RE and Academies - the DfE replies

Well, full marks to the team at DfE for attempting to address concerns about Religious Education. Following their bland "REisastatutorysubject" mantra, Leona Smith of the Public Communications Unit has provided a much fuller response to the concerns expressed in this blog about the position of RE in Academies and the apparent lack of monitoring by Ofsted.  Her reply certainly explains the legal position clearly, although those who are expressing the concerns know perfectly well what the position is. However, it is at least reassuring to hear this re-statement of it. Here is Leona Smith's response:-

All academies have to provide RE under the terms of their funding agreement (FA) with the Secretary of State. The FA for non-faith academies states that they must arrange for RE to be taught to all pupils in accordance with the requirements for agreed syllabuses in the maintained sector. Academies are not required to follow a locally agreed syllabus, but can choose to do so. Where they choose to design their own RE syllabus they must ensure that it meets with the requirements of a locally agreed syllabus. Any academy which fails to teach RE is in breach of its FA, and where there is evidence for this; the Education Funding Agency can enforce compliance of the FA.

Ofsted does not inspect individual curriculum subjects, but is required to report on whether the curriculum offered by the school is broad and balanced and promotes the spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of pupils. If, during an inspection, inspectors see practice that does not conform to statutory requirements, they will delve more deeply and will report their findings. Where an investigation reveals that statutory requirements are not being met and this is a contributory factor in explaining why pupils are not achieving as well as they should, it will be considered for inclusion in the inspection report as a key point for improvement.

The trouble is - and remains - that, however the statutory position is re-stated, the law is breached and Osfted does not follow it up. Which is why, somewhere along the line, policy-makers need to have the courage to instruct Ofsted to ensure statutory compliance.  And, as stated previously, the revision of the National Curriculum looks very much as if Spiritual and Moral development will be sacrificed for personal, environmental and economic.

I may be wrong but, sadly, reassuring though she is, Ms Smith does not convince me. Suppose we start reporting schools where RE is not meeting statutory requirements to Ofsted or the Funding Agencyå?  Maybe what is also needed is an FoI request to academies about the state of their RE.  I've got a lot of writing to do this summer but, just maybe, I might construct such a survey. It will be reported here.

The Gibb Doctrine

Well, the DfE wrote a reply to the last blog about the perilous state of RE and, as always, it is reproduced here. What is sad is that this plays into exactly the scenario I described. Of course, the government has no intention of changing the compulsory status of RE but it's selective deafness again, isn't it? If RE was so darned safe, why is the RE community so jolly worried?  This is the bland Gibb Doctrine - a pity it continues to raise more questions than answers.

Here's the DfE response:

The Government is fully committed to maintaining the unique status in the school curriculum which RE enjoys. We agree that RE is central to the aim of the school curriculum to promote the spiritual, moral and cultural development of children and young people, to prepare them for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of later life. I can certainly assure you that we have no plans to change the subject’s compulsory status.

Okay, now convince us that RE will be reinforced in Academies as well as LA schools, that it will be monitored by Ofsted and that schools failing in their statutory duty to provide it according to their Locally Agreed Syllabus will be reprimanded. And the rest, as they say, is silence.

The National Curriculum and RE

The publication of the draft framework for the national curriculum marks yet another step in this government's determination to secularise the curriculum while pretending to protest that it isn't.

Before we even begin thinking about Religious Education let's consider the aims and purposes of the National Curriculum. As we all know, the current Ofsted framework provides for the specific inspection of SMSC - Spiritual, Moral, Social and Cultural development - however, the sharp-eyed will have spotted that, for the first time since the inception of the National Curriculum, both spiritual and moral have disappeared. Cynics might suggest that this is symptomatic of a political culture that eschews both spirituality and morality. This is, after all, the zeitgeist.

The new curriculum aims are now fivefold: economic, cultural, social, personal and environmental. So, with one clean sweep, the only parts of a school's curriculum that enable students to explore deep questions and test deeply held personal values are consigned to the scrapheap.   Justify this, as the case is made, in terms of comparability with high performing jurisdictions, and you still sweep away something that has been fundamental to British education since 1870. How does this align with injunction in the new Teachers' Standards not to undermine traditional British values?

So, what of RE? Well, those of us who have been defending the diminishing island of RE against the swelling flood of secularisation have got pretty sick of Nick Gibb's protestations that RE does not need protection because it's a statutory subject. He must know that this is utter nonsense and enough people have pointed this out to him for it to be taken seriously. Like many ministers, Gibb suffers from selective deafness. And RE seems to make ministers deaf. Why else does there have to be an all-party group of MPs, formed to promote the case for RE? And you can bet your bottom dollar that the whole of the DfE suddenly goes deaf.

If proof were needed of the increasingly perilous position of RE look no further than the draft revised framework for the National Curriculum. There you will find that RE becomes part of the basic curriculum, along with sex education and, for the time being, work-related learning.  The framework reinforces the statutory nature of RE but the detail makes clear that, while schools should implement the statutory programmes of study for the national curriculum, they are able to determine the specific nature of the basic provision for themselves. Which is why, in respect of RE, an increasing number of secondary schools and a worrying proportion of primaries simply do not deliver the expectations of their SACRE determined agreed syllabus at all.   With impunity. The RE lobby has long been pressing for Ofsted to police this statutory requirement only to be met by the bland Gibb doctrine.

Now, inject the wildcard that the non-maintained sector which, for the purposes of this discussion, includes Academies and Free Schools, will not be subject to the statutory national curriculum. So,  weak as it is in proposed legislation, the place of RE will be left unprotected in these new constituencies. It may be in their Funding Agreement, for the moment, but that is almost as laughable as the relatively recently repealed requirement for a Hansom cab to carry a bale of hay!

The proposed Framework is supposed to contribute to further debate but we all know the futility of consultation with an administration whose response is,' yes, but we're going to do it anyway'.

This is a government with a modernising agenda that is self-defeating. Real, deep societal change will not happen if we take away the very mechanisms that underpin it.

It's a strangely balanced world

 

As anyone who follows this blog will know, I could not be described as a fan of this government’s perverse education policy yet there are some exciting opportunities around that help to balance the bonkers ideas. I’ve just found myself nodding at Gove’s rejection of his backbenchers’ calls for a return to Grammar schools, saying they were not the ‘magic bullet’ many supposed them.  This seems a little different from the neo-conservative reactionism we have come to expect from the Secretary of State who many, including this writer, have often accused as having a desire to re-create the education system of his childhood. It might have something to do with the drubbing the Tories received in the local elections, but far be it from me to suggest that.

The Vice Chancellor of the University of Reading, David Bell is better remembered as that long-serving Permanent Secretary at the DfE who was once New Labour’s HMCI and who served in Whitehall under four Secretaries of State. Bell commented on the ease with which the Gove steamroller has bowled on without much serious opposition, citing two reasons for this lack of resistance. First, Gove spent a lot of time in opposition “rolling the pitch: in other words, preparing the ground for what he wanted to do.” Secondly, he claimed, the DfE’s policies are “genuinely driven by local demand…The vast majority of teachers in those schools are seeing the benefits of their school having more control over what it does. There’s a sense in which this is just going with the grain.”[1]

There are many who would disagree with this ‘local demand’ – converting to Academy status is frequently the result of fear of trying to operate as an LA school while the LA is struggling to keep going or of DfE bullying and coercion.  I am Chair of Governors of a large Junior School and we have twice had the Academy discussion but, somehow, it’s just not that alluring and there doesn’t seem to be the will to take the risk. And it is a risk – the financials do not stack up quite as favourably as they do for us in an LA context and there is a lot more isolation for the headteacher; the buck comes to an even more sudden stop when there is not a LA officer to criticise!

It is a pity that our LA is picking its way round the ruins of its own collapsed empire. It seems to have rather more schools than it can properly service with the rump of its resources. But somehow, it is a comforting billet…for the moment.  I was once told by a Man from the Ministry, ‘Oh, you’ll become an Academy…. one way or another’.  Was that a threat? Surely not!

Nevertheless, the changed landscape of the strange admixture of schools that now characterise UK education, is throwing up some extraordinary opportunities for those prepared to take the risk. Each week I look at the TES and see posts that I would have killed for: strange and exciting opportunities to forge a unique future and shape education, a real chance to make a difference.  But there, I have always liked the element of risk and thrived on instability. There are plenty of my colleagues, good headteachers whom I respect, who are not risk takers and who run highly successful schools. In this Brave New World of opportunity, is there still a place for them? The trouble with risk taking is that it is quite as easy to get it wrong as it is to get it right and, even at this stage in Govian education, the machine is driving over the corpses of the risk takers for whom it all went horribly wrong.

But, were I looking for a headship right now, in the current fairground of education there are many really thrilling rides and I look at some of these roller-coasters in envy. From time to time I consider going back into headship but then I think I am probably better to use my experience and expertise in working alongside my colleagues - the risk takers and the safe-players.

It’s a funny old world. Let’s hope, like the GM Schools debacle, we can look back one day and laugh. Hmm.

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[1] Civil Service World -  Interview with David Bell 13th October 2011

The DfE and Sir Michael's Cocoa

As ever, when I get a reply from the DfE, it gets posted here in the interests of balance. Followers of this blog may now recognised what looks a bit like a standard reply. Draw your own conclusions about that. However, here goes:

Sir Michael Wilshaw was appointed to the position of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector as a result of his track record as an outstanding head teacher who has demonstrated that he can achieve excellent outcomes for pupils in deprived areas.
Successive Chief Inspectors have spoken without fear or favour about aspects of education and schools and it would be inappropriate for Ministers to appear to censure the Chief Inspector for doing so.

The Chief Inspector is accountable to Parliament, through the Education Select Committee, for his actions and for the performance of Ofsted.

The press and media can be selective in what they use from interviews and in the way that they present things.  What is important in considering Sir Michael’s comments is the underlying message he was making, which was that strong school leaders do not shy away from the difficult decisions that need to be made to bring about improvement in poor performing schools.

Well, that may all be true, but it doesn't solve the question of the untended geraniums!

Time for your cocoa, Sir Michael

What does Sir Michael Wilshaw think he's doing? At a time when his political boss is making slightly conciliatory noises and is apparently rowing back on no-notice inspection, this foolish old man is whipping up yet more vitriol against the teaching profession.

The trouble is that, rather than tending geraniums on his allotment,  Michael Wilshaw has been diverted from a well-earned retirement to become head of Ofsted, a position that requires both professional integrity and great emotional intelligence, neither of which he would seem to have in great measure. To alienate the profession he claims to espouse is a blunder of considerable magnitude. But not necessarily if you are an elderly old boy locked in your own little world.

As we become elderly, three things tend to happen: our world view narrows somewhat around our own perspective, we get more irascible and willing to say things that previously we would keep private, and we tend to relate things more and more to ourselves. The Chief Inspector's performance to date suggests an early onset of just these things. When he was first in post, Michael Wilshaw spoke glowingly about the 'hero head' as if this was the pinnacle of leadership. Why did he take this view? Because he was a hero head, riding out of the sun to rescue a failing school. There is no denying that he did a magnificent job as head of Mossbourne and is rightly regarded as its saviour. However, being a hero head is not the only way; there have been equally highly regarded and successful heads whose management style has been collective and collegiate.

I remember an elderly aunt saying to me, 'you can get away with saying a lot more when you're ninety than when you're forty' and Wilshaw seems to have discovered the veracity of this quite early. Why else would he tell an assembly of headteachers that teachers don't know what stress is? The profession is already sick and tired of the way this man rubbishes it but he doesn't seem to learn. Instead, characteristic of his way of thinking, he turned the topic to himself, saying that stress was what his father felt,  searching for a job and what he felt, as a new headteacher in a time of industrial action.

What arrogance! Of course the unemployed are stressed, we all recognise it. Of course Wilshaw would have felt the stress of headship at that time, as were so many of his colleagues. The stress of the job is relative to the times. But to criticise headteachers for complaining while being well paid is disingenuous in the extreme. Teachers are feeling stressed, headteachers are worried about the way their profession is being judged by Ofsted. It is a characteristic of modern society that there are so many stressors, for the unemployed, of course, but for the employed too. People want to know they are  doing a good job - few teachers are the work-shy slackers Wilshaw would portray them.

Teaching is not the only job where there are high stress levels but, as Mary Bousted of ATL has pointed out, the HSE reports that it is the occupation with the third highest amount of work-related stress. The Chief Inspector is perfectly aware of this but perhaps chooses to be selectively deaf to it because he knows that his policies are a contributory factor. Somehow it all seems to fit in with the intractability of age and self-obsession. 

What shall we do about the problem called Sir Michael? Well, it might be time to move his chair into the sun, give him his cocoa and let him have an early night. The geraniums might need attention in the morning.

Right of Reply

In a recent blog I referred to the new HMCI's reported (and pretty well substantiated) comments. Interpret these how you will.

In the interests of equity readers might be intersted in the DfE's response to the blog. It is repeated verbatim here:-

You refer to comments that Sir Michael Wilshaw, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector has made about school leadership. The press and media can be selective in what they use from interviews and in the way that they present things. I believe that Sir Michael was referring to the proportion of schools inspected in which leadership and management was judged less than good, rather than specifically referring to headteachers. What is important in considering Sir Michael’s comments is the underlying message he was making, which was that strong school leaders do not shy away from the difficult decisions that need to be made to bring about improvement in poor performing schools. I would, however, recommend that you seek clarification from Sir Michael on the comments that you attribute to him.

As you suggest the majority of our school leaders are doing a good or outstanding job. That is why at the heart of the Department's approach is a determination to free up head teachers to get on with what really matters and for the best to foster improvements in schools that may be struggling or want to improve aspects of their provision.

We are doing this in a number of ways; through the opportunity to become an academy, the removal of unnecessary bureaucracy and reductions to the amount of guidance that lands on head teachers’ desks. We want good head teachers to focus on what brought them into the profession in the first place and concentrate on leading the teaching and development of their pupils. 

All parents want to be able to send their child to a good or outstanding school and schools themselves aspire to be good or outstanding. Ofsted’s evidence shows that around a third of schools did not achieve good or outstanding at their last inspection. And some 3,000 schools have been just ‘satisfactory’ for their last two inspections. That is not good enough and that is why we strongly welcome Sir Michael Wilshaw’s plans to look again at Ofsted’s approach to awarding judgements and its proposals for early targeting of schools that require improvement.

We are determined to tackle those schools that should be doing better whether it’s those that fall below the floor standards or are coasting. We are aware that such a focus can, unfortunately, obscure the fact which we readily acknowledge, that the majority of schools and school leaders are doing a good or outstanding job, often in demanding circumstances. But that should not outweigh the need to tackle under performance and to foster improvement where it is needed for the benefit of the country and, above all, for our children and young people.

It is up to schools' governing bodies to manage the performance of head teachers. In the case of maintained schools, the performance of head teachers, like that of other teachers, is managed according to the provisions of the relevant regulations. New regulations are due to come into force in September 2012. Governing bodies will, as now, have a duty to appoint an external adviser for the purposes of providing them with advice and support in relation to the appraisal of the head teacher and must consult the external adviser when setting the head teacher’s objectives and assessing their performance. Maintained schools are also required to have procedures for dealing with lack of capability on the part of staff at the school, including the head teacher.
 





Have a suitably informed day.

When headship palls

I do know what it's like to lead a failing school out of special measures, and I understand completely that those staff who do not 'get it' may not have a place in the school's future. But I am appalled and saddened at HM Chief Inspector's latest charge, that 5000 headteachers are no good. A non-teaching friend said to me this morning, 'people don't want to be heads, do they?'  Is it any wonder, with leadership like this?

Of course, there are some headteachers who probably need to move on. I was recently part of a team of colleagues supporting a school where we identified all manner of improvements that were needed urgently. We made suggestions, wrote reports but were met by a blank silence and we are very aware of the price being paid by the children at that school for the headteacher's blind recalcitrance.  Is this a perversion of the 'hero head' that HMCI proclaims as the answer to school's woes. Leadership is a team business and the trouble with hero heads (or whatever the perverted opposite may be) is that they can lead without opening their ears and minds to their colleagues.  But this is the exception, not a 5000 strong rule.


In the most recently published 'Primary Headship eBulletin' (Optimus Education), I wrote about sensitive leadership, not one where low morale meant 'you are doing something right'. as HMCI had suggested in his last harangue. To my surprise I was deluged with emails from headteachers, some from outstanding schools, who did not believe in management by belligerence but by compassion. Compassionate leadership does not mean weakness and it is high time Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Schools recognised that there is room for a range of leadership styles, not just his.

Frank Knowles HMI once told me, 'behaviour can be sorted out quite quickly; standards take a lot longer'. One presumes that is still true. Some of our heads are truly heroes; and many of them are turning the educational equivalent of a super-tanker. They are, for the most part, good, successful leaders and they deserve to be treated with greater respect.

A little light relief

Heaven knows, there's not much to laugh at in education at the moment so I wanted to share a thought that came up in a conversation with a colleague yesterday. I am working with a Free School in Birmingham and we were writing some of the quality assurance measures that we will need, particularly in respect of the school's religious character. Thoughts turned to self-evaluation, for which several schools are using my style of SEF.

We were reminded that the instruction to inspection teams is to accept a summary of the school's self-evaluation in whatever form the school chooses to present it.  In what form might that be, we wondered?  Could a choir school present it as a cantata?  Would The Brits School perform a musical? Could a school with a media specialism show the team a documentary? How would a language specialist school do it? Could they perhaps offer achievement in Russian, Behaviour in Italian, Teaching in French and Leadership in German?

Imagine the team rocking up at a specialist sports college to be presented with a summary of the school's self-evaluation in their own unique way? How might they do it? A Mars Bar for the least sensible answer.

The mystery of school supply

As an education historian I am very intrigued by the current race to build schools - or at least, to set them up. Such a battle for market-share has not been seen since since the 1870 Act gave voluntary providers a last chance to set up their schools before the School Boards started to 'fill the gaps'. And these are similar times for another reason; the two thousand School Boards and the various voluntary bodies created a veritable blizzard of school providers, all in some way accountable to the Board of Education. Each week the TES includes advertisements for the leaders of a fresh batch of free schools. The parallel may or may not end there and there may or may not be lessons to learn from history - it would be good to explore this further in a future blog.

For the moment, let us return to the matter of academies. The last of these occasional blogs, entitled 'Academy Ally, a game with no winners', brought a fierce rebuff from the DfE. Alan Schneiderman, from the Academy policy team, denied that there were no winners. Academies, he wrote, have successfully raised standards. By working with other schools to provide support, encourage innovation and share expertise and resources that success can become even more widespread.  Of course, it would be foolish to disagree with this. We are seeing the fruits of success in many quarters and, while it can be argued that this would have happened regardless, with the proper injection of resources, advice and support these school have only received by virtue of their new status, we must accept that this has only happened because they have Academy status. However, I am often drawn to the words of Eric Bolton, HMCI at the time of the 1988 Education Reform Act, who used to speak of 'the stubborn statistic' or 25% under-achieving pupils. It is salutary to consider that, whenever government number monkeys wheel out figures of under-achievement, they are frequently around 25%!

I am no Luddite and recognise many of the great things that are happening in education at the moment, indeed, I sometimes find myself advising governors and leaders of free schools and frequently reflect on the exciting new opportunities they bring. However there are many aspects of this new school provision that worry me and these I will return to in a later blog. What I do get sick and tired of is the mantra trotted out time and again by every coalition politician and DfE civil servant, including Mr Schneiderman, that, we need to raise standards in all schools in order to create a world class education system. After all, it is hardly that we don't accept that we want to raise standards to give our children the best life chances. Few of us entered the profession for any other reason. This mantra has become the justification for all kinds of things, some of them good, some of them ambivalent and some of them downright daft.

If history has anything to teach us, it is that this massive burgeoning of school provision is going to have some negative impact and we may well find that there will be quite a lot of losers, many of them not deserving it.