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.