Missed university places?

How many young people missed their university places because of poor marking standards?  The whole UK education system needs to be overhauled urgently.

90,000 re-grades?- Click here

Research Bid Failed

My interest in researching remote methods of delivering teaching and learning took a blow recently when I failed in my bid to get funding for a research project.  The application is reproduced here for the interest of educators:

Employment History (5/7)

Job title 

Retired Teacher

Name and address of employer  

n/a

List, in brief, previous employment or occupations  

Shipwright Artificer - Royal Navy
Submarine Officer - Royal Navy
General Manager -and Business Management
Teacher - Business Studies, Law and ICT

Briefly list appropriate qualifications, if any. In particular, if your project is science or medicine related, please include your relevant qualifications  

BA(Hons) Business Studies
P.G.C.E. (Secondary) (Business and Economics Education)
M.Teach
Fellow Mirandanet
FCollT

Additional Information (6/7)

 Interests outside normal work 

Motor cruising, dinghy sailing, kayaking
Community Volunteer with Victim Support

 Apart from holidays, have you ever been abroad; if so, where and in what connection? 

Africa, Asia, Australia, USA, Mediterranean and European countries - Royal Navy
New York with Business Studies students
Denver, Colorado to write a report on the provision for TaG students

Project Details (7/7)

Project Description 

To evaluate Disrupting Technologies for Remote Teaching and Learning

Please indicate under which category you are applying 

Education - Education Futures

Which country(ies) do you wish to visit? 

- Australia

For how many weeks 

6

State the background to your proposed project. 

Since qualifying as a secondary teacher at the age of 50, I have, and continue to, research various Disrupting Technologies to bring education to students who could not access school for a variety of reasons. I have run a 'virtual classroom' successfully. During early research, I discovered that the Alice Springs School of the Air achieves consistently higher results than mainstream schools by remote education. I wish to show that UK schools could utilise this pedagogy to reach school refusers.

 Describe the aim(s) of your project 

To understand how the School of the Air, and parents, maintain motivation to study in the face of geographic isolation by working with School of the Air, and visiting the remote communities that they serve. To compare the School of the Air results and processes with Queensland schools (Townsville) and, main cities such as Sydney. To promulgate the findings and possibilities with UK academies, LEA and free-schools via presentations, TES articles and using the global Mirandanet Fellowship based in the UK, and proselytise the benefits of remote digital learning for certain students and schools.

 Describe how you will carry out your project 

The Alice Springs School of the Air is one of the world leaders in teaching children by remote and ever changing technologies. One week working with the school in Alice Springs with the teachers and administrators will give a clear insight into the methodologies being used. A further week spent visiting remote communities will show how the school and the parents maintain motivation and focus by their children.

It is also necessary to compare the School of the Air with other Australian states and schools to discover any fundamental differences between them and the School of the Air, and also the UK best practice. Two weeks researching, team teaching and meeting parents and children in schools in the North East town of Townsville, followed by the final two weeks following the same aims and objectives in Sydney will give a clear and usable pedagogical data.

A report would then be written and shared with Government Departments, Academy Trusts, Local Education Authorities and clusters of Free-schools.

Describe the benefits of your project, to others as well as yourself 

There appear to be a number of benefits for education in the United Kingdom that can be derived from a better understanding of providing education via remote access such as 'virtual classrooms', quizzing programmes such as Socrative, Second Life and MOOC courses (massive open online course). The benefits can include educating school refusers, the long-term ill, prisoners, isolated communities in the Highlands and Islands, and excluded and disruptive children.

The dissemination of this fascinating topic can be processed by presentations, magazine articles (e.g. TES), and television interviews. Using academy and free-school trusts, the Mirandanet Fellowship and teacher training establishments, the thinking around Disruptive Technology can be promulgated.

Oh well!

Oh well!

It might have provided me the evidence I needed to show that if Alice Springs School of the Air can do it, so could the UK education system: My application to travel to Australia for 6 weeks to research remote blended learning has hit the buffers:

"Dear David,

I am sorry to have to inform you, on behalf of the Advisory Council of the Churchill Trust, that you have not been shortlisted for interview.

This year’s awards generated considerable interest, and we received 989 applications for the 150 Fellowships we are offering in 2016. The overall quality of the applications has also been exceptionally high, and Council members had a very difficult task assessing and selecting a short list for interview."

Where is the research about violence in respect to school size?

Within my limited resources, I have found research that shows that the larger the school, the greater the instance of violence in schools.  Unfortunately, the research is from other countries such as the US and it does indeed show a correlation.  I cannot find any research in the UK which addresses this issue.  Should we not have that evidence before we start to build super-schools?

Does anyone know of any such investigation into the correlation between pupil numbers and instances of violence in school?  I would be interested to hear about it.

More tinkering with a broken engine instead of changing the engine?

The Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan, continues to tinker with a broken engine.  What do I mean?  She is now proposing a National Teacher Service to take high-flying teachers out of their schools to parachute them into 'failing' schools.

In my experience, the loss of fantastic teachers to other schools dilutes the original school's success and demotivates those left behind.  The 'failing' schools' staff are then perceived by parents to be incompetent and useless.  The 'failing' schools are judged on the results of the most over-tested children in the World and rarely has anything to do with poor teaching.  The socio-economic divide and the expectations of children are the real causes of 'poor' results.  To be frank, as in my school days in the 50's and 60's, some children are just not up to getting 5 A*-C GCSEs, and the jobs they took after school were worthwhile but now degraded in value.  To expect 90%+ plus to gain A* to Cs is unrealistic and setting some pupils up to fail.

In addition to removing good teachers from their schools, she intends increasing testing of Primary students.  For goodness sake stop torturing them and let them have a childhood.  We all find our level in the end.

Time for a moratorium on school changes and the setting up of a national task force to develop the paradigm shift in education that we desperately need.

Five more reasons for an urgent paradigm shift in education

The TES this week provides five more reasons why the United Kingdom education system needs urgent reform:

1. 'Lesson observations can ruin teachers’ careers'
2. Teaching is among the 'top three most stressed occupations'
3. ‘I hear of teachers crying on their kitchen floor because of the stress’
4. Half of teachers have considered quitting in the past six months, poll finds
5. How art in schools is being painted into a corner

1. 
   
2. https://www.tes.com/news/school-news

Robbing pupils of individuality - is that not where we are heading also?

A recent article claims that pupils in China are being robbed of their individuality by their 12 hour school day and rote learning.  Are we not producing our own version by punishing pupils and teachers if OfSTED cannot see improvement in every minute of every lesson even if that child cannot cope?  Today's children are far more stressed and anxious than during my school days in the 50's and 60's, and my generation didn't do too badly as we rebuilt Britain after the Second World War.

China 'robbing pupils of individuality'

A leading educationalist says China's education system needs to change or its young and economy will suffer

• 23 October 2015
• From the sectionEducation & Family

Related content

• Fifth of youngsters suffers from anxiety
• Hong Kong minorities 'marginalised' in school

Full article China 'robbing pupils of individuality'

Now here is a thought ........  if a third of school syllabuses were delivered in MOOC-style so that children can work from home 2 days per week, then what is to stop them going on a school term holiday and completing work while everyone else is on holiday during term-breaks?  Time to think outside of the box?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-34591050

The Riba Stirling Prize architecture award, announced last night, has been given to the re-vamped Burntwood School in Wandsworth.  From the images,  it seems to be a bright and colourful set of buildings, although the inset window designs are very similar to an accommodation block in which I lived in Rosyth, Scotland during 1967.  It was disappointing, therefore, to see television footage of the new school depicting desks in regimented rows facing a smartboard, which I suspect was just like the previous design of the classroom.  The school looks very nice, but is it fit for the 21st Century?

The main point is that £40m and three years were taken to produce what would appear to be superficial restructuring for over 1,700 students, not all of whom will be well behaved.  As all educators know, nooks and crannies provide areas very hard to supervise during breaks, lunch periods and going home time giving ample opportunity for bullying and other bad behaviour.  1700 students on-site can be, as I know from my own experience, very challenging to control.

The Headteacher would no doubt challenge my assumption that some bad behaviour will occur, but how much better for students and staff would it have been to build a smaller, high specification school, with classrooms proving interesting layouts and opportunities, with some of the girls working at home or elsewhere on MOOC-style provision of their curriculum?

What is your view?

BBC News - Riba Stirling Prize

Is there too much pressure on teachers to use technology in the classroom?

Is there too much pressure on teachers to use technology in the classroom?  Here are my views (purely my own) expressed on Virgin Disruptors.

Click here to read Natalie Clarkson's Virgin Disruptor article:  Too much pressure on teachers to use technology

Super-size Schools - Really?

I just wish someone would listen ............. we do NOT need super-sized secondary schools.  We need smaller schools built to very high technical specifications and a student 3-day week at school and a 2-day virtual classroom environment for the rest of the week.  If parents cannot or will not take responsibility for their kids for those 2-days then re-open all of the closed libraries and employ supervising assistants.  We are educating children for a different world than we inhabit.  More and more UK jobs can be done by working from home, so let's teach them how to do that.
BBC News: Super-sized secondary schools

Are we preparing our students for the wrong world?

The UK's primary production is declining.  Our fishing fleets are devastated, and mining almost extinct. Oil production being exhausted, and farming is being taken over by imports.  Manufacturing in secondary production has all but disappeared, with shipbuilding almost non-existent, and the construction industry has reduced owing to austerity.

That leaves the tertiary production sector as the major contributor to the national economy and sources of employment.  Within the sector, more and more professionals and employees are working from home, reducing travel time, the requirement for large offices, and the daily commuter slog.

The only nod to this changing world in education is to insist on computer coding being introduced again into schools.  So the question is ...... what are they going to code.  UK information technology companies, almost without exception, farm their coding specifications out to India, Kuala Lumpur and China.  The level of basic salary that exists in those countries would not be feasible in the United Kingdom.

So what should we be doing?  I believe we should be preparing our students for the new world.  Instilling the discipline to work at home, or in a library, or youth club.  We should be reducing the physical size of schools but building them to higher specifications and upgrading the technology as it develops, not trying to catch up once it has moved on.

More emphasis on the user than the programmer training.

By having a rotating three day week in school, with the additional two days being logged on to a 'virtual classroom' completing MOOC-style courses, that preparation for the future will begin.  There will, of course, be those children who will not or cannot accept these changes, (no different than with today's model) but there are many school refusers and students with long-term illnesses that would thrive along with the rest of the school population.  Those not succeeding would be required to attend all five days at school.  I cannot think of a better motivator for the disinterested than to work towards being allowed out for 'homework days'.

I know that at the moment I may be in a minority of one, because traditional thinking clouds an open mind.  But before shooting me down in flames please at least think about this first.  Something has to change, and soon.  We must stop teaching in a 19th Century way, but using technology instead of slates and blackboards.