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 The reporter asks, “ So is the examination system in the UK, out of date?”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. 

Matthew Taylor at the RSA has an insightful little post this week about Policy based evidence making, a neat reversal that exposes how often research is really only ideology skulking behind a mask of objective respectability. It coincided with my having to do some research of my own that exemplifies the problem Matthew was raising, so I thought it could be an informative thing to actually show readers what this looks like when it happens.

So the US education department employed SRI International, to carry out some research into e-learning and K-12 students (our primary and secondary pupils.) The study, published in May 2009, was a meta-analysis, so not original research, which looked at other people’s research over 12 years, comparing the effect of e-learning to face-to-face learning. It's even titled coincidentally, Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis of Online Learning Studies. The researchers wanted to answer these four questions:

• How does the effectiveness of online learning compare with that of face-to-face instruction?
• Does supplementing face-to-face instruction with online instruction enhance learning?
• What practices are associated with more effective online learning?
• What conditions influence the effectiveness of online learning?

The researchers hit a bit of a problem which they openly acknowledge, An unexpected finding of the literature search, however, was the small number of published studies contrasting online and face-to-face learning conditions for K–12 students.

What of course this means is that because they couldn’t find much in the way of real research that met their strict criteria, (a) contrasted an online to a face-to-face condition, (b) measured student learning outcomes, (c) used a rigorous research design, and (d) provided adequate information to calculate an effect size for K-12 kids, they had to look outside that age range. They did and the more than 1000 papers they screened covered career technology, medical and higher education, as well as corporate and military training. That was the only way they could find enough studies with older learners to justify a quantitative meta-analysis.

Again this is something they openly acknowledge when they state: Thus, analytic findings with implications for K–12 learning are reported here, but caution is required in generalizing to the K–12 population because the results are derived for the most part from studies in other settings (e.g., medical training, higher education). My bold italics.

So how does that all translate into the real world? This is what that bastion of academic objectivity Becta, had to say about this research.

A thorough US Government report comparing results from e-learning and traditional learning, mainly in non-school based studies. Systematic search of the research literature from 1996 to July 2008 identified more than a thousand empirical studies of online learning. The meta-analysis found that, on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.

So ignoring the illiterate, opening none-sentence, (no finite verb=no sentence I'm afraid guys!) my bold italics highlight the single sentence Becta quoted directly from the original research abstract. And they are far from the only ones who donned the selective spectacles. I suppose we should give them some credit for attempting to hint that the research might not be of much use, since it was in non-school based studies, but to leap from what the research actually dealt with, and the crystal clear reservations of the researchers themselves, to this huge claim that e-learning is best…well, as neat an example of policy based evidence making as Matthew could wish to find.

I guess the guys from Becta just never noticed that bit in the report (p. 51) which says, the findings of this meta-analysis...should not be construed as demonstrating that online learning is superior as a medium. 

As someone who has devoted much of his adult life to books, reading and writing, and especially to helping students enjoy and understand some of the most sophisticated and difficult writers the world has ever known (difficult in George Steiner’s sense of the word, for the truly literate amongst you) I’m really interested in the ranting and ravings in the educational ICT world about digital literacy. It would be just too easy to cut and paste nonsensical examples which mistake the kind of unconscious, visual literacy any child steeped in the highly conventional language of TV and film today possesses, with some kind of fully assimilated, knowledge based skill. The 21^st century schools world is awash with them. Ironically that would be precisely the kind of crude action the very same voices would applaud as an example of being digitally literate, but instead I’ve picked on a definition which has the merit of being well thought out and well written, which you can read in full here. What I like about this definition is the following fundamental stipulation it contains.

However the dimensions are described, in almost every circumstance “ordinary” basic literacy skills are a necessary precondition for digital literacy.

You bet! And that leads me onto what I really wanted to write about. The news that the Conservatives are promising to expand the Teach First programme was accompanied by criticism from teacher union leaders. So in the interests of combining digital, with real literacy, I invite you to have a look at this quotation from a union leader on the story, and ask yourself what the speaker's choice of words tells you about them? 

Chris Keates of the NASUWT, said: "It is disappointing that the Conservatives plan to hijack schemes designed by this government to nurture teachers and leadership in schools in a bid to advance the Conservative Party vision of elitism in every aspect of education."

Chris Keates might also be interested to learn that Teach First was not a scheme designed by this government, but was the original brainchild of an American, Wendy Kopp, transplanted to the UK by the consultants, McKinseys. 

Some research I’ve been doing this week shoved that fulminatory little issue, grade inflation right into my face and I was nurturing a post on it…but then along came Sir Terry Leahy, Tesco’s popular CEO, with his articulate and damning attack on current educational standards. Fundamentally we have more and more sixteen year olds passing exams at higher and higher levels, hordes of academically qualified eighteen year olds entering university, yet the largest supermarket chain and most successful business in the country doesn’t rate them. Now if Sir Terry was boss of a nuclear power station or a company that manufactured brain scanners I might not be surprised, but a supermarket? Basically his business challenge is to shove food and stuff in one end of a vast shed then out the other as fast as possible… but with tills in between. 

It’s important to add that Sir Terry is also an education adviser to the current Rump and so I guess schools ought to at least sit up and listen. But I wonder if he is aware of the fact that for well over a decade now schools have been bludgeoned, cajoled, bullied and harassed to educate children for the world of work (just look at the entire 14-19 curriculum for example) yet apparently without the kind of success that even a supermarket can value. Why?

Well one reason is because, as Terry Leahy stressed, teachers aren’t allowed to get on with their work without a busy, busy little gaggle of quangos undermining pretty much everything they do. And the world of educational quangos is not exactly replete with individuals who know anything at all about high educational standards. You have to have delivered them to recognise them for a start.

But a second reason is because of a rather unholy alliance between the ICT business and the quangos themselves, an unhealthy symbiosis which has done nothing for the children or teachers on the receiving end.

So amidst a constant demand for children to have 21^st century skills and be prepared for the information age and the world of work, and a whole raft of other clichés constantly pushed by the quangos and the businesses, the absolutely fundamental things employers say they need from employees get utterly neglected. The P21 organisation in the US, a prime example of this kind of symbiosis, itself states that when asked the question, Of the high school students that you recently hired, what were their deficiencies?

Employers said the following:

• Written communication 81%
• Leadership 73%
• Work Ethic 70%
• Critical Thinking & Problem Solving 70%
• Self-Direction 58%

I’ve lost count the number of times at educational conferences, when someone is prattling on about how vital it is that kids have ICT skills, I have said my experience of real businesses has been that the one thing they need above all else, is people who can write. And so, to demonstrate just how unholy this technology/quango alliance is, here is a paragraph taken directly from guidance that a UK A level examination board sends to schools for a course that P21 recommends as exactly the kind of new, 21^st century skills kids need.

Candidates should prepare there own coursework in the correct format for submission. It is the teachers responsibility to ensure that this has been done correctly and collate all the candidates work from their centre and burn it to disc (see below). They should also verify that the disc has burned correctly by opening it on another computer. (My italics and there’s plenty more where that came from!)

So my advice for any school keen to leap on the 21^st century skills bandwagon would be: teach them to write, teach them to behave, teach them to work together and teach them to be responsible. That might help. Needless to say, this is what all schools with genuine high standards do, and without ever having to put it down in a strategy paper for stakeholders anywhere. 

On the whole I try to post something about events I’ve been to and this week I fully intended to hear the Don and Dusted: Is the Age of the Scholar Over? At the British Library, but events defeated me and I had to miss it.  I listened to the appetiser on the Today programme later and was even more annoyed that I didn’t make it.

Something which completely bemused me when I first left the world of academic English teaching and the scholarship that goes with it, for the world of educational technology, was what that ICT world seemed happy to call “research.” Over the years I’ve still never got used to it. The idea that someone can scribble a few inarticulate pages online, drag and drop a few minutes of video footage showing some exploited child enthusing about the latest gadget, and call it “research” just doesn’t cut it for me I’m afraid. I wasn’t at all surprised when the archetypal example told me he was simply too busy to write any books. He had loads of great ideas, of course, just couldn’t find the time to write.

Even more worrying has been the growing trend for pay-the-piper research. The pharmaceutical industry was the leader in this field but it has slowly crept its way into education too. You know the kind of thing, leading mobile phone manufacturer discovers mobile phones just happen to be responsible for a 50% improvement in GCSE grades. I actually don’t have any problems with that kind of blatant approach, it’s just another form of marketing. But some organisations and commercial suppliers are a lot less honest and their web presence is often supported by what looks at first sight like genuinely independent research. A bit of research about the researcher however, often reveals that their work is anything but objective. 

In a period where a lot of energy, effort and money is being channelled into improving education, the least we should expect is that if someone cites research findings or evidence to back up their proposal or policy, it comes with a bit of integrity.

And on a different note. What a joy to find that John Donne was voted second best poet by the 18,000 people who responded to the BBC’s poll for National Poetry Day. In my view he was actually first because there is absolutely no way half the people who voted for T.S Eliot have read anything he ever wrote…just seen Cats.