I was a guest at the E-learning Debate at the Oxford Union last night which debated the motion, This house believes that the e-learning of today is essential for the important skills of tomorrow. There was a packed audience from across the industry and I fully expected the motion to be supported, since my own pre-debate view was that the motion itself betrayed the current politically dominant, crudely utilitarian view of education. Especially since the lead speaker for the motion was Diana Luarillard whose techno-zealotry is well documented. At a previous event I have even heard Diana press the case for abandoning formal exams because we are testing children on irrelevant “skills” they don’t care about…like essay writing. Much better to give them a play station and let them design something “cool!” 

It was therefore quite a surprise to hear the articulate opposition, especially from Marc Rosenberg, whose rhetorical skills were extremely strong and I suspect really did swing the debate live in the hall. The Noes won hands down. Dr Rosenberg fundamentally rejected the vacuous promises made for e-learning and pointed out that the very same promises have been made about new technology all the time…and always without result. What was most impressive was his stance that no one was really suggested e-learning wasn’t useful, what he was interested in was a dramatic and fundamental rejection of the way it has been done to date: the tedious online courses; the deception of pretending something is learning when it is really merely training; the obsessive interest in the technology and not the content, but above all he called for e-learning to be done in a way that accepted the reality of human communications, schooling and work practices. Anyone who’s a regular reader will realise it was a fairly obvious choice for me to join the hordes of others queuing for the Noes exit!

The only contribution I made to the debate was to object to the proposition side’s assertion that e-learning was “safe” by pointing out that it is precisely through the combination of e-learning (Serious Games) and operant conditioning that we’ve produced the most effective infantrymen ever invented…and that many of them subsequently return home to find they have to be treated for trauma and depression using exactly the same e-learning applications used to train them! I wonder how many ex-soldiers suffering after effects would accept that the e-learning they received was safe?  

Matthew Taylor kick started an interesting exchange about the internet as a force for good or evil this week, shortly after this blithe announcement about virtual gateways for schools was made. Yet another example of policy makers who can’t see the good for the geeks!  Ed Balls is quoted as saying; We need to find innovative ways of involving parents in schools, particularly secondary schools…to which my first question would be, Why? But putting that aside, his additional comment, I like to think of it as a 'virtual school gate' - where parents can chat to each other online, find out what is happening in the schools and pass on useful information to each other really is one for the staff noticeboard. No one who had any experience of dealing with parents from a school’s perspective would make such a naïve statement, never mind anyone who had taken the trouble to read anything at all about social networking sites and the complex psychological and social issues surrounding them. Add those two together and…oh joy!

But Matthew’s blog also coincided with me doing some work revising my new book on Milton’s Paradise Lost and I was suddenly struck by the parallel between the explosion of self generated publishing on the web (blogging being by far the best example) and the outburst of pamphleteering which accompanied the abolition of the Star Chamber in 1641 and the way in which Milton especially, exploited it. Anyone who has read any of the pamphlets or newsbooks published in vast numbers at the time, will know that they had little interest in fact or objectivity and are in contrast to anything like journalism, examples of pure invective at its most extreme. Milton himself was adept at this kind of writing, abusing individuals with precisely the same kind of ferocity and personal abuse that characterises such a lot of online writing today, though I imagine he wouldn’t have liked to have been told he was merely indulging in smack talk or flaming. 

The connection back to Matthew’s original question, the net: good or evil? is that one of the things which came out of the freedom to print what you liked in Milton’s day was…civil war. The great irony is that when this uncontrollable welter of opinion reintroduced censorship in a hypocritical act of self preservation, it wasn’t the pamphlet (or blog) that Milton turned to in his brilliant defence of freedom of the press, Areopagitica…it was the book...

As good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye. 

...and not Facebook.

Earlier this week I attended a conference in Oxford with a number of colleagues which focused on managing transformation in education. There was an interesting range of  speakers, not all from the education sector, who had some interesting international experiences to reflect on and share, and even though I know I had the added incentive of being at an event with a new company and new colleagues, I found it peculiarly thought provoking. Not a common sensation to have at education conferences during the last decade or so!

The one question I came away with was this: what is so great about innovation? I feel I can ask this safely because I can look back a career that has been built on innovation, from the small scale changes made in a house system, to involvement in the international award winning Scottish intranet, Glow, Teach First , or more recently success in the Entrepreneur of the Year competition with, RM, my last company. I’m so habituated to innovative thinking that I had to smile when Matthew Taylor assumed I was anti-progressive, and would therefore somehow naturally approve of rote learning in his blog some weeks back.

I can recall at a conference at the Serious Games Institute asking one of the speakers, a Canadian “innovator,” whether he thought innovation was always good and being not the least surprised when he had to think long and hard before saying, Gee, I guess I’ve never thought about it.

Just a quick look at the language used to describe the programme at a Guardian conference, coming up in November, ought to set alarm bells ringing for any skilled teacher. The Innovation in Education Conference, is aimed at exploring education systems to meet the high learning challenge of the 21^st century. The utilitarian assumption behind this and much of the programme, is just startling. And I have no personal axe to grind about Lord Puttnam, but just because he claims to be passionate about education, because his own experience of state education was so disastrous, is no reason whatsoever to seek his advice or advocacy for transforming education. Why on earth would you seek advice about how to design or run great schools from someone whose own experience of schooling was so poor? What concerns me seriously about so much of the innovative rhetoric surrounding education is that it masks an unspoken, anti-schools agenda for so many of the individuals front of house.

What’s needed is not just an awareness of this amongst the teaching profession widely, but a counter argument which asserts the undoubted value of stability and consistency. Values even more precious in the world of education where every single lesson counts…if you are the child on the receiving end. 

Am I the only edublogger out there subject to the Cassandra Effect? I’ve raised the issue recently about the misuse and doubtful value of classroom assistants a number of times here and woke up this morning to reports about research by Professor Merren Hutchings from London Metropolitan University confirming my worst fears, certainly in secondary schools. Her research reveals just how long and how often many children are sitting in classrooms without a professional teacher teaching them.

I left teaching some years before the classroom assistant emerged so I thought it would be only reasonable to give some thought to what one might do, or how I might have used one if they had been available. Apart from purely practical, mundane things like handing out books or collecting them in, and working one-to-one with children once they were carrying out an individual task, I could not think of a single worthwhile activity for a classroom assistant in any English class I ever taught. And even the one-to-one work would be pretty worthless unless they were educated to at least A level at English.

The entire dynamic of a great lesson (from the child’s point of view) depends on the relationship you establish with the class and children you are teaching and having an assistant there makes them part of your audience too, with the additional burden that they aren’t children.

I won’t repeat things I’ve written before about this, but if ever there was an example of why politics should be taken out of education, the origin and rise of the classroom assistant must be it.  

BSF, the current government’s Building Schools for the Future programme has once more been attacked for wasting taxpayers money. The latest news reports focused on the huge sums being paid to consultants and quoted Michael Gove as saying, Millions has already been spent on consultants with hardly any improvements actually delivered, while Ed Balls hit back with jibes about the Tories turning office buildings into schools. I would point out that one of the most delightful senior schools I have ever visited (and I suspect I’ve visited a few hundred more than Mr Balls) was in a Stockholm office building.

Before writing this, I did a bit of net research and found an absolute plethora of similar critical news stories dating right back to the earliest years of the programme and as I have just left my old company, where I have been heavily involved in BSF work since the very first bid began in Bristol, 5 years ago, I thought it would be a good opportunity to reflect frankly on my experience.

I started by considering listing the things I have seen which have shocked me: the perfectly good, recently built buildings which are being demolished, for example and the way appointments at local and national level are driven not by educational experience or professionalism, but by politics; the Kafkaesque way PfS employees police the programme, sitting silently at the back of meetings, contributing nothing, like some irascible, mediocre school inspector. But the list expanded so quickly I abandoned the idea and instead have these few reflections to offer colleagues and others still involved in the programme.

Five years ago, before the programme kicked off, I was asked for my views on it at a company board meeting because I had already built up a some experience of the people and businesses who were positioning themselves to get involved. I made two simple points. One, I was pretty dismayed at the fact that some of these people thought you built a school for 20 years. All great schools have two things in common, stability and longevity, and if you don’t build with that kind of vision, you may well build a school… but not a great school. The second was that I felt the government’s professed aim at the time, to rebuild every secondary school in the UK, was likely to turn into something less ambitious quite quickly and that some schools were likely to get a lick of paint. At the time I was told I was wrong and there were “no weasel words from government.” Within months I was proved right and most schools are actually being refurbished: not rebuilt.

At the very first presentation I gave to building companies before the programme began, I stressed how important ownership of space was in a school not just for discipline and maintenance, but because it is perhaps one of the most powerful tools any secondary school teacher has. That is as true now as it was then.

But above all, if you want to build great schools, ask advice from people who run and manage great schools, not techno-zealots or local politicians. I was really delighted a few months ago when the German headmistress of a perfectly good secondary school, currently housed in dreadful seventies buildings told me and my colleagues, I'm not the least interested in building as change agent, because we could get A stars...in a shed.

As the film director Josef Von Sternberg said when he disowned his film, Macao, Instead of fingers in that pie, a whole bunch of clowns immersed entire parts of their anatomy.  That has been my experience of BSF.