Some sanity on study leave, please

Whatever happened to study leave? Cutting study leave prior to exams - a drift which has happened at different rates in different schools, but all gone the wrong way over the past decade or more - was motivated by several different reasons: one idealistic-if-misplaced, one spinelessly convenient, one exploitative - and perhaps a depressing fourth. Importantly, the agendas of developing independent learners and ending study leave are explicitly opposed, despite the claims of the cancel-study-leave-brigade that learning is improved by their actions.

 

First the idealistic argument for cancellation: students sent on study leave often simply don't study. They doss around. They waste time. They play games. Etc. (I don't know where this comes from. I studied hard during my study leave and so did almost everyone I knew. Slouched on the sofa with the TV in the background while I scribbled, and a pack of biscuits beside me, may not have looked entirely studious to suspicous eyes, but I promise you it was going the way I knew best for me. I still defy anyone, decades on, to take me to task on the plays of Brecht, trigonometry or the correlation between safe playgrounds and the social class of an area. And in fact a majority of my current students and tutees rail against being forced to attend "pointless revision lessons when I could be at home revising better myself.") But let's follow the argument through. "They don't study if given independence, so keep them in lessons until the last possible week / day / hour / minute before the exam," goes the mantra, "and they will do better." Well, maybe. (Actually, maybe not, not only because of the psychological issues of displacement and interference, which suggest late revision is counter-productive, but because the demotivating and distracting effects of being over-regulated may reduce home engagement: a half-engaged hour at school may prevent a focused hour at home. In addition, any teacher-led / -structured revision is inevitably useless for most of the class, and reduces student ownership of the process to zero.) What you're saying is that your whole philosophy is based on the inability of students to motivate or manage themselves, to take any initiative or show any independence, any responsibility for themselves. If this is the limited view you hold of them - what do you think will happen the moment they go to university? Or need to get a job in an astonishingly competitive and ruthless job market where all reasonable help or support has just been axed? If you view students as so ill-prepared to take responsibility for their own choices, actions and future - ye gods, what have you been doing with them for the SEVEN THOUSAND HOURS of education they have had in your institution? "It's too important to gamble with letting them study by themselves!" - No, it's SO important that they can do that by the time they reach exams that absolutely everything you do with that seven thousand hours should build towards it! Wood for the trees and all that. You aren't half as responsible for their grade performance in exams as you are for their future life prospects across the board: deep and lasting self-responsibility, not some quick fix, is the aim of schooling. School is short and life is long. Check the timeline. Scrap the revision lessons and send them home. Have a code of ethics and ideals which is longer than your immediate performance management target list.

 

Hordes of people right now will be reading the last few sentences and snorting with derision that I don't realise other forces are afoot. "But you can't let them have study leave," they chant in unison, "it would harm the attendance data!" Kindly unhitch your cart from in front of the horse. Tell your dog to stop being wagged by its tail. This blindly-obedient convenience ("I don't need to make a decision, some remotely-required data has made it for me") is ridiculous and merits no more comment.

 

The idealism is ill-judged, and the excuse of attendance data is thin: cowardly or stupid. But the significant reason for refusing to give study leave, the exploitation, is more malicious: keeping students in schools longer might be simply because ambitious careerist deputies / heads / chief education officers get to look tough by demanding more work for free out of their staff (and perhaps by pressuring students unnecessarily, too.) These people - not as rare as you'd think - tend to enjoy trumpeting how much harder their staff and students work than surrounding schools, and take pride in how much they can force teachers to hold compulsory revision sessions which pointlessly consist of demotivated teachers repeat-lecturing stuff students either know already or can't take in that way. The local press love it because it is "extra schooling" and because it keeps (a tiny tiny number of) "problem" students off the street. Politicians of all colours make press-release favourites of these leaders, just as they do of the morons who talk of teaching all through the summer holidays. As with most "do more and don't question it" initiatives, this is not value-free. Teachers did not spend May on the beach during the halcyon days of study leave now lost. They did slow down a bit and relax - to the kind of pace most normal jobs are at. And in doing so they gave themselves time to reflect for the first time in the year on issues of practice, programme design, building cross-curricular projects, how to change how they delivered courses next year. They improved because they gave themselves time to stop and think. Killing study leave kills that creative, gradual, reflective and renewing process. Impoverished practice and a lack of change and dynamism is the result. At its most extreme, heads brought forward the next school year to start in June, as soon as exams were underway for the departing year group. No time to stop and think at all. Either this is typical education management macho teacher-bullying, or (if you're a real conspiracy theorist) the aim of stopping the profession thinking was exactly the point - more unquestioning robots, please. I'm not willing to subscribe to quite such a JFK line on this but even so the result is staid and unreflective, exhausted practice, year-round. You could use the time instead, as a leadership team, to launch productive CPD and practice-sharing, and innovative projects - but that would require intelligent thinking and probably even a degree of professionally inclusive and democratic action at leadership level, wouldn't it? Nah... easier just to make them stay induring study leave...

 

So here's my thought, Mr. Gove - I think, presumably like you from the things you say, that students ought to learn to take responsibility for themselves in good time before reaching university or the workforce, both for their own good and that of the wider economy and society; that they and their parents are the key agents for ensuring they do their work, meet their obligations and achieve what they can; that teachers and schools should stop spoon-feeding increasingly low-grade and banal mini-chunks of information for students to be crammed with until the last moment. I agree with you on this issue at least that a student's socio-economic background isn't an excuse: everyone must step up to the plate at the final exam and be judged equally, and schools ought to be developing in students those real skills of initiative in everything they do ready for that public reckoning. I agree with you that schools should be more ambitious and devote their time with students to building the right mindset and values from day one, about independence and self-responsibility.

 

So I want a national dictat from central government on study leave. And no, I don't want you to ban it; I want you to make it legally COMPULSORY at all schools studying UK syllabi, in the UK or abroad. I want schools to be told that no student is allowed to be taught, mentored, lectured or otherwise provided-to, in person or remotely, by any school or any staff member of a school, from a point, say, two weeks after Easter in their exam year. All schools would be obliged to follow this prescription as simply and absolutely as they are obliged to follow any other exam regulation - and always do, to the letter, so - critics - please don't pretend it's unworkable.

And the result? Instant level playing field between all schools and all students, with the message: it's down to you. Instant requirement for schools to shift their whole focus - however they do it - to the development of independent study skills, self-motivation, and good planning, rather than force-spoon-feeding content repeatedly. And with the freed-up teacher time - as well as allowing some reflection, planning and thinking time - you could massively increase your three Rs direct tuition to younger students, with every teacher of every subject sent to do one-on-one literacy and numeracy support for younger individuals at more influence-able ages - or send every teacher in the country on a IT coding course, if you like - or to learn Mandarin; or triple the Work Experience opportunities for all fourteen year-olds. Or get teachers to team-teach in other subjects and learn a wider range of skills from one another. Or create a ten-week window of wider activities and enrichment for year groups remaining in school. Etc. So make study leave a fixed legal requirement with a set date for all schools. Go on, Govey. I dare you.

 

Sigh.

 

Of course this won't happen, and the true reason is horrific: the other, not-to-be-mentioned purpose of keeping students in classes until the hour the exam starts is social control: teachers and schools are cheaper and more effective than policing the streets, providing youth facilities or expecting parents to take the lead with their own children. People believe, but fundamentally won't be caught saying, that they think that study leave leads to students running feral in the streets of sleepy market towns, grunging around / skateboarding / nicking stuff from Tesco / terrifying old ladies and / or generally being drunk and groping one another irreverently by the Cenotaph. Far better to keep them in school until the last possible minute. Examine for a moment the premises that underpin this philosophy:

• schools have the capacity to, and should function as, places of restraint to keep dangerous characters out of the public space - i.e. schools are prisons
• no-one else wants responsibility for our youth - not police, local councils, employers or parents - not hard to see where the current youth unemployment figures come from, huh?
• young people are predominantly likely to be a danger to society rather than an asset - the litany of alarm (cf James Arthur's work - now running the new Jubilee Centre for Character and Values at Birmingham University)
• we don't expect schools to have inculcated any independence or focus on self-managed learning into students in all of the years they've had them...
• ... and we're going to reinforce that negative presumption and poor practice with a constant insistence on no-study-leave which compounds all these negative messages about the function of schools and the incapacity of both schools / teachers and young people themselves

Clearly, no study leave is idiocy. It disembowels (and advertises the powerless disembowelling of) any effort towards using education to develop independent initiative in young people. What else could education possibly be for, if not independence and the building of one's own capacity to meet the world? How much more wrong could we possibly get it? And all because we think - "don't give study leave or they leave their study!" - we're doing it in the interests of students. This is the definition of spoiling them - ruining them, in fact. Like my recent post about the flawed idealism behind attendance obsession - so much for the best intentions of orthodox thinking. Until we see that student independence and development of initiative and self-responsibility is the key, national, aim, no individual school that understands the damage caused by obsessive attendance orthodoxy could risk giving a sensible length of study leave when their competitors use every minute for crammed revision and social policing; it requires a brave rejection of the vile idea that schools are prisons / daycare centres for teenagers, that attendance is all-important, and a decisive shift to making students responsible for themselves. What we need is a national ruling from the Secretary of State to make study leave compulsory. Have you got the nerve, Mr. Gove?

Wilshaw busts a gut - just not his own

Further to recent remarks by Sir Michael Wilshaw, Head of Ofsted ("Teachers don't know what stress is"), a leaked document from the National Audit Office has revealed that the government is forming a calculus for levels of teacher stress. MBD on Education can exclusively reveal the content of this calculation process and why the document has not been released to the public courtesy of an off-the-record leak by a junior statistician at the NAO. The results will shock teachers, but probably not surprise them. (Unless anyone is foolish enough to believe this spoof / sketch is genuine news, of course.)

Our source was unable to discover which firm had won the contract - "it was one of those massive firms that parasite onto public sectors contracts, like Serco or Capita, but neither of those two - I can't remember and they'd erased their logo from the paperwork by the time it reached me, once they realised the project was tanking. They'd moved on to a new DWP contract removing the long-term unemployed from the voting register by then."

The reason the formula has not been applied is obvious upon closer examination of the maths involved. Here is the formula, explained by our NAO statistician:

 "It looks complex but let me break it down for you. The sideways M letters are sigmas - you add things up. c is the number of curriculum change initiatives - numbered as y ('why bother') - you add all them up from the first day of government to a maximum level of d (for 'derision') - gauged by how many of the population think, inexplicably given that they don't think this about doctors or nurses, that they could do your job better than you. To reduce this slightly, you divide this by h times t where h is the holiday length and t the relatively early time in the day teachers are said to finish, so the top-left sigma is about stress caused by managers and parents and what little respite teachers get from that. You could remember the 'ht' as standing for half-term if you like, except most teachers just spend them ill, recovering barely in time for the next Monday. The ht divider used to balance this proportion of the graph out but in the last decade, and particularly under this government, this part's become top-heavy: the EBacc is messing with the curriculum and the right-wing press has ramped up the we-hate-those-lazy-teachers rhetoric from the 1980s again, and then Gove is trying to abolish the summer holiday too. Plus anyone in the industry knows nobody goes home at half three anyway, so this is the first big stress block.

"The second sigma function is based on stress caused by children. It sums up i - people presumed at first that it stands for children's usual self-centredness, or the 'x' for the zero initiative they regularly show, but actually this function is a measure of how much they use their iPhones instead of doing what they're supposed to - from a value of zero to f, where f is how many times in the average lesson they try to check their Facebook page. This can be divided by w, or the number of bottles of wine teachers are provided with at the end of term. Obviously that divider makes this part of the score very favourable for staff in independent schools, whereas it is often as low as zero for state school teachers, meaning that the child-caused stress figure is divided by zero, producing a level of infinity for stress in this sigma function for teachers in schools of the ungrateful poor.

"Next you add together those two sets of data and multiply them by the large E divided by the small r. The E stands for the ego of your particular headteacher and acts as a multiplier for how much stress comes down to classroom teachers. The nearest thing we have to data from the 1980s suggested that headteachers protected their staff from stress and stupid central initiatives because they remembered what it was like in the classroom but now we have NPQH to develop a sense in headteachers that they're altogether different in kind from teachers, they're a master race who rise to the top inevitably and owe nothing to their erstwhile colleagues. The really important thing, they now realise, is for them to make to it to being Chief Exec of a profit-making academy chain earning a quarter of a million a year so they need never step in a classroom again. You divide this by r - for remuneration of normal teachers, which is obviously falling after years of consecutive pay freezes. Remuneration was slightly higher in some academies than unconverted schools, but this effect is massively outweighed by the Ego rating of heads of academies, who pretty much all think themselves Plato.

"A helpful mnemonic to remember this part of the teacher stress equation is that E/r is like 'Emergency Room', because by now the patient is all but dead on the table."

Next this total amount of stress, for causes from above and below and balanced with any possible benefits, made specific to your context, is divided by a multiplier called 'ao/b'. Our statistician explains: "This is three factors considered together: a is for attendance - we don't know why that's in there, but apparently it has to be included in all school data now, no matter how relevant or otherwise; o is 'opportunity index', a measure of how wealthy an area a school is in, sometimes also called the 'offensiveness index' because we measure it by how many minutes a teacher can go for without being verbally abused in a way most other professionals never have to suffer. In many independent schools this can be months at a time, whereas in inner-city schools it's usually a fraction of a minute. This produces a really low divider score, raising the overall stress level coming out of the equation. You multiply the attendance by how much respite teachers get and then divide it by b, which is 'bare-faced cheek.' This is ascertained by reading the Education Secretary's recent pronouncements, in which a millionaire educated at a thirty-thousand-pound-a-year school with a pupil / teacher ratio of 8:1 and which sends more students to Oxbridge than the whole UK Free School Meals population lectures the working classes on how it's their fault they've failed to penetrate the inbred network of privilege and favour that forms the closed upper echelons of UK society. In short - the more Gove opens his mouth, the higher teacher stress levels rise.

"You can probably remember these variables because by calling them 'aob' we've basically chucked everything else we can into the equation, just so it's really hard to calculate, is even more non-specific, and wastes another load of time you can't spare. Best of luck working it out. Apparently they were going to call this denominator the 'Gove Fantasy Index' but that got vetoed early on."

So far so complex. Many teachers will have been trying to calculate their own stress levels using the calculus so far; but if you're pleasantly surprised by how low it is, read on and brace yourself. The real problem with the data recently, has been the next step - you need to put the number arrived-at so far through the exponential 'bull' factor. The best way to explain this is to hand back to our statistician. "Oh, the bull - that's easy to explain. This stands for 'beating up on lead learners' and is a measure of how much abuse comes out of Wilshaws's mouth, directed at teachers. If you know anything about maths you realise how rapidly exponential rise can push the final number up - and this is where Wilshaw has made a real impact. He's had nothing nice to say about teachers either during his long public soundbite audition for the post, nor for the time he's been in post. He's actually not been in the role long, although for most teachers it will feel like he's been there an eternity. Apparently in the design of the equation consideration was given to multiplying the bull by an 'mp' factor - not for 'Member of Parliament' but for 'Michael Palin' effect for how amusingly ironic it is when Wilshaw bangs on about teachers not feeling stress then contradictorily uses his own experience as a teacher as a comparative reference. It reminds people of the 'When I was a lad, we were so poor we lived in a hole in the road' sketch of Monty Python fame, basically."

We asked one teacher in Walthamstow what the difference was between Wilshaw and his predecessor Christine Gilbert. "It's like swapping matron from the Carry On films for Voldemort," she said, turning pale. "She was just a mean and humourless old bitch - although it's funny looking at her hypocrisy now trying to defend the profession - but he's a force of unmitigated evil, aiming for universal domination and the destruction of all that is good and true. OFSTED Inspectors are basically the Dementors from Harry Potter, let's face it. I wouldn't mind half a chance to f***ing Expelliarmus him."

There is one final tiny positive tweak in the calculation. Teachers will be half-heartedly reassured that a (small) deduction can be made from the now-astronomical stress figure produced by the calculus so far. Over once again to our statistician:

"Notice the small-font 'ps' at the end. You take the value of a teacher's pension for p, and the sense of solidarity with colleagues whose integrity and ethics are also under constant assault by those meant to champion and represent them - and multiply them together to get 'ps', and take this away from the result so far. Whilst solidarity is at last rising again, that's being more than offset by the fall in the value of pensions.

"Of course, as deductions to stress go, by then it's like Palestinian children chucking stones at tanks, it's that futile and irrelevant an impact. So 'ps' in small font seems quite fitting because it's a trivial afterthought, let's face it."

It appears that the reason for burying the formula - assembled expensively in the private sector for a budget of around four million pounds (enough to run a medium-sized comprehensive school for a year) - is political: not only did data testing of the formula on teachers across multiple schools produce results in all cases likely to end in the DfE being sued for constructive dismissal, the highest results of all were in Gove's newly-formed academies.

"It was a nightmare" reports our source. "The stress levels coming out of the model were above all maximum health and safety limits set by EU law. Gove went mental. Somebody senior said the government wanted us to bury it until we can pull out of the EU Social Chapter - there was something about how, after that, we can screw teachers and the rest of the workforce all we like, but until then it might leave the government liable for large payouts. Worse yet, it turned out that neither the Education Secretary nor the Head of Ofsted scored anything like as highly for stress as the mean figure for year 5 teachers in urban schools. That would have looked really embarrassing, so I guess that's why they canned it."

The private sector contractor allegedly offered to look again at the model, but their eight million pound redraft fee was considered unreachable, with the D of E already having closed two county support centres for children with learning disabilities so that the private sector firm could put in the six hours' work needed to draft the original formula. "Plus," adds the civil servant, "it was difficult to reach them again after the problem arose. We could only get through to voicemail and a message saying they were on their way to the bank. There was quite a lot of laughter in the background."

This blog approached the teacher unions for comment in response. NASUWT sighed then put down the phone, the ATL representative just wept for twenty minutes, and the NUT phone line went quiet, followed by sounds of weaponry being armed faintly in the background. We'll keep you updated on further developments. At an hour-long INSET to explain the new calculus at one rural school in the North-West, one sparky NQT asked whether it could integrated with SIMS for export to a marksheet, while seven of twelve heads of department exhaustedly indicated they didn't understand the data anyway.

Time for fixed boundaries

No - this isn't an article about the riots. But yes, I am going to go a little Tory-traditionalist on you and take the Telegraph point of view. I want the abolition of grade inflation at A-level and GCSE by the imposition of fixed boundaries of percentages of students for every grade. First set a fixed quality boundary for "minimum standard" and call below that U. Then take all the results above that and rank them. Top 5%: A*. Next 15%: A. And then in tranches of 20% each, the 4 remaining grades (B-E) below that. Here's why.

When you run a 100m, you do not get gold for a fixed time or a personal best. You get it for beating the others. When you get a job, you beat someone else to it. When you win an award, the others shortlisted have ended a grade lower than you. When you sell your goods, that customer bought them instead of a competing company's offer. This is competition and it is good, as long as it is fair (and as long as, alongside this, we make strenuous efforts at real social justice and social mobility, disproportionately supporting the disadvantaged to give them chance to compete fairly) and should exist in education. By this token, when you get GCSEs or A-levels, you are doing so in direct competition with others in your peer group. There do not need to be "objective" standards for grades: I'm no statistician, but when millions of students take these exams every year, at the same schools and taught by the same teachers as the year before, there really cannot be any meaningful variance that would mean wildly differing quality from one year to the next. The sheer volume of the system means an A* one year - being in the top 5% - will mean, to within a hair's-breadth-of-dammit, exactly the same standard of student as last year. Change in standards over time will be very long-term and gradual.

I am a supporter of students. I value and want to celebrate their achievements. But I do find myself having to apologetically point out to them that my A grades are actually a lot more elite than theirs. They look a bit confused when I explain "there was no A* in my day." I ask them how many times they use the letter "A*" in normal writing and they get it: it's an imposed nonsense to cover up the gradual landslip in grades. How has this happened?

It's partly artificially political - no government wants to be seen to preside over "falling standards" - but there is a myth of fixed political interference which is a nonsense. Rather it is a matter of the skill of the teaching profession: to really understand grade inflation, don't mock teachers but recognise just how much teaching has improved. Over a quarter of a century, we've moved to a strict competitive focus on these letter grades. Teachers have always been committed, innovative and motivated and they still are: it's just their focus has moved - we have lost some of the breadth, pastoral concerns and extra-curricularity to focus almost exclusively on academic outcomes, predictably thereby raising the quality of academic work; we have used IT and followed research on good learning better than ever in the last decade; and teachers are working harder than ever before (and making students do so as a result.) Can we really be surprised at quality of student attainment improving? Although I gently mock my students that my A grades are worth more than theirs, in a straight comparison of our work, they're not: I looked back recently at my GCSE English essays which got me A, and they'd only get a B now. This is a subtle point, in contradiction both to the (genuine) problem about "basic skills" (a D/E grade problem for a small percentage), to the more general politicised nonsense usually printed in the media about "what students don't know / can't do" and really needs to be made explicit: genuinely, standards have gone up -and YET, grades mean less. My own GCSE work was (on a straightforward qualitative comparison) weaker than that of my current students but I was, in percentage terms, higher up my cohort. I deserve the A that many of them - despite their better work - do not. Now that sounds unfair - but here's why it's not.

I can't say how well I'd have done in this day and age as a student. I rather suspect word-processors and Wikipedia would have saved me the "longhand copying of neat fourth drafts" that still, just about, marked my GCSEs; whether Call of Duty would have ruined my focus as it does for so many current students, I don't know. The point is you can't compare different generations against one another - and there is no value to doing so. Of course technology and the world moves on; of course resources change and develop; but for all these students as they go through life, the one thing they will be permanently in the company of is their peer cohort - and they'll be in competition with them. The 100m sprint to the university-entrance finishing line is a crystal-clear instanciation of this, but they will realistically be fighting for success against these same peers throughout most of their (early) working life. An NQT starting now is not that closely in competition for any post I apply for - we're a different proposition, with different costs. And by my level of experience it's my references and achievements in post, and no longer really my academic results, that have come to matter - the results bridge that gap-before-your-thirties before you have an in-depth career record to point to. So it is irrelevant if my students' work is better than mine on a like-for-like comparison basis: they never were and won't ever be in competition with me on the basis of these grades (though later, on the basis of workplace efficiency, they might be.) These grades will only ever be a competitve marker against their peers, and so it against those peers that they should be set in fixed bands. You don't promote seven sides from the Championship to the Premiership and only demote two because "this year Championship sides looked like they were playing better football than ever before" - that may be true, but the numbers in each division, in each band, are rightly fixed.

This call for fixed banding of grades is becoming increasingly dominant and hurrah for the Telegraph for taking the lead on this: they polled on it the other day, but also witness these two excellent articles from them this week: Dr Richard Cunningham's (who seems to agree with me about increasing effort and quality by teachers and students - and I agree with him that what we don't need is more universities, promoting yet more meaningless grade inflation) and the explicit call from Richard Cairns, with which I am siding, for fixed boundaries. These are both strong articles, but there are two mistakes here - firstly the Telegraph has two academics from independent schools write them, rather than seeking a centrist or leftist to support the call - is this just PR-posturing from the private sector? Or do they think there's no hope of achieving this change? Surely, Telegraph, if you genuinely want this happening, you need to build some consensus across the aisle? Well - here I am offering centre-leftist support. Come and talk to mainstream teachers - you'd be surprised how many of us agree.

The problem for rightists is that they have yoked together an ill-fitting pair of arguments: they have hamstringed the valuable argument for fixing grade boundaries with traditional, prejudicial nonsense about some subjects being worth more than others. This is pointless dogma that stops the genuinely worthwhile traditionalist desire for fixed boundaries (as I'm arguing for here, despite being no educational traditionalist) being debated properly: witness Willetts' article also in the Telegraph, arguing for this kind of formal bias. I rubbished this nonsense in a separate blogpost yesterday but it can be simply dismissed here for brevity: if a subject is an A-level it must be counted the same as all A-levels; if it isn't good enough for that, then stop it being an A-level. Duh. Willetts is bright, but gunning wrongly here: combine fixed boundaries and a slimmer list of A-level options, along with enhanced vocational offerings, and you would have a much better educational system than just confusing matters with "it's-a-qualification-it's-not-a-qualification." Have the courage of your convictions and stop fudging with prejudice. You people are in charge. Make the change. Notice that the Richard Cairns article referred above - sound throughout in all other aspects - also throws in the one-liner about soft subjects with the statement that "We must also shatter the myth that exists in the minds of too many pupils that a Media Studies A-level is in some way equivalent to an A-level in Mathematics." No grounds are provided for this claim, as usual. Cairns is headmaster of the very grand independent school Brighton College. You may wish to quietly note that the school's website lists departments in Dance, Photography and Sports Science. While I agree there is some over-proliferation, this nonsense about "appropriate subjects" is not only the same nonsense people used to talk about English in the 1920s, it's in direct contrast to the subjects these schools themselves run. Less prejudice and hypocrisy, please, and more on the real issue: standardising with fixed grade boundaries.

I can't see why there isn't more decisive action here from the Tories. This is a government of iconoclasts who enjoy wiping the etch-a-sketch historical slate clean with a vengence; but where's their appetite to do so, common-sensically, here? They did it with budgets, school league tables, benefits and more. Their modus operandi has clearly been one of detonation-to-make-a-point, and then fresh rebuilding to their totally new template. I'm not going to get drawn into which of these other revolutionary acts has worked and which has not - but since they have form here, why not do it now for results 2012 (GCSE) and 2013 (A-levels - so those just having achieved AS don't have an odd jump in their results)? Why don't Gove and Willetts co-declare, right now, fixed percentage grade boundaries for those forthcoming exams - fixed in perpetuity at those %s of the cohort each year - no matter what quality of results? ZIP! The instant end of the politicisation of "continual improvement in results"! Trust teachers and schools and students to still compete (what choice, in this economic climate, do they have? - the structure of the game makes them do so, even if they didn't want to - which I also think they do.) Trust the inspection process and the ongoing development of teacher training and professional accountability measures to keep teachers and schools working at the cutting edge of good practice; trust the market (whether in universities or jobs) to then select between the outcome students. The difference, if there even is one, between 2012's B grade and 2013's will be so infinitesimally tiny that reference and interview differences will make it pale into comparison.

Universities want to be able to choose the best clearly, without grade inflation. Employers want the same. Both would welcome fixed grade boundaries. Teachers would be in no way offended, with the change rightly explained to them; and parents and students, whilst they would have to adjust to a one-off step-change adjustment, would understand the purpose and meaning of grades more clearly, and know they were fixed and therefore more credible. Competition between students for those % thresholds would not cease - if anything, not knowing *quite* where the boundary for the next grade up leads most people to over-work to be sure of hitting it. We would have to drop the current nonsense about every student always knowing exactly what grade they are at - or least, be honest about the element of estimation always intrinsically built into that, which would be better. Fixing boundaries would not relax the pressure on teachers or schools - grade inflation is already an irrelevance to them compared to the effect of league tables. Not least of all we would be rid of the Maoist nonsense of continually improving figures belieing ongoing problems in practice. Perhaps a third of schools each would fall back, a third improve each year, (and, to boot, we could then have a meaningful discussion about context and value-added) as opposed to the weird sight every year at present of seven-in-ten improving and perhaps one-in-ten falling back. So what if standards change slightly over time? That's the real world. Apple don't measure themselves against the efficiency practices of the East India Company. Fix grades to tell employers and universities who to take on. Make students realise that competition is raw - it is between them and their peers - it will shape their life - there's no guarantees, and you must apply yourself. Teams don't sit in the dressing room before the Cup Final consulting a grade descriptors table and saying "Oh right, if my tackles are 'robust' we get a draw, but if they're 'robust and expertly-timed' we win." You win if you do better than those you are competing with.

Fix the grade boundaries and we fix the problem with the value of qualifications. And I'm speaking as a centre-leftist.

End the long summer holiday?

It's been an odd summer, having just finished in one post and preparing for a major move out to the Persian Gulf for a new teaching job. If you thought moving home in the UK was a task, you should try reducing your life to 70kg, selling any vehicles you own and arranging house lets - and all before coping with the well-meaning flurry of friends and family wishing to bid you farewell and notifying you misguidedly that no-one in Arab countries is allowed to do anything, ever. I'm exhausted despite having the long summer holidays to sort it all out in. I have a vague recollection from childhood of being bored as hell two weeks before the end of that holiday every year - but not any more. Either I've got much better at entertaining myself or have a hell of a lot more to do.

I'm a big fan of travelling and have developed a predictably dull teacher routine of one very long trip every summer holidays so setting aside my customary jaunt round Europe in order to be practical and responsible feels dismal. My feeling-hard-done-by is self-afflicted but none the less miserable for it. I keep trying to tell myself that I can use my new teaching base as a point to explore India or South-east Asia, which I've never been able to afford to get to before, again in equally long or longer holidays, but that's sparse consolation right now. I almost wish, perversely, that I only had a week to sort it in so I would be forced to make swift and brutal decisions. And so all this wallowing got me to thinking the unthinable - should we stop having a holiday of this length?

Ah - I can hear the hissing of teachers nationwide through strained teeth, like angry geese. Or perhaps something more aggressive than geese: threaten the long holiday and teachers turn positively lupine at you. If you're the Daily Mail this is because they are cossetted public sector spongers with no sense of what a real job looks like: witness this typically-poisonous article slyly tarring teachers for not wanting to work hard. Anyone in the industry knows otherwise. And yet many of us would confess that the fixed structure of (almost) nationally-identical term dates makes no sense at all. Isn't there some middle way in discussing this?

There are multiple good reasons for cutting the long holiday, and we can start by dividing them into (mostly) uncontenious reasons, which teachers wouldn't see as an attack on their rights or sanity, and the cultural assault reason propogated by opponents of the profession. To start with the uncontentious: (1) Teachers pay more for their holidays than anyone else because the fixed dates create a high-demand arrangement. Embittered, we have attempted to afflict all other parents with this same heightened cost, by insiting children can never, ever, ever be taken out of school on holiday in termtime - or they will fail everything, ever. Sane parents nod politely and remove the child anyway, not least when a summer in Rome or Paris is infinitely more educational, in the holistic sense, than grinding through those agonising last two weeks of exhausted term, filled with wasps, DVDs and French bingo lessons. (2) Half-terms are an astonishing waste of time. In my experience in every post I've ever taught in, there's a 50% chance I'll collapse into illness and exhaustion at the start of every holiday, and start to feel human again about 4-5 days in. This makes a half-term week-off effectively a protracted illness followed by a weekend too busy on the roads to go anywhere anyway. Half-terms have never ceased to irritate me in their worthlessness, and I had rather have a couple of long weekends scattered through a full term, and three weeks at Easter and Christmas instead. (3) The terms are woefully imbalanced. September to Christmas, descending into darkness and SAD despair (additionally fueled by commercial cynicism) is a Promethean torture; the period to Easter is comparatively sane at first, although grisly with failing resolutions, rising in panic towards exam season and then summer a confusion of testing and bizarrely shortened weeks trailing away into purposeless nothing. (4) The long summer holiday clearly harms most the prospects of more disadvantaged children, a well-documented phenomenon, nodded-to amongst wider points by Mick Waters in the TES recently. You might argue his article should be taken with a pinch of salt - the opening line is a give-away that here is a Labour-era educational guru repositing to apply for high favour under the Tories - but Waters has always been a credible champion of young people and his points are valid despite the kow-towing to the Gove line. Most importantly, he also hits: (5) teachers rise and fall in energy levels in unison, which cannot be good for a collective body or the institution it forms. Everyone in schools knows there's a tide in a term, and we all ride it together - ten thousand staff morning briefings around the country in the last week of each term are filled with headteachers wearily paraphrasing Henry V's "Once more unto the breach...", in varying levels of irony and sincerity - and we are indeed like a force-marched army grinding to a useless halt as the campaigning season runs out. Consider that students work much less hard than us (NB, please, Michael Gove) and keeping them at school more consistently would (a) be good for them and (b) be welcomed by most parents; the key to Waters' point is an implicit acknowledgement that you would need to keep teacher days at 190, while  students study more; teachers would take some of their holiday allowance in term-time. This has complications to which I'll return below. But at the very least you could change term dates to make more sense.

Sigh. Didn't we go through all this debate a decade and more ago? About five-term years? We did. In my (Gloucestershire) experience it got hijacked at the county level, with some dimlar jobsworth going "Yeah, five terms sounds like more learning than three. You know what's even better? SIX terms. And it's easier too, cos we can just split each of the three terms not into two half-terms but into two 'terms', that sounds more and better. Great. Master will be pleased with Igor. I don't have to work anything out, but I can relabel everything to confuse everyone. If no-one knows what to call the 'half-term holiday' anymore, because now it's between two 'terms', maybe the Daily Mail won't notice their existence. And I get to spend at least three weeks of 'work' giving seminars on this tokenistic change. Gosh, I hope the Tories don't win the next election and cut my valueless post." Six terms is a nonsense, but five might be worthwhile - two before Christmas and three after, and you'd need to ignore / railroad Easter (who really cares, now? Honestly?)

And now the insincere and inflammatory right-wing reason for cutting the holidays: (6) Teachers don't work hard enough and get "all these holidays." Witness the TES community rants on this fevered issue. The real answer is simpler: teacher stress levels are far too high compared with almost any other job reports the Guardian, while the equivalent Mail article blusters about "15,000 teachers go sick EVERY day" as if it were shifty-eyed workshy malevolence - that's 3.5% of the workforce, you moron, like in any other profession on any given day. Teachers are incredibly highly stressed; their mental illness and career dropouts rates are things of horror compared to any other graduate profession; we get the holidays because we need them. The Health & Safety Executive's (impartial) analysis, replicated graphically here by the NUT, is a nightmare to observe (please, click that link and spend a few minutes looking.) It is very overtly ironic that the main parental / right-wing press complaint about the holidays amounts to "Good God, [even with nanny / childcare / summercamp], I can't handle my 1/2/3 children for 6 weeks, please take them back as soon as possible" because the implied subtext is: "to add to the 25-30 you handle for 40 weeks." (See teacher Francis Gilbert make mincemeat of parent Barbara Ellen's illogic in this structured debate.) A walk round a tourist site on Saturday in August, or Asda on any Friday night, will affirm for most teachers the complete inability of people to handle even two children compared to what we do: the plea that teachers should work hard because they're slackers is a smokescreen covering parental desperation and incompetence. Well, tough: you chose childbirth, now take responsibility. Teachers are not babysitters and our termtime workload is insanity by the standards of any other profession: in what job do you have not ONE major hour-long meeting a day but FIVE, with no time to prepare for them, and that meeting is with 25 clients, who don't really understand what it's about, five of whom want to swear at you and provoke confrontation while another ten withhold most co-operation? Name me another industry that works under those parameters if you dare. In addition, bureaucratically, teachers work extremely hard in evenings and often weekends in term-time - personally I don't begrudge this that much - but need extensive breaks to balance this. Soldiers and oil rig workers have extended, high-intensity tours of duty followed by much lighter respite windows and the same rationale applies with teaching. I am two totally different people: a work robot in termtime, dedicated heavily, professionally, and continuously, but emotionally drained and physically exhausted - beyond what most jobs demand - and myself, free to recover and have the identity and hobbies most people in most jobs consider normal, in holidays. Teachers do not have "extra" time off versus other workers: rather, we condense our stress / workload and our free time where others spread it more evenly. This is partly a necessity, because good learning should be intense; partly an effect of the fact that classes over about 18 in number (half that if there are multiple learning or behavioural difficulties) really can't be taught with genuine individual support - yet our system is predicated on contact numbers double these. Having spent time in the tutorial / crammer sector, I can tell you that I could teach those small numbers year-round without holidays at all, by comparison with state-sector classes and workloads.

This doesn't kill the argument about summer holidays. If we set aside the unreasonable argument, the good arguments for cutting it are still incredibly compelling by themselves. Why shouldn't every local council set slightly different term dates, spreading the holiday market and reducing prices for teachers and all parents alike? In light of the recent riots, differing term dates across regions would make universal dissatisfaction less widespread and enable police resources to be concentrated more easily. It would enable consultancy / cross-county support services / extended services offers to be spread more effectively for schools. This seems a non-brainer. Set your dates differently to adjacent counties and the benefits are obvious. I'm going to teach in the Gulf, where the climate dictates the calendar - only a couple of days at half-terms and a lot longer again than the UK in the summer, in order to flee the desert at its worst - but were this not an issue, or were I setting up a free school, I'd have five eight-week terms starting (like the Scots) before August ended, each with a long weekend "exeat" in the middle instead of a half-term, with 3 week breaks inbetween each and only slightly longer in summer - the same 190 days split sensibly. Christmas would be preserved but archaic dates like Easter and Whitsun provided only as bank holidays, not included in the structure of weeks off.

Mick Waters' more radical suggestions are tougher but worth a brief flight of fancy. Imagine (as I think Gove justifiably does, but sadly without doing his budgetary or teacher-workload maths) schools open 50 weeks a year, twelve hours a day. Imagine staff working the appropriate 190 days a year on rolling dates, booking their holidays to a central calendar and taking one another's classes in the same department while colleagues took their holidays, the school always having the right number of staff drawn from a pool Waters rightly identifies as needing to be 20% larger; imagine student total holidays being fewer (to the relief of parents) and with an understanding approach to parents removing students for culturally-valuable holidays in termtime. Don't baulk at the idea of leaving your class in a colleague's hands: in a good school, with good teachers (NB, ones that are not as tired as under the fixed-terms system!), and stability of (valued!) teachers to ensure students had positive relationships with all staff, there would be not only no loss but potentially a refreshing change for students in taking a module with a different staff member for 3 weeks; county groups, federations or academy groups would need to (at last) responsibly and sustainably source a pool of regular support / supply staff and cultivate them with better-than-the-current-ragged-treatment they receive; all but the smallest schools would be able to programme like this without difficulty. In other words - we'd function like normal business organisations with sensible depth of staffing capacity. Since total holidays were shorter for students, some of the (very valuable) Extended Schools provision in summer could be run alongside / integrated with normal schooling - an awkward divide at present. There is a difficulty of course, Mr. Gove - far from teachers not working hard enough, you currently have a system predicated on driving half a million skilled graduates to the verge of nervous collapse three times a year and effectively no effective staffing reserve in any school - so you currently have a term dates system structured as a prop to barely prevent that. If you want all the "Imagine" possiblities above, you'd need a 20% rise in education funding at a stroke, wouldn't you?

But at the very least - we could change to a sensible five-term year right now, without cost or difficulty, to the benefit of all. Still knee-deep in packing boxes after three weeks I may be, and with a fortnight of chaos yet to come - but even I see the sense in shorter summer holidays.

EBacc to basics

You have to be amused about the whole EBacc thing, predominantly because a red rag has rarely so transparently been waved at the educational establishment with such little substance behind it. The spitting fury is palpable, from teachers and teaching associations of the "new" subjects suddenly downgraded, to the Heads of the best private schools who suddenly find themselves at the wrong end of league tables they never anticipated. But all this sound and fury is laughably unnecessary. Gove doesn't mean what people think he means by introducing the EBacc.

Presume for a moment that a bunch of advisors a few months back, who spent years in opposition denigrating Labour's target-driven culture, and recognising that brutal cuts in all sections of public spending were unlikely to promote raised achievement in difficult schools, had a meeting trying to work out how, by the 2015 election, to paint the ConDem government an educational success. You need a target that sounds nothing like the other targets. And referencing the past is always sound territory for Conservatives, so do that too. Where you'd start is where many teachers start a GCSE course: with a difficult, traditional baseline assessment on which they help students little, so as to get an idea of the natural lie of the land, uninfluenced by support or later political interpretation. And in the case of Gove's advisors, that would take the form of this question: how can we select a criterion which is currently very low, so everything counts as progress? Dare I say drama teachers might use a difficult traditional play as the baseline assessment at the start of year 10, or English teachers a challenging textual extract for analysis? Quite. All those Gs and Fs would be a good place to start: not so much things can only get better as the only way is up.

So only one in six students got the EBacc? And very few at top schools? Perfect. Even if there were a mass revolt, or even mass disinterest, there'll still be enough careerists, traditionalists and downtroddenly-obedient teachers to rapidly and dramatically swell the rate of uptake once they focus on this measure. Progress will be effortless and government able to claim credit for "restoring rigour to our educational system" (allegedly, whenever Tory Press Officers open a Press Release email template, the subject line autocompletes the word "Restoring" as the opening word.) But, cynicism aside - dare I say it as a centre-leftist and a teacher? - what's wrong with the EBacc as an idea?

There are two obvious responses: one, that it forces children to do subjects they hate, with little modern real-world relevance (honestly - how many geographers do we think UK PLC needs?), and problematic behavioural consequences in thousands of classrooms; and second, the protest that applying the statistic retrospectively to compare schools is unfair. The former is genuinely problematic, because it's about real education, and we'll come back to that; the latter, merely PR, and easy to dismiss. The cacophonic cries of "unfair / it's retrospective" are pointless: these claims are predicated on a target-obsessed mindset from speakers literally unable to see wood for trees. "But we worked so hard to skew our curriculum to the targets about A*-C!" goes the underpinning non-philosophy; "it was all rubbish and now it's worthless rubbish! That's not right or fair!" Well, nor was rigging your subjects to suit a league table, so quit pretending you're on a moral high ground - you're in the mire and now you simply have to wade to another point of it.

But, dear me! - all this kerfuffle from the right as well as the left. The terrible state of British education! So few educated well! Actually, since so few got the EBacc - since the outcomes are so low, it will be generally disregarded by most parents as an invalid comparison of real quality even if it marks an interesting point of note about the recent drift of education. As it happens, back in the Dark Ages when I left school, these traditional subjects were all you could do - ironically my GCSEs do form an EBacc, despite my now teaching subjects outside of it. A saner response is taken by my own head, who stops short of the word boycott but expresses general indifference to the publication event, indicating that his first priority is subject relevance to particular pupils. Good for him. It's quietly conspicuous that the options grid this year now discretely maximises the chance of pupils, however accidentally, selecting an EBacc combo (doesn't it sound like a Subway sandwich?), and doubtless we shall all landslip gradually and quiescently into the being-forced-to-count-against-it swamp over several years, but the expression of hope from some heads that there might be a general consensus to pay no attention to it (or better yet, to actively publish to their parents a rationale for ignoring it) is admirable in its disinterest - even if unlikely to come to anything other than the squished compliance so engrained in teachers' genomes. In the end, this profession does whatever it's told.

This is not to say that Gove doesn't have a point: these traditional subjects are indeed underdone; it would indeed be better if we had a little more of this kind of knowledge in society. The question is whether a focus this explicit and narrow will so dramatically hack back the new technology-type subjects that we'll be unable to staff the only kinds of jobs Britons are still likely to get in this day and age. As with much Tory education philosophy, it is hard to escape the sense of an initiative genuinely positively-intentioned (even for the most deprived) but designed at such a lofty Olympian height in the public school clouds that its effect at ground level will be massively ineffective at best - or heavily counter-productive. The "engagement" issue with comprehensive pupils ("but we have to do courses they'll enjoy!") may well be pandered-to too much, but shifting them forcibly onto the EBacc is only likely to produce a raft of hybrid courses (please await "IT History", "BTEC Geography of Sport" and "Maths Travel and Tourism") to avoid the behavioural car crash that would follow from forcing vocational-type students back into more academic-type lessons. The EBacc, ironically, will damage and devalue the vaunted purity of the subjects it aims to promote.

It will be adopted, though. The clever trick of the EBacc, and why it will succeed in dominating debate and forcing schools (in time) to adhere and be interested is that sheer narrowness of its list, creating an artifical debate. Notice that only Geography and History are permitted as Humanities. Cue a predictable debate (already now starting) where The Telegraph attempts to row religion back into the frame. This is likely to end with RE included as an equivalent option, thus affirming Gove's "flexibility" and "responsiveness." But it is unlikely those framing the original plan anticipated anything other than allowing this in when pushed anyway; it is less likely that Citizenship, for example, will be permitted to count, as this is a subject born and bred under Labour - no matter how much more relevant it is to the modern world and young people than RE. A sham debate will cover the absence of a real one. English Literature might be permitted the same exception, where Media Studies will not, although this government doesn't seem massively enamoured of books; Music and perhaps even Art might be allowed to slip in somewhere (as traditional arts), although Drama teachers will remember the 1988 curriculum's erasure of the subject from existence and would be wise not to hold out any hopes. By playing in a general sense to the traditional assumptions of a mostly educationally backward-looking populace (who, en masse, almost all did only these traditional subjects, but not for the reasons enshrined in the EBacc) Gove easily hands the fight over to becoming the teaching profession versus the traditionalist press - leaving himself a free hand to tinker, unobserved, in more specific ways elsewhere - while all the time watching the EBacc rate rise. Clever boy.

Of course the presented argument for the EBacc - that these other subjects are less challenging than the traditional ones - is simply not true. As anyone who's ever examined knows, a gargantuan industry exists around standardisation of difficulty between subjects - and it works. (Cynics might suggest that the public-sector cull will destroy this effective process and thus genuinely require a return to old subjects. Hush my lips.) Media cherry-picking of select questions for political comparison is a classic fallacy of argument from single example and simply cannot prove the superiority of one subject over another: they are cross-standardised, and it does work. But nonetheless, Gove is in some ways right: it is certainly true that "new" subjects like Media Studies, Psychology, ICT and BTEC Sports have proliferated - for all their genuine relevance to students, and (more importantly) relevance to real-world employment futures - beyond the real need for them; it is difficult to challenge the rightist assertion that schools are using such courses to bump themselves up the tables unrepresentatively. It is true that we could do with more students knowing a little more history, culture and grammar - Gove and The Telegraph are right in this. It is irrelevant that the measure is retrospective, and complaints to this effect more likely damn the complainer than the Secretary of State or his advisors or press cheerleaders. It is futile to suppose the measure will be ignored or go away. If anything, as yet another measure amongst increasingly many (GCSE A*-C, A*-C inc English and Maths, EBacc, CVA...) it will rightfully inform those bothered to interrogate the figures in the round about the nature of a given school; schools are free to explain which targets they pursue, how and why - and if overall success rate clashes with EBacc rates, forcing a thoughtful choice between relevance and traditional status could be a good thing indeed. The EBacc certainly mustn't be the Holy Grail - but it's a good idea - if used right.

The choice, as usual, is in the hands of the profession; will we be so moronic as to mangle all wider aspects of education for this one Crufts hoop, just as we did when the A*-C including English and Maths score became focal? We needn't. You can sell success in many ways - and forge it in yet more. If there is a brutalisation of relevant education for young people just to chase the EBacc percentage, teachers and Heads will have only themselves to blame. Don't hold your breath.