The focus of The Good-morrow has always been educational news and research so it isn’t surprising that I’ve found a lot of posts I’ve put up recently have had some connection with school improvement, transformation and inevitably therefore in the UK, the Building Schools for the Future programme. I’ve just done a presentation in Singapore for an organisation called SPRING (which had nothing whatsoever to do with new schools) but while researching I’ve been reading a lot of reports from people working in the field, and this little extract from someone with considerable experience training teachers in rural schools in this region, just seemed priceless to me.

…educational decision-makers seem to prefer an approach to resources drawn from the Hollywood film, Field of Dreams: "Build it, and they will come." In practice, buildings, classrooms, computer labs and other educational ‘hardware’ take precedence over the development of human resources, as if building an attractive new classroom will somehow magically guarantee that effective teaching and learning takes place.

I’ve always found my spine contracts slightly even at the mere sight of Hillary Clinton, and her use of that bland truism, “It takes a village to bring up a child,” reveals far more about her than she thinks, but coming across the comment above in the report I was reading, really does drive home the point so many politicians are just too dim to grasp. Education is about big people working with little people…now which bit didn’t you understand?

I was invited to a preview of a new film this week at the Guardian’s London offices, which is a full length documentary about education called We are the people, (sic) We've been waiting for, purporting to expose an inconvenient truth about education. i.e. that it needs to transform if the UK is to continue to compete globally. The two quotations aren’t mine, they are from the film’s own publicity material and the use of both Obama and Gore’s words reveals a lot about the film’s makers. As does the crucially incorrect punctuation of the film's title which appeared on everyone's invitation...but then I guess this was an event organised by the Guardian.

Yet this isn't a trivial matter. It is frighteningly indicative of the problem because the comma changes the entire meaning of Obama's words, rendering them incomplete and meaningless. But hey, who cares...this is only education we're debating with a group of invited "experts" in the field.

You can see the trailer I saw here, and reach your own conclusions about it, but for me the opening montage with compulsory belching chimney, starving child and pathetic polar bear scrambling onto a shrinking ice floe, said it all. This is a film that mistakes politics for education. In fact I found the entire event quite worrying, apart from one insightful comment by a headmistress, which I will come to later, because it seemed to be peddling a covert message it was actually too naïve to be even aware of. This is the anti-schools agenda, so many people on the fringes of education are eagerly pushing.

Numerous voices were raised in the discussion which followed the screening that displayed not only a profound ignorance about what excellent schools and teachers do, but a palpable contempt for them. We have the absurd situation in the UK where we have some of the greatest schools in the world, who know what education is and how to do it superbly, to such an extent they are busy exporting their model around the world to countries who do appreciate and value the concept of a school, in all its considerable subtlety and complexity. At the same time, individuals in the UK who have never set foot in a great (never mind a good school) are busily trying to undermine the whole concept.

Being very familiar with this covert agenda, it was no surprise to me that one of the panel voiced their disappointment in the failure of the Building Schools for the Future programme to deliver anything like real innovation or transformation, a key buzz word of the film. A representative of the key quango responsible for delivering the programme happened to be present and when they were asked to provide an example of innovation or transformation that wasn’t about buildings…they couldn’t.

The reason is (as everyone who has ever attended or taught in one knows) a good or great school is just a little bit more than a building. If anything clearly demonstrates the problem created when political ideology stifles the experienced voice of good teachers, it is the BSF programme. No one with any serious experience of working in great schools would ever have argued that a building is transformational. Similarly, only those with a personal grudge or political agenda rather than an educational one, would ever seek to undermine the idea of a school as a means to educate children.

And the headmistress’s comment? She had recently been to a school in India where she saw a 60 strong chemistry class she described as more difficult than anything she's ever seen in the UK, which was utterly inspiring, because the incredible energy and the desire to learn from the children was “tangible.” She described it as a Damascene moment for her and she returned home wanting exactly the same thing for her own school. Well if that is what she wants, she won’t get it from any of the fringe characters driving this anti-schools claptrap. 

In what I hope to be a regular feature, I've invited someone else to voice their views on The Good-morrow. Francis O'Gorman is Professor of Victorian Literature and Head of School at Leeds University, and writes here in response to the government's recent proposals for universities.
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 The future of universities in a knowledge economy.  That is the subtitle of BIS’s report on Higher Education, out in the week of November.  A knowledge economy is where it is recognized that knowledge contributes to the economy, right?  Well, that’s incontrovertible.  The Universities UK report last week announced that Higher Education contributed £56bn to the British economy in 2007-8. 

We are making money out of knowledge. 

But there is a difference between the (hard-to-be-exact about) financial contribution of the sector to a national economy, and the financial sustainability of any single HEI. 

As the two at the moment look about to become confused, there are some tough questions. 

Does the new definition of ‘knowledge economy’ now mean that universities must pursue only forms of knowledge that directly and measurably make money for the economy (and if so, how would that ‘directly’ and ‘measurably’ be—measured?)  Or, even, does it mean that universities must primarily or only pursue forms of knowledge that make money for the individual HEI and directly and measurably for the national economy? 

Such a view would make universities businesses entirely, only undertaking academic activity that would be immediately profit-making or internally sustainable within a short-term financial plan.

‘Universities’, says BIS’s new report, ‘need to rigorous in withdrawing from activities of lower priority and value, so that they can invest more in higher priority programmes’ (p.4).  The key metric of what is of ‘value’, though, is that short-term financial sustainability/profit and imagined ‘direct’ and pretty immediate contribution to the national economy.

But universities’ role in a national economy requires more sophisticated thinking than this. 

The education of highly-skilled and highly-articulate graduates to work in the United Kingdom is a crucial part of HEIs’ ongoing mission (it is not the only part of their mission, to be sure, but it is an important part).  Yet that does not mean they should be imagined as some kind of industrial site for the direct production of individuals with specific skills for specific businesses at a given point in an economic cycle. 

Universities teach, among other things, life skills of vital use to employers: written expression, critical thinking, analytical and problem-solving abilities, time management, a capacity to research and think about difficult issues, the ability to argue a case from evidence.   They do all this very often through demanding academic subjects, rigorously taught, by professionals who are, for the most part, researchers and authorities in their fields.   From such challenging training emerge graduates well equipped to learn in the future, with the aptitude to acquire new skills as new jobs that we cannot even envisage appear.

I am glad about BIS’s recognition that a university significantly contributes to the economy.  But I am dismayed at the narrow and instrumentalist understanding of this in Higher Ambitions, and at the privileging of short-term economics over long-term.

Higher education is not merely a commodity, though it must be paid for.  It is not merely ‘consumed’, though those who pay for it must obtain good value for money.  It is not merely about ‘satisfying customers’ either, as one might be satisfied with a new car.  Higher education, among many other things, provides skills, energy, confidence, knowledge, and ambition for which students did not even know they had capacity. 

Universities are in the transformation business, but they are not businesses. 

BIS should think with more ambition and breadth of mind about universities’ role in the UK, and the role of public money in funding them properly in support of the exceptional opportunities they create, and national resource they constitute.

On several occasions I’ve cited examples in this blog of poor expression and even illiteracy from techno-zealots and edubloggers, people claiming serious educational roles, so when I heard today’s news story about Gordon Brown’s letter of condolence on the radio I wasn’t surprised, and expected he had simply misspelt the late soldier’s name, writing in a hurry. I know from my own experience as a writer, how easy it is to make very simple mistakes and not to notice them when you check through. Your eye is very good at telling you you’ve written what you intended to, not necessarily what your fingers (or hand) actually put onto the screen or paper. Proof reading is a real skill. So my guess was that this was a tabloid squall in an eggcup.

However, I’ve just found an image of the offending letter on the web and seen not just the obviously impatient, literally care-less handwriting, but the seven spelling errors a competent twelve year old wouldn’t make. It has, in all honesty, rendered me blogless. 

Two educational news stories caught my attention this week because they have such a revealing connection. The CEO of the Royal Society of Chemistry, Dr Richard Pike, is in the news for suggesting that exam boards should be fined for breaching standards, citing the absence of maths or science in some science exams as an example of their poor practice. The BBC covered a story that some Danish schools are allowing students to use the internet during exams. The key points about the use of the internet in exams are made during the video by a teacher who says: “The main thing we do is to educate the students as to what is cheating and what is not cheating,” and a student who adds, “Well some will try, some will get caught and some will get away with it.” Both are of course right. Research commissioned by JISC on plagiarism two years ago, revealed some truly worrying information about high levels of pupil cheating and highlighted the point about educating the children about right and wrong academic ethics.

As far as I’m concerned, using the internet in any exam designed and properly policed for its use, is an entirely sensible exercise, but the question the BBC reporter then posed in the video, is what connects the story to Dr Pike’s desire to fine exam boards. The reporter asks, “ So is the examination system in the UK, out of date?”

Cue the most pernicious and educationally damaging piffle at large in the UK educational world today. I’ve heard it voiced by a number of ICT zealots, at a number of conferences over the last two or three years and it has been gaining currency amongst techno-acolytes and minions so that you come across it on discussions and edublogs all over the place. No skilled or professional teacher who seeks and commands the respect of their pupils would of course give it kennel room but…that’s been the big problem for a decade or more now.

The argument goes something like this. Kids today are doing such cool, 21^st century things with technology, they are so amazingly creative and clever, why on earth are we still sitting them in an exam room with a paper and pen in an outmoded, nineteenth century fashion? Why are we testing them for range when we should be testing them for breadth?

This is just the latest manifestation of precisely the deceitful, egalitarian, social engineering that has led to Dr Pike having to demand exam boards are fined for failing to meet their fundamental educational responsibilities. The truth is that after years of bending over backwards in ways that would make a Chinese State Circus contortionist blanche, exams boards and many teachers have dumbed down things down to the point of utter irrelevance because they were far more interested in social engineering, than in educating the pupils to think and learn meaningfully for themselves. Behind that innocuous little word breadth lies an entire lifelong learning agenda that as Frank Furedi explains in his latest book, Wasted, undermines the notion of the teacher as expert, the value of formal education itself and I would add, actually despises the notion of schools. Never mind the quality...

Testing for breadth means it’s all equally valuable. Testing for range differentiates meaningfully, fuels competition and nurtures excellence. Things all the genuinely skilled teachers I have ever met, understand and value.