Are summer schools the answer? Five questions for Nick Clegg

Nick Clegg is to announce that he will be spending £50m to set up summer schools for children on the verge of starting secondary school as a “compassionate response” to last month’s riots.

I’m all in favour of anything being provided for young people, who seem to be at the sharp end of a lot of current cuts.  But I do have some questions:

1. This money seems to be being taken from the pupil premium fund designed to help schools to support children in most need (ie it doesn’t appear to be new money).  How does making schools spend their money in this particular way support the government’s notions of promoting freedom and school autonomy? 
2. Where’s the evidence that a fortnight’s voluntary summer school at 11 will have any impact on stopping young people “falling through the cracks” ?  Is the government already so clear about the causes of the riots that Ministers are prepared to spend a substantial sum (admittedly of someone else’s money) to put it right?  As Theresa May said earlier this month,  “it [is] not helpful for politicians to “suddenly speculate” over what happened. The causes would only be known once all the evidence had been analysed”.
   
3. The summer schools are not, apparently, going to be compulsory.  Being realistic, how many of the target children, those seemingly at risk of falling through the cracks into rioting, criminality and beyond are likely to attend them? How will the impact of the scheme be measured? 
4. Assuming that the target children do turn out for the fortnight.  What is being planned to keep them on the straight and narrow afterwards?  Or is 14 days of the right kind of training going to be enough?
5. How far would £50m go if it was put back into Connexions or some other form of careers advice for school leavers to “put them in touch with their own future” through  training or employment? (The Guardian reported recently that:  Under proposed reforms to careers guidance, a new national service is due to launch next April, which would see teenagers no longer entitled to any face-to-face careers guidance. Instead they will be pointed to a website or told to call a helpline. The duty to provide face-to-face advice will be transferred to schools, though they are to get none of the £203m central funding that pays for the existing service.)

And here are some more rhetorical questions:  Is this anything more than a media gimmick to give Clegg a soundbite for his conference speech?  What’s the betting that we will hear this wheeled out over the coming months as an example of how the Lib Dems are stamping their belief in fairness all over the Coalition? Is there any wonder that another speedy response to the riots concluded that lack of trust in politicians was a cause?  Could Ministers attend summer schools in practical policy making next year, instead of pandering to their conference audiences?  What do you think?

How do you get 11-year olds to read?

I’m starting a project with a local secondary school  trying to raise enthusiasm for reading among the incoming Year 7s.  It’s a classic social marketing project: promoting something – reading – that requires action from its audience of 11 and 12-year olds.  I’ve started doing some desk research, but so far I’m raising more questions than I’m answering:

1.  Where’s the advice for parents of older children who’ve slipped through the net?  There’s lots of advice for  parents of young children, but I’m thinking about kids for whom nursery rhymes and bedtime stories  are  in the past – if they ever happened at all.  Is there a secondary school equivalent of the  summer reading challenge for ages 4 – 11?  If not, why not?

2.  Where has all the content gone?  What’s happened to the advice that used to sit on government websites about parental engagement?  Content was rationalised when DirectGov was set up, and snapshots of government websites have been archived, but I can’t find stuff that I know the DfES used to carry for schools and parents.

3.  Is anyone asking children what they want to read?  I have  some hunches about children and reading, based on observation of my own children and their friends – hardly a scientific sample.  Can anyone tell me if I’m right that we’re recommending too narrow a choice of books?

• Boys seem to prefer reading non-fiction, but there’s only one non-fiction title in this typical recommended reading list and no non-Western authors.    Michael Morpurgo compiled a list for the Telegraph  of 100 books every child should read, which is dominated by classic fiction.  This list from the Literacy Trust mixes fiction with non-fiction  in a wider mix than  anything else I’ve seen, but I sense that Michael Gove is more in tune with the Telegraph than the Trust.
• Boys like sport – so how about a school subscription to Match of the Day magazine?   What alternatives are there?
• Kids like the linear format of comics – so how about some graphic novels like this?  Is Asterix too weird to be peddled to youngsters these days?  (I asked about graphic novels at the school and was told that they are going to get more graphic novel versions of Shakespeare – this may not do it…)

4.  Is it worth thinking about new media or audio books as ways to get children hooked on stories and reading for themselves (or, as Problogger put it, should kids blog?)

5.  Could schools stop calling it literacy and start calling it reading?  Literacy very definitely doesn’t sound like something you’d want to do at home…

The big question is how to make reading into more than just the refuge of the nerdy.  I agree with Michael Gove that children should read more books – for the  sake of their hearts and souls as well as their education.   How do you get them to want to?  I’m genuinely interested in any suggestions or experience anyone out there can pass on.  Please do leave a comment or reach me on Twitter – I need your help!

Foopball, foopball, ra, ra, ra

In the wake of the coverage of Andy Gray/Richard Keys, I had  a blog post floating round my head yesterday about the  crushing ubiquity of football and the culture that surrounds it.    Had I got round to writing it,  it would have made some of the points made by Catherine Bennett  in her piece for today’s Observer Forget getting rid of sexism in sport.  Let’s get rid of sport:  an end to the blokey horror if it all, say I, to the absolute  inescapableness of it, to the obscenity of the money (pretty much any story in the Observer’s Said and Done column most weeks is enough to make you want to ban the game completely), to the new social necessity of following a team.

I blame Rupert Murdoch, for enabling the Topsy-ish growth of the Premier League, and Nick Hornby , whose   Fever Pitch made it socially acceptable for football to spread beyond the back pages, wheedling its way into every part of daily life like honey fungus.

Bennett makes another good point in her piece about the pervasiveness of sports chatter in the media: the low percentage of women and girls who enjoy the competitive nature of team games: 

the Women’s Sports and Fitness Foundation finds that 36% of women “enjoy the competitiveness of sport”, as opposed to 61% of men. Why, then… should the sport-averse be subjected to extended sessions of compulsory sport, as if they were still in class, forced out into the mud to contemplate the skills of the school elite? 

Good point.  And why, if this is the case, are the government so keen to promote competitive sport in schools at the same time as they cut School Sports Partnerships to the detriment of sports that girls might actually enjoy?  I played lots of competitive sport at school – netball, hockey, rounders for the school, a county trial for hockey.  All at the point of my PE teacher’s gun.  I hated every minute and gave up sport as soon as I could, only to rediscover the pleasures of exercise years later when – by then pretty unfit – I joined a gym. 

Professional sport is entertaining enough to watch,  but it isn’t important.  I do  not feel it will be a national disgrace if “our medal tally” is worse at the London Olympics than it was in Beijing.  I do not care that ‘we’ are unlikely to win the World Cup again in my lifetime.  I was delighted about the Ashes, but no-one would have died if England had lost.  Sport, like most other things in life, is more fun to do yourself than watch someone else do.   Can we get a bit of perspective back please? 

The dash to academies

Flickr: Cogdogblog

Pretty obviously, most of the 1,900-odd  schools who “expressed an interest” in becoming an academy when the rules changed only did it to get hold of  information about what was on offer.  Jolly sensible too.  It never meant that they wanted to become academies and I’m astonished that Michael Gove was able to get away for so long with the pretence that there was a tidal wave of enthusiasm for the scheme which justified the  way the Bill was swept through parliament.  The fact that only 153 schools actually want to take up the offer having seen what it entails shows how  far they still have to go to persuade anyone of the value of the approach. 

Anecdotal evidence from this part of London suggests that, at  a meeting of school governors from across the borough, no-one spoke in favour of the scheme and there was huge concern about the potential effects on the support offered to all schools by the local authority.   A period of properly managed communication and consultation about this – and about cuts to BSF  - might have explained the thinking, avoided some of what its claimed are misunderstandings about the approach (they’re not stopping all capital spending on schools, although have managed to give the impression that they are),  and, who knows, built a bit of support.  This might have meant that Mr Gove missed his chance to be first off the blocks with big cuts and new legislation in this shiny new government, but perhaps this is a case of more haste less speed?

Building schools for whose future?

I loved the idea of Building Schools for the Future (BSF) long before I had school-age children who might  benefit from it, and not just because someone needed to (literally) fix the school roof. 

The public sector’s realm used to be ugly, grimy, cheap and second-rate.  Asked to think about the public sector in the 1980s and chances are you pictured  schools with leaky roofs, outside loos and children taught in pre-fab  huts which were inhumanly hot in summer and deathly cold in winter.  NHS hospitals were painted  grey and sludge-green and the lino on the floor was cracked.  There were plastic chairs chained to sticky grey carpet tiles and staff behind protective  barriers in council offices and job centres.  Those mental images, I’m sure, helped undermine confidence in the whole value of the public sector.  Public was for losers who couldn’t  haul themselves into the promised land of Private. 

The notion of BSF was a welcome vote of confidence in Public.  It was a philosophical Trojan horse  which didn’t just make a practical point – that children couldn’t learn and teachers couldn’t teach in those conditions; but  introduced the idea that people who used the public sector should be treated well and deserved excellence.  That Public could be as good as Private. 

For all its problems of slowness and bureaucracy, you’ll have guessed that I’m not overly chuffed  at the news that Michael Gove is halting investment in BSF; especially as rumours persist that part of the savings from this and other cuts to the education budget are to be used to fund free schools and the dash to academies which are not exactly uncontroversial. 

Still, as the man said don’t mourn, organise.  I’m not sure what can be done to save school building, but here’s a campaign to try to secure parental consultation before schools can opt for academy status; here’s info about another campaign in support of local schools, and here’s the Department for Education case for and the anti-academies alliance argument against – for those who want to see both sides …

Look on my works ye mighty and despair

Strange feeling reading the papers since the election result, as though the whole of my working life for the past few years has been written up on a giant etch-a-sketch  and is now being slowly erased.  I have, over the past few years, worked in different capacities on or alongside Every Child Matters, Building Schools for the Future  and the QCA amongst other things for the DfES;  on support for victims of sexual violence (Home Office ) and on equalities legislation ( GEO )  All of it now seems potentially to be threatened,  gone or going.  I am the Typhoid Mary of government communications. 

I suppose this is the inevitable result of working with the civil service – as someone once explained it to me we’re the chauffeurs, Ministers chose the destination, we just get them there the best way we can.  The destination on my stuff has evidently changed, so mirror, signal, manoeuvre and off we go again – even if  lots of good stuff seems to be being jettisoned along the way.  How much weirder it must be to have been one of the Ministers and now watch the whole thing being dismantled as you are plunged into irrelevance and obscurity.

A Department by any other name?

Intrigued by Michael Gove’s instant decision to change the name of the Dept for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) to the Dept for Education before he’d opened his first red box.

I was at DfES when it took responsibility for children’s issues, and led some of the early work on communicating the Every Child Matters programme.  It took a LONG time for the Department to get out of its  “education, education, education” mindset and start to think about children’s services as  an equal part of what it was about.  I remember an excruciating planning meeting looking at the  strategy for the whole Department, which focused so exclusively on schools’ standards that those of us working on children’s policy complained of feeling like the mad relatives locked in the attic that no-one wanted to talk about.  Eventually things changed -  some might argue it went too far the other way (though not, I’d guess,  thousands of children in care who still have much worse chances in life than their more fortunate peers).  

So, does this symbolic name change mean that children’s services are being shoved back in the Departmental attic?  A quick google to find things Gove has said about children’s services reveals much complaining about Baby Peter but not many policy clues, and a rather worrying willingness to dismantle what’s been put in place. 

There’s another blog post (or possibly a rather dull book) to be written about what worked and what didn’t on Every Child Matters, and I agree that there are levels of bureaucracy now in place that might well stand in the way of positive action.  I’d be happier if I could see some more definite thinking about what the Tories want to do in this area – and some recognition that children’s policy isn’t just about supporting families through the tax system.

This is the Morden World

To R’s school a couple of nights ago for parents’ evening (how weird it is to be doing as a grown-up the things you remember your parents doing when you were the child).  

Apparently she is topp at Hist and Geog, German, Maths, Tech, Science and RE (where she is trying to convert  the other kids in her class to atheism).  She can almost play Fairy Bells on the piano and may not be able to recite The Brook, but has put together an anthology of her own peotry (all right, all right,  I’ll stop with the St Custard’s stuff now)

There are, of course drawbacks.  As her (otherwise fantastic) English teacher pointed out in her report:  ”Her spelling is her Achilles heal” (the title is one of hers, but with teachers like that…); but she knows she needs to work at it, she’s getting better, and she is  filled with enthusiasm for EVERYTHING the school has to teach her. She’ll do just fine. 

Obviously I can’t speak for all schools in Tower Hamlets, but the ones I know about are pretty impressive.  Don’t let Michael Gove spook you.  Education isn’t in crisis because children can’t recite the dates of the Kings and Queens of England.  They’re  learning different things these days, that’s all.  And they learn them in different ways because the world is changing.  I hate the New Labour managerial-speak of enrichment activities and learning outcomes just as much as any other literate person,  but I do understand that different doesn’t necessarily mean worse.

Parental choice

At 7am tomorrow we will find out which secondary school our daughter will go to next year.  The closer the moment gets the more I am convinced that the whole concept of parental choice  in schools is a callous joke.  I don’t feel I have any choice in which school R goes to and it’s an illusion to suggest that I do.   I can express a preference, but I can’t make a choice for the obvious reason that not everyone can go to the one local school which is regularly lauded by OfSTED as one of the best in the country and which is consequently first choice for every parent in the area.  (This isn’t leafy Surrey, by the way, it’s gritty east London which somehow makes the achievement even more remarkable) As a friend of mine said yesterday, the only way you can be sure your child will go to Morpeth is if you gave birth in the playground and never moved outside it. 

Schools Ministers have for years been arguing that parents want yet more  choice in education.  The theory seems to be that if schools are pitted against each other in some kind of Darwinian fight for survival, with parents’ votes as the mark of survival, then they will pull their fingers out and standards will rise.  This is evidently not true and runs contrary to another strand of government policy which is about getting schools to collaborate to share resources and expertise. 

The continued stress on choice and competition also flies in the face of all of the research, which repeatedly says that parents just want government to make every school good, so that every parent feels happy to send their child to whichever is nearest.  Make every school a Morpeth and all parents will have their choice.  Make it illegal to discriminate against children on the grounds of their parents’ religion (or lack of it) and at least everyone is in with a chance of going to a school they live close to.  As Deborah Orr said in a recent article about schools lotteries:  The worst schools are not compelled to improve because of parental choice. They just end up populated by the children of the parents whose choices are fewest.  The choice is illusory – and I’ll go on believing that it’s a poor way to go about allocating places even if we do get into our first choice.