over-confident assertions
• Consequently, much of the department’s ‘guidance’ serves only to shift blame for failure from itself on to school and Trust leaders and in doing so creates work with significant opportunity cost to children and communities

The purpose of this blog is to highlight the importance of focusing on quality and not speed when issuing education guidance during Covid by constructively reviewing its latest Framework for reviewing remote education. So let's quickly and superficially identify what is wrong or insufficiently thought through:

• As a whole the framework adds little value and much confusion, it is effectively a self-assembly noose with instructions to, “Insert neck of responsible officer here”
• It's based on a false premise as we simply do not know which are the better ways to deliver remote learning to children not in school yet, so we should be seeking first to understand before we rush to measure
• It is confused about whom it is for and confuses governance with operational management throughout
• It imposes a self-assessment grading system without evidence base or terms of reference and although it (optimistically) asserts it will only take “approximately 1 hour” to complete fails to show how this will achieve anything other than the creation of a piece of paper marked 'remote learning self-assessment'
• Having been drafted at speed for multiple audiences, it is less than clear over who is responsible for what and fails to even mention Trustees from whom authority must be delegated in MATs for some of the decisions it mentions
• It wrongly and dangerously attempts to make schools and Trusts responsible for the safety of the home learning environment when this can only ever be a parental responsibility
• Although it is merely repeating the line from other guidance, the requirements are stated in terms of quantity (hours per day) not quality when the role of remote learning is not to fill time but to help children learn
• It appears to add a requirement to provide real time both way communication ‘school community events’ which are likely to be safeguarding nightmares
• It lobs a reminder about GDPR in at the end just to keep us on our toes
• And its last line is one of the best “There are clear rules for behaviour during remote lessons and activities. Pupils know them and teachers monitor and enforce them.” 
• Anyone who has attended Google hangouts, MS Teams or Zoom meetings in the last year will immediately understand the impossibility of controlling behaviour of primary school children remotely. NB the Spanish councillor or other example of carelessness and stupidity whilst online

So far so easy and so negative. But what would better and more succinct look like? To which I offer the following:

Postpone all formal examinations for the forseeable future

The government and Ofqual and some education bodies are currently arguing furiously over how we will be able to run examinations in 2021 if Covid continues unabated.

They are entirely missing the point. It is like arguing over what colour to paint the lifeboats whilst the ship sinks.

There is a limit to what an examination system can tell you. No amount of brute force trauma on next year's exam statistics will be able to redress the unfairness in the learning already lost to Covid since March. Exams are not impossible. It is perfectly possible to design a comparatively safe way to conduct them next year. But why would we bother? We already know beyond any doubt that they will be irrelevant and fundamentally unfair.

Exams are merely a proxy for what we think young people may or may not be able to do next. They are effectively passports or letters of introduction which say, "You can trust the bearer of these results to be able to..."

• Study 4 A levels with a reasonable chance of passing them
• Reasonably hope to complete a BTech
• Cope with the academic rigour of a university course
• Thrive in this apprenticeship
• Etc etc

Surely as a sector we can come up with some form of emergency letters of transit that equate to a letter from their current school that says, "Peter could reasonably have expected to have achieved between x & y GCSEs at grade q or above had he not lost six months of school in the last year". The next institution can accept Peter onto its programme of study or work; perhaps with a novel probationary period, if it turns out that Peter can't actually keep up with the demands of his new programme.

This is the only way that massive regional and economic unfairness is not further baked into an already divided country. 

This emergency process need only be for the duration of Covid and the only risk is that we admit a small number of people onto programmes of work or study that are too challenging for them. Well, what is wrong with that? Provided we treat them fairly and supportively, we can say, it looks like this course is a little too hard for you why don't you try 'x' instead.

The three arguments that the government has used thus far to defend its absurd attachment to exams under Covid are:

• To do any different undermines the credibility of the exam system as a whole
• It is unfair to those in previous and future years
• It risks promoting people beyond their capabilities

The first point only matters if you are trying to protect the myth of a meritocracy. And can you really tell me that anyone in the current cabinet other than perhaps Rishi Sunak is there on merit?

On the second point if you could find me one person from the past or the future that says, "No we shouldn't err on the side of kindness to this year's cohort, whose education was ripped away from them by Covid. No. Let's mark them down because it's unfair on me". I'd say you'd managed to find an idiot and a heartless one at that.

And on the third point, see my answer to the first point.