Have you tried turning IT off and then turning IT on again?

Just over a month ago if someone had told me that by mid January, both D&T and IT would have been let loose from government control I wouldn’t have believed them. In fact I’m not entirely sure I do now, even after Mr Gove’s recent announcements. Meanwhile it must be galling for teachers of English, Maths and Science who have faithfully done as they have been told for the last 20 years or so to learn that technology teachers are obviously all so clever and trustworthy that they can just be left to get on with it, and that somehow just through the means of social networking they will magically lead us into a new golden age of prosperity.

Sadly, nothing could be further from the truth. No technology teacher under the age of around forty has ever been in the position of having the freedom to determine their own course content, and suddenly asking them to do so is a little like sending a domesticated animal out into the wild for the first time. I suspect most IT and D&T courses will in reality stay well within the safe confines of exactly where they are now. The lack of expertise in the current workforce means that there’s going to continue to be a lot of working in Wood and Word for some time yet.

In a few schools there will be outstanding exceptions, and enlightened enthusiasts will form collective departments that use the time to create new schemes of work that imaginatively merge IT and D&T to explore the creative processes of designing innovative electronic products, services and systems that are easy and satisfying to use. It is these schools that are likely to provide the future programmers, developers, interaction and games designers that can potentially save the country’s future economy and global standing. But there are unlikely to be many of them.

Meanwhile the responsibility for defining the technological curriculum of the future would now seem to be in the hands of the examination boards. No school is going to offer a course in Technology that does not lead to a GCSE or equivalent recognised vocational qualification at 16+. And at the same time, those boards will have to face up to the challenge of providing a format for examinations which can be seen to effectively assess technological capability – a three hour written or multiple choice question paper taken in the school gym just isn’t going to reveal evidence of the ability to undertake creative and collaborative open-ended problem-solving.

Now that the current Technology curriculum is about to be switched off, there is a potential opportunity to create something new and exciting, and finally provide a grounding in what are frequently referred to as 21st Century skills (or more accurately, the late 20th Century skills that were never provided).  The question is how?

And, one wonders, was Mr Gove given an iPad for Christmas and at some point needed to be told to try switching it off and then on again?

Breaking News…. ICT ‘deleted’.

“We have ways of making you learn”

Herr Gove announced today that from September, the National Curriculum requirements for teaching ICT are to be scrapped from September 2012. Schools are free to do what they want.

“Our school system has not prepared children for this new world. And the current curriculum cannot prepare British students to work at the very forefront of technological change….Imagine the dramatic change which could be possible in just a few years, once we remove the roadblock of the existing ICT curriculum.”

It would seem to be extremely naive of him to believe that just by ‘deleting’ ICT lessons in schools we are going to somehow move to the forefront of technological change, especially as last year nationally only three teachers with a computer science degree became teachers, and many traditional subject teachers would still rather not have computers in their classrooms.

It will be interesting to see what happens in the long-term. Presumably what will emerge will be a great muddle, sorry, diversity, of provision, with some schools going overboard on coding (which many kids will find even more boring than current ICT lessons), and others ignoring IT all together, or specialising in just one area, and with very little sense of continuity and progression. Some really good, balanced, coherent guidance and CPD is needed, but in the current economic situation this seems unlikely to happen?

Comments please!

A cat amongst the pigeons

Well, it’s been an interesting week. Sources revealed that various academic and subject-based associations are meeting together and conspiring to put together a revised Design & Technology National Curriculum in the unlikely belief that it will remain a statutory subject at the end of the current review. Of course for academics and subject-based associations it matters a lot that D&T retains its status, but the reality is that the future of D&T lies more appropriately in a vocational rather than academic context. Meanwhile we all need to accept  that, for a large proportion of children and teachers, the D&T National Curriculum has over the last twenty years been a complete waste of time for all but a few schools where it has been done well. At a time when some forward-looking, non-academically-led vision is needed, the last thing we need is another patched-up version of the past, and another attempt to make a somewhat 19th century view of engineering compulsory for all. And a further danger is that what is submitted as being suitable for an academic National Curriculum will then end up as ‘non-statutory guidance’ for a vocational experience.

The 1989/90 first D&T National Curriculum was seen by many at the time as being over-ambitious, which of course it was, given that not nearly enough was subsequently invested in the in-service training needed to enable a workforce with largely no previous design experience to deliver it. Instead it was simplified, and by the mid 1990s had ‘settled down’ into something more manageable. But that’s where the development largely stopped. At a time when technology started to race ahead, a limited 1960s approach to 3D product design for mass-manufacture was still being offered – the only real change being the introduction of expensive CAD-CAM equipment that tended to limit rather than extend creative design ideas.

While 1999 was not so very different from 1989, 2011 is a very different world from 2001. Back then mobile phones just made phone calls and the internet was an expensive dial-up affair. There were no mp3 players, no sat-navs or domestic digital video cameras. And flatscreen, widescreen, catch-up TV viewed on hand-held tablets was still a wild aspiration. Few had even dreamt of the possibilities of Facebook, Blogs, Twitter and YouTube. Today’s 21st Century children think, communicate and learn in very different ways to their teachers

Sadly Technology education is now hopelessly out-of-date, and the problem is we don’t have a generation of enlightened twenty and thirty-somethings coming through into the profession who are capable of teaching children about things such as collaborative, agile ways of creatively solving complex problems for an unpredictable future, how to design apps or intelligent sensor-driven products and interfaces made from composite smart materials, or how to design and program an App that interacts with its environment. Technology education now needs a framework that enables it change rapidly, not once every ten to fifteen years.

But what made the week really interesting was the sudden appearance of a short, anonymously published, somewhat disruptive pdf document that got rapidly circulated amongst the academics and subject associations still trying to pretend that D&T still had a place in Mr Gove’s flawed academic vision for the nation. The document was simply a collection of responses to the question ‘Should D&T continue to be a National Curriculum subject?‘ Although the responses varied, the overall conclusion was a resounding No!, and that it would be better if it were left to those teachers who were actually able to deliver it well, leaving the rest to focus on something more worthwhile. With Mr Gove extremely unlikely to admit D&T into the sacred academic ‘essential knowledge’ circle, it was suggested that this might be a good moment to try something completely different.

2D&Tornot2D&T? ( .pdf download)

This, as someone remarked, put the cat amongst the pigeons. The response of some of the academics and subject associations to the document was particularly revealing in their haste and vehemence in dismissing the responses as being of no interest or relevance, seeing it as an attack on the value of the subject, rather than the reality of its delivery. At the same time others are unbelievably still trying to define what is meant by ‘design’, as if this was not extensively explored in the 1960s and 70s.  Though after a number of days an increasing number of academics started to come out of the woodwork, so to speak, and admit that the document did make some very important points that needed to be taken into consideration. All of which simply begs the question – How many academics,  administrators and politicians does it take to make a mess of the next National Curriculum?

Meow!

Standing in the shadows

I wonder how many teachers know what the Burnham Scale is, and when it dates from? For those readers who don’t, it was a national pay scale for teachers and lecturers devised in 1919 by a committee led by Lord Burnham. Essentially it regularised pay across learning institutions and identified relative differences in pay between the different sectors and in comparison to civil service officers. Back in 1919:

“A man teacher on this scale who was teaching in a junior or a senior school and began his teaching at 21 years of age would by 30 years of  age be receiving a net salary of about £262. He would reach his maximum, £366 gross and £348 net, by the time he was 38 years of age. If such a teacher had spent four years instead of two years over his training and had thus taken a university degree as well as completed an approved course of training he would nevertheless be on the same scale.”

In 1994, a single national scale was agreed, and is still known as the Burnham Agreement.

All of which of course, at first sight at least, has absolutely nothing to do with Andy Burnham, the shadow education secretary who is calling for schools to provide a ‘pathway to employment’ for the ‘forgotten half’ less suited to going to university.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jul/10/labour-schools-work-michael-gove?CMP=twt_gu

It makes refreshing, optimistic reading, particularly when he says things like:

“Government is in danger of preparing young people for a world that no longer exists, by prioritising Latin over engineering and not listening to what employers want.”

Clearly he ‘gets it’. Or does he?  I’m a bit confused when he suggests: “The [Labour] party wants to ensure that as many teachers as possible have MA qualifications”. Surely the last thing we want is more university-trained teachers with an even higher level of academic qualifications? What’s really needed are suitably trained and qualified inspirational teachers who have had a real experience of work outside an educational institution.

Perhaps it is time the Burnham Scale was reviewed again in order to encourage such people into the profession?

 

UPDATE, 13/7/11

Here’s a link to the text of Andy Burnham’s full speech:

http://www.labour.org.uk/what-young-people-need-to-succeed-in-modern-world?Init=f8905e5f-ff97-4eb4-69ca-f84c932daa49

Amongst all the good stuff though, he says the ‘brightest’ 30% of children could do Latin. So everyone else, who is by implication ‘dim’, will be prepared for the world of work?  Maybe he should have said the ‘most academically able 30%’…?

A turn up for the iPads?

It seems that nice Mr Osborne is now having his say about education, with today’s surprise announcement that ‘Schoolchildren will be taught to design apps for smartphones’.

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23950435-osborne-puts-apps-on-school-agenda-to-boost-digital-skills.do

In yet another carefully thought-through joined-up strategy, one wonders how many existing teachers are experienced enough to lead their classes in the design of apps? Perhaps a scheme in which schoolchildren teach their teachers how to design apps might be more successful?

And then there’s the little problem that, also reported today, it seems that mobile phones and wi-fi are about to be banned in schools:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/mobile-phones/8514380/Ban-mobile-phones-and-wireless-networks-in-schools-say-European-leaders.html

which might just dampen Mr Osborne’s hope to “produce a Zuckerberg or Brin of the future”?

Meanwhile one wonders what nice Mr Gove is making of all this. Has he perhaps been persuaded to add ‘the design of apps’ to the requirements for the EBacc? If so, maybe it will shortly be appropriately renamed the e-Bacc?

But perhaps the most surprising statement Mr Osborne made was:

“For politicians of my generation, the incredible disruptive impact of the internet is not a threat – it is an opportunity.”

I wonder if he will be speaking at next year’s ‘Learning Without Frontiers’ Conference?

Horses for courses

I was recently reading about a highly qualified Oxbridge scientist who was enjoying, and by all accounts succeeding in her first year as a teacher in a secondary school under the ‘Teach First‘ scheme that encourages graduates to spend at least the first two years of their career teaching in ‘difficult’ secondary schools.

Very soon, I thought, and sooner than she probably realises, she will have to make the biggest decision of her life – whether to leave teaching at the end of the two years, or to become a teacher for the rest of her working life. In later years we of course would recognise her as someone with excellent communication and personnel skills, highly organised, methodical, hard-working and socially-minded with excellent communication and personnel skills – ideal for employment in any industry. But sadly industry doesn’t work that way, and before long will simply see her as someone with no commercial experience or drive, and with scientific knowledge and experience that is now out of date. And, before she knows it, she will also have taken on to that mysterious ‘aura’ that seems to mark a teacher out in a crowd -  it’s just something about the way they speak, look and behave.

Meanwhile with our frequent references to ivory towers, regular readers might imagine that All Change Please! has the impression that all university courses are purely academic and, as such, of little practical value. Nothing of course could be further from the truth, with many of the so-called ‘soft subjects’ successfully preparing students for the rigour of life and work in the real world. And indeed, it is the traditional courses in history, english literature, pure mathematics, etc that are declining in numbers and closing down. So why do we continue to have a primary and secondary curriculum that continues to promote these out-moded academic disciplines, particularly at GCSE and A level? Why aren’t we introducing and giving much greater emphasis to the subjects school-children are more likely to go on and study?

Maybe it’s partly because most of our teachers are those who have themselves been academically successful in school, have gone on to study a traditional academic subject at university, and then have discovered they can’t get a job in anything other than teaching a traditionally academic subject in a secondary school? And at the same time mid-career industrialists don’t see that the technical, project-based collaborative skills and expertise they have acquired and could pass on will be valued in a school.

Somehow ‘once a teacher, always a teacher’ is a mind-set and situation we urgently need to change.

A horse is a horse, of course…

Meanwhile, after a photo-finish and a win by a short head, the novice, dark-horse Mr Ed appears to have won the race.

The more senior readers amongst us will of course recall that the famous Mr Ed is of course a talking horse who featured in a US TV series in the mid 1960s…

Giving the Tories’ education proposals the Third Degree

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8464916.stm

Now of course it’s good news that nice Mr Cameron has today announced his promise to improve the quality of teachers and to make teaching ‘the new noble profession’. And some of the ways he plans to do this might be of some benefit. One of those ways though is to restrict financial support for graduates who only get a Third-class university degree. Despite the fact that he says “Everyone remembers a teacher who made a difference through sheer force of personality”, what this proposal is actually doing is reinforcing the notion that by default people with high academic standards, ie extensive subject knowledge, make them the best teachers. As such it fails to recognise – or more probably reveals the lack of understanding of, the breadth of skills involved in the processes of teaching. I once used to work with a science teacher who had a PhD and who bored the pants off his pupils because he was a poor communicator and organiser who had little sense of how learners learn. What we really need are more effective ways of initially assessing potential teaching ability, and particularly I suspect those applying to do BEd degrees.

Meanwhile another part of the plan involves paying teachers more. Perhaps controversially, this also is not the solution. Successive governments seem to have had the belief that teachers are only in it for the money, whereas in reality it’s a vocation – unless you are motivated by the belief that you are in some way making things better for the children you teach you wouldn’t, and indeed couldn’t, do it. And anyway industry and commerce will simply offer the ‘brightest’ graduates more, and the whole thing will spiral out of control.

Meanwhile having used it in the title I was curious to know what the derivation of the term ‘Third Degree’ was. It seems that:

‘The third degree’ is well-known to all US crime-fiction enthusiasts as ‘an intensive, possibly brutal, interrogation.

In Masonic lodges there are three degrees of membership; the first is called Entered Apprentice, the second Fellowcraft, and the third is master mason. When a candidate receives the third degree in a Masonic lodge, he is subjected to some activities that involve an interrogation and it is more physically challenging than the first two degrees. It is this interrogation that was the source of the name of the US police force’s interrogation technique. ‘

Perhaps the way to get better teachers might be to give them the Third Degree?  I’m sure 9b would make a very good job of doing the interrogation…

Training Tomorrow’s Teachers Today

A recent comment on another post has raised important issues about the current provision for initial teacher training. If nothing else, we are certainly going to need a highly capable, committed and motivated workforce to deliver the appropriate and effective educational experiences that we need to start to provide in the 21st century. Which is why it was worrying to read the account of an ITT lecturer’s experiences of preparing tomorrow’s teachers today. Are five A*-C GCSEs and three C grade GCEs enough to qualify someone to train to be a competent teacher?

Here’s what ‘Roberta’ wrote:

“After 35 years in education (secondary and higher), not including my own, I think that perhaps we do need to take a pragmatic stance on primary and secondary education. Perhaps it is for the production of employable people who will be able to take on the roles required by their employers, people who are punctual, civil, creative, responsible, curious, eager to learn new skills and information, who are literate and numerate. I am not talking about ‘factory fodder’ here, but young people who will join the professions.

Universities are now experiencing ‘bad behaviour’ amongst a large proportion of first year undergraduates, these include Primary Teacher trainees, whose antics are those that one might expect from Year 10 and 11 pupils. This inappropriate behaviour is manifesting itself in the lecture room, a situation which has never occurred before this year, with the open use of mobile phones and MP3 players, laughing and talking over the lecturer’s voice and during session tasks, absenteeism, eating and drinking (including alcohol) and complaints when asked to make contributions to teaching sessions.

Admonition is greeted with complaints that lecturers are being patronising and since the students are paying fees, they are able to do as they please.The idea that they may be disrupting the learning of others does not occur to them. Their refusal to carry out tasks, unless they contribute to formal assessment and final degree classifications, is bewildering for those of us who see learning as a continuum. The idea of engaging with learning because that is why they are attending university seems to be beyond their comprehension. This is from people with a minimum of three C grades at A level.

For the most part, these are young people who have chosen this career path, not ‘ended up’ teaching through Clearing, due to unexpectedly poor A Level grades. They are recruited to Initial Teacher Education early in the academic year before they finish secondary school and references and good predicted grades are being given by their schools. What is happening? If this is deemed to be acceptable behaviour by these young people, who are our future educators, what hope is there for those who emerge from the secondary school system barely literate and numerate with a disaffected attitude towards society?

In addition, the government’s QTS tests in English and Maths, taken towards the end of their undergraduate (and postgraduate) teacher training, are proving a really difficult hurdle for many, to the extent that Michael Gove has announced that a Conservative government would limit the number of times that they can be re-taken by trainee teachers. What is this saying about the level of education of our young people, if those with fairly decent A levels are struggling with literacy and numeracy?”

I’m reminded of a recent cartoon in which an excited sixth-former had just opened a letter offering him a place on a teacher-training course. “All I need” he is announcing to his parents ” is an A, a B and a C. And they’ll teach me the rest of the alphabet when I get there…”

So any suggestions as to how this situation needs to be changed that don’t involve the traditional reaction of  the need to get back to the good old days of formal academic education? As always I look forward to your comments…