Colours of the Alphabet – you must see this film @alphabetfilm

On Wednesday evening, I went through to Glasgow to watch this film. It was so wonderful, in so many ways, I just have to blog about it.

It was beautiful – beautifully shot, beautiful children, beautiful colours, beautiful subject.

It was moving – about families, about growing up, about education, about how people learn who they are and what their lives are for.

It was funny – watching little children at play, at work, just being their wonderful selves.

It was thoughtful and thought provoking – there are messages, overt and covert, in the film – about language, about poverty, about ambition, about how different life is or could be without today’s technology, consumerism and media influences.

It was great entertainment – so much to enjoy and so much to think about.

Watch the trailer here:

It was also educational – what is, or should be, the proper relationship between ‘home language’ and the language of education and to what extent should all languages, however small, be protected/funded/written. What are the barriers to learning associated with language (took me back in my thoughts, as so often in my teaching career, to the work of Bernstein, Class Codes and Control ( see here ) and more recently Michael Young’s restatement of the importance of ‘powerful knowledge’ (see below) and the work of Elizabeth Rata http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01411926.2011.615388:

“Limiting the curriculum to experiential knowledge limits access to a powerful class resource; that of conceptual knowledge required for critical reasoning and political agency. Knowledge that comes from experience limits the knower to that experience. The shift to localised knowledge fixes groups in the working class to a never ending present as schools that use a social constructivist approach to knowledge in the curriculum fail to provide the intellectual tools of conceptual thinking and its medium in advanced literacy that lead to an imagined, yet unknown, future.”

In the concluding discussion (as it was a premiere, part of the Glasgow Film Festival ,the producer, director and Liz Lochhead were there for a chat and questions afterwords, to give us some insight into the production and its meanings), it turns out that the first draft of the film ran for three hours featuring six of the children – I can’t wait for that director’s cut when it comes out on DVD (producer, please take note!).

Michael Young on the importance of ‘knowledge’:

Click to access 1.1-Young.pdf

also here:

 

The National Improvement Framework for Scottish Education

See also blog on national testing.

This is my abbreviated response to the Scottish Government’s consultation on the proposed National Framework for Scottish Education. Responses are welcome either here as comments or to my e.mail at daniel.murphy@ed.ac.uk.

General

I wholeheartedly endorse the vision and commend the political commitment to realising it in practice. Setting out a clear vision and values for Scottish education is helpful. However, the document (and consequently the Framework) contains a number of conceptual confusions. Many of these conceptual confusions arise from the way in which the term ‘equality’ is used in the document, and in more general public discourse. As a result, the practical steps proposed are not well targeted. The Moray House School of Education, the EIS and others have made a number of valuable responses which contribute helpfully to the debate in terms of practice. As a result, I will limit this response to the foundational issue of conceptual clarity and one or two recommendations. I hope this response is helpful to you and would be happy to be involved in any further consultation / discussion on these matters.

The concept of equality:

• different ‘equalities’: at times in the document, equality is used to mean equality of opportunity and at other times to mean equality of outcome. These are very different types of equality. Other aspects of educational equality are equality of value and equality of input. Each of these aspects is important and is explored briefly in turn below.
• equality of opportunity: this is generally considered to be the weakest form of equality, if what it means is equality in the opportunities offered, even though different individuals will have different levels of capacity to take up the opportunities. Delivering even this weak form of equality would demand greater equality of input than is currently the case (see below).
• equality of outcomes: if this very strong form of equality is the desired ambition, the government needs to be clear which of the many possible inequalities are to be ‘equalised’ – the categories of the ‘equalisation equation’ in which greater equality is to be measured: socio-economic (deciles, SIMD or occupational class), gender, ethnicity, rurality, in-care, age (on average, those who start school at a younger age have a very unequal experience of education and continue to learn and achieve less well through to age 18[1] ) etc. Another important aspect is the age at which ‘equality’ of outcome will be judged – in addition to the school stages at which it is proposed to conduct national assessments, a case can be made for stage appropriate assessments at 3 (much of the different at P1 can be predicted at age 3) and 25 (the latter would fit with the GIRFEC framework in maintaining public interest in the progress of all young people, and also takes account of the influence of postgraduate education, unfunded internships and other later inequality in educational opportunity).
• equality of value: the society into which Scotland’s future citizens are growing values individuals very differently according to the skills they bring to the job market. In contrast, every public school in Scotland aims to value each child equally. However although teachers and schools strive to do this, the schooling system does not value children equally, particularly as selection effects influence the character of schooling through the examination system. What does ‘Higher’ say if not that everything else is ‘lower’? A universal graduation certificate, allowing for diversity in achievements but requiring a minimum ‘threshold’ level, could restore balance to the way the system values young people (see below).
• equality of input[2]: the two most important sources of input to a child’s education are those of the parent and the schooling system, and great inequality in these inputs contributes hugely to inequality in outputs. (a) Parental inputs vary greatly and at all ages, for example: in the value they place on school education; in differential levels of support in learning to read; in the purchase of privileged access to private education or private tutoring; at later stages, where advantaged parents can find routes to success in the job market or use their social advantages to put a ‘glass floor’ beneath their children. Because the selective function of schooling, and consequently the examination system, is competitive, advantaged parents use every advantage to ensure that their children succeed in the competition (b) School inputs also vary greatly. At present, equality is measured (bizarrely) only by looking at the outputs. Important factors such as the range of additional support services or the amount of money provided for each pupil by different local authorities (including significant differentials in funding to support individual special or socio-economic needs) are not measured or accounted for in the ‘equalisation equation’. Public and political discourse on ‘equality’ needs to recognise the importance and scale of the different inputs made by parents and local authorities and the extent to which these influence the capacity of schools to ‘close the gap’.
• equity[3]: equality should not mean ‘sameness’. We value diversity and freedom of choice. As young people near the end of their school career, they are exercising agency and choice in a variety of ways in their personal lives. This is also true in school education. Equality cannot and should not therefore be done to the students, but must be done with This is where the concept of ‘equity’ is important: the vision of the Framework is for equity, which is about fairness, not an equality of sameness. At present, the senior phase has become too individualised for those not aiming for Higher examinations, with the consequence that greater inequality may be embedded ‘by the back door’ as the selection effects of competitive examinations kick in. The original vision of Curriculum for Excellence outlined four ‘capacities’ of every educated citizen. Scotland should revisit that vision in the context of ‘education to age 18’ and identify a minimum threshold level of achievement in relation to the desirable outcomes of education, to which every young person should be entitled. These can be matched to the graduation certificate (see below) to provide a strong curricular map for the 15-18 stage, one which values fairly the differing achievements of young people rather than positioning them on a linear scale of examination results, in which some will inevitably be less well positioned than others.

2. Some recommendations:
   • a Graduation Certificate for all[4]: the government therefore needs to be clear exactly which ‘equalities’ it intends to improve and how it will measure whether the desired improvement has taken place. It is helpful that health and wellbeing are to be included alongside literacy and numeracy. However the principle ‘measurement’ of educational success in our schooling system remains the SQA examinations. The use of ‘positive sustained destinations’ offers one element of a more balanced evaluation. However a genuinely equal valuation of all our young people would certificate the diverse range of achievements and talents which they ‘bring to the table’, not simply their academic progress. In 2007 the OECD report recommended that Scotland introduce a graduation certificate to mark each young person’ progress from full-time education. We should (a) ensure that all young people remain in education (whether in a training or workplace, school or college) to age 18; (b) pilot and then introduce a graduation certificate which would include the variety of ways in which different young people achieve and bring value to our communities (not simply their academic achievements – important as these are). Such a graduation certificate should initially be piloted in chosen locations before widespread introduction.
   • diagnostic individual character of testing[5]: I am in agreement with the idea of standardising testing across the country – at present we have this ‘de facto’ since so many authorities administer standardised tests. However much more care needs to be taken with the conduct of the tests, messages about their intention and communication of their results. At present, too much testing in schools results in judgement, with negative consequences for those whose test results are not seen as being ‘good enough’. The fundamental purpose of testing in education should be, as it is in health, diagnosis – a purpose in which a degree of norm-referencing plays an important part, particularly in relation to development. I therefore propose that, as is the practice in medical/health testing, results are confidential to the young person, his/her teacher(s) and his/her parent and are used only to support planning. Such confidentiality should apply within classrooms as well as more widely.
   • other purposes of testing: currently examination results are used for two further purposes and it seems that the Framework will also use standardised tests for these purposes: (a) to hold schools to account – where standardised testing has been used for this purpose in other systems, it has generally had negative effects of increasing inequality as the schools in the poorest areas tend to be labelled and judged more harshly leading to a negative spiral (b) to provide an overview of the system as a whole – this important function should be delivered through anonymous sampling of standardised results, as was done with the previous national survey.

 

[1] Murphy, D. (2014) Schooling Scotland (Argyll Press) p21

[2] See Murphy, D. et al (eds) (2015), Everyone’s Future (Institute of Education/Trentham Press)

[3] Ibid Chapters 5 and 11

[4] Murphy, D. (2014) p115ff

[5] Murphy (2104) pp61-63

‘Everyone’s Future: lessons from fifty years of Scottish comprehensive schooling’ – some key quotes.

Some quotes from the book:

By 1997, there was widespread civic acceptance in Scotland, confirmed by responses to the 2002 National Debate, of the local authority comprehensive six-year school, albeit modulated by parental choice, as the best model for state secondary school education (Munn et al., 2004). This was in marked contrast to England, where in 2001 Alastair Campbell, the Labour prime minister’s spokesman, famously predicted that ‘the day of the bog-standard comprehensive school is over’, thus associating comprehensive schools with mediocrity (Clare and Jones, 2001). There was no appetite in Scotland for ‘opting out’. The focus was on making local authority schools more ‘effective’.p23

CfE is, in reality, a curriculum for 3–15. The previous examination system, which had dominated the 15–18 school curriculum, with Standard Grade and Higher Still courses running both in sequence and in parallel, was simplified by the new exam arrangements, but there was no attempt to overhaul, or even subject to critical scrutiny, many of the existing irregularities of curriculum design and practice in the Senior Phase. p31

Comprehensive education in Scotland has promoted equality…..Equality of opportunity has been expanded through the provision of a broader range of curriculum options, abolishing overt discrimination by gender and extending the range of post-compulsory pathways …Comprehensive reorganization removed some barriers, such as school selection and the more divisive aspects of curriculum and examination systems. But it did not abolish wider social inequalities, or the selective function of schooling, the main factors restricting equality of outcome….Comprehensive education in Scotland has, however, promoted greater equality of value. Pupils who would once have been marginalized as ‘non-certificate’ are now full members of the moral community of the school. p197

Improvement needs to be defined in terms of all of the aims of a comprehensive system.
Current models of improvement – nationally and internationally – are dominated by comparisons of pupil and school performance in standardized tests. While a comprehensive school system that aims to provide a broad general education for all of its young people and which values them equally needs to define improvement in terms of performance, it should also include a wider set of factors involved in balancing liberty, equality, and fraternity in fair and just communities. So too should it include a greater range of contributions to civic health than those that define the individual solely in relation to ‘performance’ in pre-specified competitive tasks. System improvement needs to be specified and evaluated across a wider range of outcomes than test performance alone.  p203

Book Launch

Everyone’s Future

Lessons from fifty years of Scottish comprehensive schooling

This (click on the word!) is how I’ve been spending a lot of my time the past few months!

‘This is a must-read for those of us who have lived the theme of this excellent book. It is even more so for those who in their lifetimes could have an impact on the future direction of education in these isles. It is an excellent account of Scottish education over these fifty years and is a fitting tribute to one of Scotland’s foremost academics. Insightful, enlightening, thought provoking and very challenging, its timing in the development of Scottish education could not be better.’

Ken Cunningham, CBE FRSA, General Secretary, School Leaders Scotland

‘This book revitalizes the debate about comprehensive education by going back to first principles –equality, liberty and fraternity – and examining the Scottish education system in the light of them. In doing so it provides new insights into the concept and the difficulties of realizing it in the 21st century. It is a fitting tribute to an inspirational colleague Professor David Raffe.’

Professor Ann Hodgson, UCL Institute of Education

It is fifty years since comprehensive education was introduced in Scotland, England and Wales. But while the ideal of comprehensive education has been largely abandoned in England, comprehensive schools are alive and well in Scotland and command public support.

This long-term overview of the development of the Scottish system, with contrasting accounts from England, Northern Ireland and Wales, concludes that comprehensive schooling, linked to underlying democratic values of liberty, equality and fraternity, has made a positive difference to the development of contemporary Scotland.

Drawing on a wide range of research, documentary and policy evidence, the book provides a critical account of developments in curriculum and governance and the impact of comprehensive schooling on its students’ outcomes, social class and gender inequalities. It exploits a unique series of surveys to give voice to young people and their increasingly positive attitudes to school, especially among the less academic. But the Scottish system’s success is still only partial.

Looking forward, the book outlines lessons from the Scottish experience both for Scotland and for other countries considering how best to educate young people of secondary-school age. A valuable resource for students, teachers, academics and policymakers.

– See more at: https://ioepress.co.uk/books/schools-and-schooling/everyones-future/#sthash.03erjp6O.dpuf

 

Dilemmas

Recently, the new format Times Educational Supplement asked for a piece based around the 2nd edition of my Dilemmas book.   I was told I had 800 words and had to include a ‘top ten tips’ section, to fit with the way they set these things out on the back few pages.  A young London editor at the other end of the phone then sent me his redraft – jazzing it up a bit.  I edited out the phrases I least liked and we ended up with this: http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6373327 . At the end of the process, I concluded, as people of my age has often done, that not all change is progress.

Apologies to my regular readers for my long absence – two months since my last post.  Since my Mum passed away in July I’ve been hibernating in a muddle of work…. carrying on with life in a very busy way, juggling various writing projects…. but there’s a bit of me that’s still numb, so numb I’m not sure which bit it is. In Sept I said, ‘blogging again’.  I make no such claims today.  Let’s see what tomorrow brings.

“School Leadership: Dealing with Dilemmas 2.0” now ready for publication.

Dealing with Dilemmas 2.0 advance copies are printed already.  The official launch at the University of Edinburgh is tomorrow evening (13th).  I’m excited about it.  When the first edition was published in 2007, Christine Forde of Univ of Glasgow told me

“Your book is going down a storm with SQH candidates – it has answered a lot
of questions for them.”

This gave me a lot of pleasure, as I had set out to write the book to answer some questions that were bothering me! In particular, I wanted to explore why there is such a gap between the real life experience of school leadership (not just of the the headteacher, but all those who take on leadership roles) and what is written on bits of paper such as policies or guidelines or quality indicators.   In the real world of lived experience, everything is much messier but also so much more real and exciting. This book goes some towards explaining ‘why?’

The new second edition is revised, updated and expanded, with many more exemplars.  It’s also physically bigger and aesthetically more pleasing.  I hope it continues to answer important questions for those who lead in our schools.

My thanks to the publisher, Dunedin Academic Press (click here), for their faith in the book and the importance of its message.

2nd edition

I can’t believe it’s been six weeks since the last blog.  Assessment, holiday, assessment, Mum’s illness, more assessment and some time in the garden and this is where I’ve got to….

Talking Mats wins again!

Talking Mats, a small Stirling company built on outstanding research and practice in improving communication, already Intern Placement Provider of 2012, Scottish Social Enterprise of the Year 2012 winner and twice nominated finalist at the UK Social Enterprise of the Year, gained another fabulous award at the Scottish Edge Enterprise awards this week, one of only three top award winners out of 235 entries.   What a team!

A Talking Mat in use

A Talking Mat!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To find out more about Talking Mats, click here

To find out about the Edge Awards, click here

 

Proof That Standards Aren’t Rising

Proof That Standards Aren’t Rising.

Brilliant!

“Dilemmas” 2.0 heads off to the publisher

Well has not that been a slog?.. but it feels like it was worth it.

My first target date was December 20th. No chance.

Then it was January 5th.. and I did spend around five days over Christmas / New Year rejigging the main chapters on the psychological, political and ethical perspectives as highlighted in my earlier (enthusiastic) posts (here for example ) … I added the first and last chapter, but really wasn’t happy with them and mid-January, while working on other material, I was delighted that four able readers proof-read and gave critical comment. That persuaded me that further rewriting of Chapters 1 and 5, together with a beefed-up Author’s Preface, were required.  I got into it again over the last fortnight and thought I had put it all to bed last weekend, only to wake up in the middle of the night with the sure conviction that Chapter 5 was still too weak.   Like the rest of the book, it’s a generalist trying to put together specialist material from within disciplines that don’t speak much too each other.

It was completed on Saturday morning.

I had deliberately left tidying up the references till the end.  My friends, you should never do that!  I was using RefWorks, a perfectly respectable programme, but, to save time, had been using the direct import from Google Scholar for the detail.   The trouble is that I had not realised that Google Scholar was not completing some of the fields – e.g. place of publication, while some of the dates in my text were different to those on Scholar.  Cue 36 hours of slog between Saturday lunchtime (pausing only for a quick visit to my Mum and the recorded pleasure of a rare Scottish victory) and Monday 6pm when the final draft was ready and e.mailed off to Dunedin.  The current estimate is of publication in June rather than autumn, provided we can work through the artwork etc.  At least the cover is already designed … all those lovely coloured pencils….

2nd edition

 

Why study dilemmas? (v2)

Revisions to the second edition of my book on the Dilemmas of School Leadership (first edition here ) are still taking place.. hopefully to be completed this week (see earlier posts in January on this theme).  I’m much happier now with the integration of elements in the Preface. One of the problems of editing your previous work is the temptation to tinker, all the time.  However as bits are cut from one area and pasted somewhere else, flow and coherence are reduced.  This has been the case particularly with the two Chapters which I have found most difficult:  Chapter 1 (some of which is now in the new ‘Author’s Preface to the Second Edition) and Chapter 5 (policy implications).

This is now the concluding section of the Preface.

“The analysis of dilemmas offers a rich ‘bottom-up’ viewpoint on the experience of life in a school community.  Through the attempt to understand dilemmas, we understand better the strands and tensions of our lives together and our hopes and aspirations for the development of our young people;  we understand better the complex link between our disciplines of learning and their application in our daily lives, between emotion, cognition and valuation;  we understand better the flows of power and influence within our communities and the role of the school in developing our democratic ways of living;  we understand better what it is we value in our lives and what we value by our behaviour and the systems our behaviour supports.

The analysis of dilemmas helps us understand better the purpose of schools and schooling.  Every school leader, and everyone who has an interest in what happens in our schools, has something to gain from that attempt.”

Yeah.

 

 

Macmurray and Dilemmas

One of the joys of spending a bit time on the 2nd edition of my Dilemmas book (due out in the autumn) has been re-reading Macmurray.   My favourite quotes come from the Moray House Lecture 1958, ‘Learning to be Human’ (published for the first time in the special December 2012 edition of the Oxford Review of Education dedicated to Macmurray):

‘..the first priority in education – if by education we mean learning to be human – is learning to live in personal relation to other people.  Let us call it learning to live in community.  I call this a first priority because failure in this is fundamental failure, which cannot be compensated for by success in other fields…. ‘ (2012 p670)

‘.. the greatest threat to education in our own society [is that] .. gradually we are falling victims to the illusion that all problems can be solved by proper organisation; that if we fail it is because we are doing the job in the wrong way, and that all that is needed is the know-how’.  To think thus in education is to pervert education.  It is not an engineering job.  It is personal and human.’ (p674)

All politicians who think examination results are a good proxy indicator of the quality of schooling would do well to read Macmurray!

The special edition of the review is introduced by Michael Fielding, whose recent book (with Peter Moss), ‘Radical Education and the Common School’ ( see here) put forward arguments for a different kind of schooling, based around less instrumental values; arguments partly founded on Fielding’s reading of Macmurray.  It’s well argued and describes an ideal model of schooling – it’s nice to see these arguments put, arguments that went out of fashion in the 1980s when the profession retrenched on what it thought was a defensible line against the attacks of the right.  It doesn’t really engage with the difficult ‘how do we get from here to there?’  question – just sets up the ideas.  Given the present Education Minister in England, you could compare a book like this to spitting into the wind (classy ‘spit’, right enough, but a bit of a hurricane coming the other way).   It may not be very effective in changing the world, but it helps keep up your morale!

Social Capital and Social Inequality

Today’s extract from the 2nd edition of ‘Dealing with Dilemmas’ (in preparation) is taken from the section which reflects on how the confusions and competing interests and values of Politics (bit P) and politics (flows of power in school communities) create situations experienced as ‘dilemmas’ in the school community where Political / political forces can pull in contrary directions.  This sections is taken from a discussion of social capital:

“Social capital is a vital aspect of a school’s capacity to meet the needs of its students.  The recent tendency in public discourse to conceptualise schooling as a service misunderstands how schools work.  Schools do not provide an educational service in the way that a garage or retailer provide a service, valuable as these services are.   Like other public services such as health, education is a jointly constructed project, undertaken in a partnership of child, parent, teacher, school and the wider community.  The narrow ‘service’ conceptualisation of the work of schools both masks the inequalities across our communities that are highlighted by the concept of ‘social capital’ and denies the agency of the others involved.  Addressing inequalities in schooling is not just a question of improving individual schools, as so many involved in the public political management of education appear to think; it is even more a question of addressing inequalities in society at large.”

 

Why study dilemmas

One step forward, one step back today. The back step was finding that Word does not count text boxes in the bottom bar wordcount, so I am 8000 words over limit. The step forward was Dunedin Academic Press agreeing an extension on the submission date.  Some hard editing decisions to come, I’m afraid.  Every one of those extra 8000 words seems precious at this stage.

Here’s today extract from the Preface to the 2nd Edition, giving some of the rationale for the study of dilemmas.  It may not survive!

“Some school leaders may never experience dilemmas.  They may be nested in a comfortable community of learning, where values are shared and common understandings of meaning and purpose underpin daily practice.  Their wise leadership may, in fact, have contributed to the development of such an oasis of calm agreed educational purpose within the turbulent change of the twenty first century world.  Alternatively some school leaders may be ignorant of the dilemmas around them, insulated by their power from the morale sapping challenges faced by some of their staff or students, or conceiving of their role as being that of a limited, compliant middle manager, following instructions or advice from a higher authority.  However individual situations can change, previous ‘taken-for-granted’ conceptual foundations can be upset by new challenges, appeals to ‘higher authority’ may not be enough to generate the enthusiasm for learning they wish for their students and staff.  Whatever the current situation of individual school leaders, they may face dilemmas in the future; whatever the current situation, engagement with the issues raised in the analysis of dilemmas challenges thinking and requires learning.  Analysis of dilemmas offers a rich ‘bottom-up’ viewpoint on the experience of life in a school community.  Through the attempt to understand dilemmas, we understand better the strands and tensions of our lives together and our hopes and aspirations for the development of our young people;  we understand better the complex link between our disciplines of learning and their application in our daily lives, between emotion, cognition and valuation;  we understand better the flows of power and influence within our communities and the role of the school in developing our democratic ways of living;  we understand better what it is we value in our lives and what we value by our behaviour and the systems our behaviour supports.  Every school leader has something to gain from that attempt.

The very full study by Macbeath and his associates into problems in the ‘Recruitment and Retention’ of Scottish headteachers (Macbeath et al 2009, 2012) confirmed the findings of studies in other times and places:  that school leadership is hard demanding work; the vast majority of school leaders gain enormous professional satisfaction from a job, a vocation, which they see as a ‘privilege’.

A stressful, exhausting, incredibly rewarding job. (2012, p9).

The picture of school leadership painted in this book is every bit as challenging, frustrating, fulfilling and satisfying.  Despite, or perhaps, because of the dilemmas it throws up, it continues to be one of the most beguiling and exciting of professional careers.”

New Dilemmas

A few new ‘dilemmas’ written for this second edition.  It’ll be interesting to see how my ‘critical readers’ take to them!

Extracts from a couple of the new ones:

Rowena is a young enthusiastic Geography teacher in Third Park Academy, passionately committed to education and to the ‘green’ agenda in politics and in lifestyle.  She cycles to work but is seen by some more small ‘c’ conservative staff as a bit too strident in her advocacy.  Her energy has lifted the school well beyond the level required for their ‘green flag’ award for environmental action and awareness  ……. The ‘environment’ group has also conducted an audit of ‘carbon produced in a typical school day’.  It showed that the biggest quantity of carbon was produced not by school buses or heating, but by staff cars.  The group, with support from Rowena and a small group of environmentalist teachers, have proposed a ‘no car’ day in school, as a symbol, as they put it, of Third Park’s commitment to developing a more sustainable future.  Some of the students are particularly strident and vociferous on this theme.  They want all staff to take part and have been ‘badgering’ some staff about what they are going to do. ……  staff association representatives …. feel things have ‘gone too far’ and predict this will cause unnecessary conflict.  He should stop it now…

 

John Macey, age 13, has not had a comfortable family life.  In and out of care and foster care, occasionally with his natural mother while of primary school age, now he is in a highly supported placement with his aunt, trying to settle in a new community.  With his new group of peers at Ashley Park High School, his nervous uncertainty about how he will be viewed leads to him being assertive and, where needed to get respect, physically aggressive.  His disrupted childhood means that he has poor literacy and only limited learning skills.  He reacts badly to the educational experiences offered by Ashley Park.  Often these, for him, serve to underline his academic incompetence, leaving him feeling humiliated by the comparison he makes in his own mind between himself and the people around him, of his age, who can read effortlessly…..   

 

The Ethics of Dilemmas

The second last lap almost over, I have a draft of this, Chapter 4; still feels very rough but it’s something to work from.  I’ll have at Chapter 5 tomorrow morning, the print out the complete draft, currently sitting at 50,000 words exact, so a little bit of editing is still needed.  Won’t make the publisher’s deadline, but hope Dunedin will be forgiving.  Publication not due till late summer.

In this chapter, understanding of dilemmas is further enriched through five ethical perspectives:

• Ethical issues are often involved in the dilemmas school leaders face;
• Ethical principles can be often, usefully, be held in balance, not forced to compete;
• Ethical judgement in situations of moral complexity can only be made in the situation, not in general;
• Those best placed to make such judgements have cultivated virtues such as wisdom and integrity;
• Dialectical thinking captures the tensions and uncertainties of these matters better than linear positivism.

It’s riveting stuff, but it’s not going to be a bestseller any time soon.  The first edition has dropped down to 197,657th in the Amazon list!

This is me at work today… it’s not exactly a coal face, let’s face it, but the brain sometimes hurts a bit!

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Politics of Dilemmas

Here we are again.. this time trying to tidy up Chapter 3 ahead of my deadline of the end of the week.  I’m getting there but not up to the schedule.  The final revision of this chapter proved both difficult and messy.

It’s the second of the three perspectives which unpick what is going on in a difficult dilemma-type situation of the type that can often occur in social situations such as life in a school.   Yesterday I posted about the psychology of dilemmas: how people interpret events and situations differently, how emotions can colour and shape the interpretation and the importance, especially in an eduational setting, of trying to focus on who people might learn from what is happening or has happened to set the dilemma up in the first place – often learning can lead to resolution.  Today it was the turn of politics:  who has power in the situation? what interests do they have and are these determining their use of power? has the dilemma been created by political forces or contradictions in policy?  how is the rapid social and economic change of recent times, and the unpredictability of our social and economic future, affecting educational policy?  what can these dilemmas situations tells us about education for democracy, education as democracy and education in a democracy?

I’ve got a serviceable draft ready, but I’ll have to spend the morning tomorrow tidying it up. That doesn’t leave a lot of time tomorrow for the most difficult of the three perspectives – ethics!  I’ll have to speed up my workrate!  The second edition is due for publication in the late summer but should be with the publisher by the end of this week.

Today I also notice the first edition slipped  to 141,925th in the Amazon list.   How quickly I have crashed down from the giddy heights of 59,618th yesterday!

The Psychology of Dilemmas

I spent today working on a second (and hopefully near to final) redraft of Chapter 2 and Chapter 6 of the second edition of my Dealing with Dilemmas book.  For some reason the first edition has suddenly jumped about 400,000 places in the Amazon Bestsellers’ List to 59,618th!!!  JKR watch out.

The new edition uses the same framework of three complementary perspectives to analyse what lies inside a dilemma – psychology (cognition, emotion and learning), politics (power, culture and relationships) and ethics (values and morality). This time there will be a diagram to illustrate (I hope).  The draft is not particularly elegant but hopefully Dunedin Press will have a better design (!).

The second edition has to be with the publisher by January 5th 2013 and I’m running out of time!  Full days tomorrow and Friday should get Chapters 3 and 4 into close to final shape.  There may need to be a little more work on Chapters 1 and 6.  It’s close to ready.

The book looks at the world through the experience of the daily dilemmas that challenge those in leadership positions of different kinds in our schools.  Today’s chapter considers the psychology of dilemmas.  People looking at a dilemma select different bits of information and interpret or make sense of them through different ‘schema’ or interpretative frameworks.  These tend to be situations where there are intense emotions involved and these emotions affect the way  in which people frame and understand the events.   However if individuals approach the dilemma with an open frame of mind, willing to learn – to learn about others, to learn about themselves and to learn about the issues – then the dilemma may be resolved positively.   Schools should pay particular attention to the inherent learning possibilities in dilemma-type situations.  However it is not enough to consider these psychological aspects of dilemmas.  Political and ethical dimensions are also necessary to gain a rounded view of what is going on.

Vacancies for skilled educators in Cambodia ..!!

VSO is recruiting now for volunteers to provide advice and support to Provincial Education Offices in 10 of Cambodia’s Provinces.  This is part of a wider UNICEF funded programme to strengthen the capacity of Cambodia’s Ministry or Education, Youth and Sports (MoEYS) to support schools and teachers and thus to develop Cambodia’s education system. It’s a great volunteering opportunity – this can be a life-changing experience, with some wonderful opportunities to learn more  than you knew was possible, to live in a fascinating part of the world, to form some relationships that will last a lifetime and to make a contribution to developing a country whose hardworking people want a better future.  You would be working in the Provincial Office and also out in schools.  Here are some of the details from the job spec:

VSO Cambodia is seeking ten volunteers to work in ten provinces in Cambodia for a project which is has matched funding from EU, SIDA and UNICEF. This project is part of the Capacity Development Partnership Fund (CDPF), managed by UNICEF, to support implementation of MoEYS’ Capacity Development Plan.. Education management advisers in each province will work as a team at national level with other education volunteers in their province to build the management and leadership capacity of the target Provincial Education Offices.

Essential qualifications:

• Qualified teacher with recognised third level degree in education
• Professional qualifications or experience in education management, leadership or administration

 Essential work experience/skills:

• At least 4 years of experience in the field of education management, leadership and planning, including working with Ministries and local authorities Experience with analysing data and building budgets
• Excellent interpersonal, mentoring, facilitation and communication skills
• Able to present information in a clear and concise manner
• Verbal and written fluency in English
• Computer literacy
• Resilience, flexibility, adaptability, culturally sensitive and as sense of humour when faced with problems, obstacles and frustrating circumstances

 Desirable:

• Experience of working in central or local government in a education context
• Pervious volunteer experience and commitment to capacity development
• Proficiency in IT – use of Word and Excel and Power Point
• Good report writing skills and an ability to collate and use data in reports

 Strong in all selection dimensions, especially:

• Positive and realistic commitment
• Flexibility and adaptability
• Sensitivity to the needs of others
• Working with others

Essential personal qualities

The ability to build good working relations with staff at the provincial and district offices of education is essential to be able to work effectively in Cambodia (just as important as having the right qualifications and experience). The volunteer professional must be patient and remain calm and friendly in the face of the numerous frustrations he/she will experience. Sensitivity to the needs of others is therefore paramount. The volunteer must be capable of understanding and working within Cambodian societal and working culture.

The volunteer professional must be a good communicator in order to build others’ capacity. The volunteer professional must be pro-active, friendly and open with colleagues in order to build good relationships.

The volunteer professional must be prepared to work in a team with other volunteer professionals and the full-time volunteer assistant (who act as translators as well as providing logistical support).  The programme is delivered through small teams or individuals in each province in order to implement activities effectively and to achieve maximum impact. Volunteer professionals and volunteer assistants are expected to develop a strong professional relationship with each other in order to maximize and complement each other’s strengths.

Working in a volunteer team is different to working in a normal professional team – there is more overlap between professional and social life than many volunteers have experienced before.  The volunteers themselves form a multi-cultural community with widely varying backgrounds, each with their own expectations and understanding of their work within the programme. It is essential that the professional can cope in this context.  The volunteer will need to be able to overcome personality clashes, if they occur, for the benefit of the programme and project.

The volunteer must be willing to be based in the main provincial town. He/she will need to have a sense of adventure, however, as sometimes their work will involve travelling, sometimes to remote locations, with their Khmer colleagues; this might involve overnight stays in district town. Travel would usually be by a moped motorcycle (100/125cc motorbike) with automatic clutch.

The Initiative to take ideas forward and sometimes to work independently will also be needed, while bearing in mind that local staff should be involved in the work as much as possible.

Adaptability is a key to living and working in Cambodia. At the personal level, the volunteer will have to make major adjustments simply to live and work in a different culture and environment.

Volunteers need to demonstrate and practice cultural sensitivity. This involves being non-judgmental and accepting of various religious and cultural traditions.

Language requirements:

 Excellent spoken and written English

Commitment to learn Khmer language. The volunteer will have a full-time assistant to help with translation for work purposes. However, it is essential that the volunteer learns Khmer in order to build relationships, be able to live comfortably and to use it for some working purposes whether with or without part-time assistant. VSO will provide basic Khmer language training in country for 2-3 weeks. VSO will also provide funding for continued language training during the placement

The volunteer will need to commit to studying the pre-departure language resources available on Volzone prior to arriving in Cambodia which will equip him/her with basic vocabulary ready for intensive language training in country.

 

Please see a link to the Khmer learning resources below:

http://volzone.vsoint.org/course/view.php?id=204

The ability to build good working relations with staff at the provincial and district offices of education is essential to be able to work effectively in Cambodia (just as important as having the right qualifications and experience). The volunteer professional must be patient and remain calm and friendly in the face of the numerous frustrations he/she will experience. Sensitivity to the needs of others is therefore paramount. The volunteer must be capable of understanding and working within Cambodian societal and working culture.

The volunteer professional must be a good communicator in order to build others’ capacity. The volunteer professional must be pro-active, friendly and open with colleagues in order to build good relationships.

The volunteer professional must be prepared to work in a team with other volunteer professionals and the full-time volunteer assistant (who act as translators as well as providing logistical support).  The programme is delivered through small teams or individuals in each province in order to implement activities effectively and to achieve maximum impact. Volunteer professionals and volunteer assistants are expected to develop a strong professional relationship with each other in order to maximize and complement each other’s strengths.

Working in a volunteer team is different to working in a normal professional team – there is more overlap between professional and social life than many volunteers have experienced before.  The volunteers themselves form a multi-cultural community with widely varying backgrounds, each with their own expectations and understanding of their work within the programme. It is essential that the professional can cope in this context.  The volunteer will need to be able to overcome personality clashes, if they occur, for the benefit of the programme and project.

The volunteer must be willing to be based in the main provincial town. He/she will need to have a sense of adventure, however, as sometimes their work will involve travelling, sometimes to remote locations, with their Khmer colleagues; this might involve overnight stays in district town. Travel would usually be by a moped motorcycle (100/125cc motorbike) with automatic clutch.

The Initiative to take ideas forward and sometimes to work independently will also be needed, while bearing in mind that local staff should be involved in the work as much as possible.

Adaptability is a key to living and working in Cambodia. At the personal level, the volunteer will have to make major adjustments simply to live and work in a different culture and environment.

Volunteers need to demonstrate and practice cultural sensitivity. This involves being non-judgmental and accepting of various religious and cultural traditions.

Language requirements:

 Excellent spoken and written English

Commitment to learn Khmer language. The volunteer will have a full-time assistant to help with translation for work purposes. However, it is essential that the volunteer learns Khmer in order to build relationships, be able to live comfortably and to use it for some working purposes whether with or without part-time assistant. VSO will provide basic Khmer language training in country for 2-3 weeks. VSO will also provide funding for continued language training during the placement

• The volunteer will need to commit to studying the pre-departure language resources available on Volzone prior to arriving in Cambodia which will equip him/her with basic vocabulary ready for intensive language training in country.

Please see a link to the Khmer learning resources below:

http://volzone.vsoint.org/course/view.php?id=204

Murder and culpable homicide. What’s the difference? Who should be responsible?

I have only read the newspaper reports of the death of Euan Craig, so I accept I may not have all the information needed to speak in detail about that case, but it’s not going to stop me commenting on the broader issues involved.  From the reports, it appears that a class were waiting in the gym for the teacher to arrive and Euan and his mates were playing about with a softball.   It struck another boy in the face as he came into the gym and he reacted badly, punching Euan in a sustained attack, despite Euan’s repeated apologies even while being punched.  Euan died shortly afterwards from internal bleeding in his brain.

Here is a quote from the BBC Report:

Defence counsel Ian Duguid QC had previously told the court that his client was a quiet boy of good behaviour and had shown “huge remorse”.

He said the authors of a psychiatric report feared that the teenager’s mental health would suffer if he were sent into custody.

“There is no direct benefit to the public of placing him in custody,” he argued.

“There would be a risk to his on going psychological development. It will impact negatively on him.”

Lord Bracadale sentenced Euan’s violent assailant, who pled guilty to culpable homicide, to detention for three and half years:  three and half years doesn’t seem to value the life of the victim very highly.    It is less than might be given for a fraud, where everyone involved is still alive.

On first reading this story, I was intrigued by the defence counsel’s remarks:  ‘his client was a quiet boy of good behaviour’.  In my twenty years experience as a school headteacher, I never once met ‘a quiet boy of good behaviour’ who would respond to an accident, for which an apology had been offered, by a sustained, violent assault on another child.  On the other hand, I met plenty of boys who assaulted other children in very violent ways, living according to the honour code of the street, which demanded that they show no mercy in order to maintain, and live up to, their reputation.

The crime of ‘culpable homicide’ recognises that the actions of one person led directly to the death of the other, but accepts that they did not intend or plan that death – it was an unpredictable or accidental or unlikely consequence of their actions.

Again, quoting Ian Duguid, the defence QC:

“These are consequences which are extraordinary. It comes from an event which might have passed off as just another school fight. It may never have been brought to court if it were not for the tragic injury which was occasioned to him.”

Let’s leave aside for the moment that this appears to have been a sustained assault, rather than a fight…. and I have spent quite a lot of time in my career as a headteacher sorting out the difference between these two.  The important general question that arises here, as in other cases, is “how much responsibility should someone be prepared to accept for the unintended consequences of their actions?”  In discussing this issue with adolescent perpetrators of violent acts, the teachers/social workers/psychologists who worked with them, and with their parents, I often encountered a variety of viewpoints.   These would vary from the extreme at one end of the spectrum, that such actions were a ‘cry for help’ from a damaged child who needed more love/support (and there is often a lot of truth in that) to the other extreme, where only capital punishment of the most mediaeval kind would suffice.

I often had discussions about just these kinds of incidents, in particular where someone had been kicked on the head.  There were a number of deaths in English schools some years ago, particularly involving girls, where the death resulted directly from kicks to the head.  It was possible to use these examples to help the perpetrator and his/her parents to see the possible consequences of their actions.   Surely part of the process here should be about helping the perpetrator to develop a fuller, truer understanding of the events – what happened? who was responsible? what led to them taking the action they did – emotion, peer pressure, socialisation, self-justification?

A car driver drives through a built up area at 40mph. He or she is late for an important meeting. A child runs in front of the car and is killed.  How responsible is the driver?  An armed Palestinian celebrates the ceasefire in Gaza by firing off rounds from his AK47 into the air.  One of the bullets, as it accelerates back towards the earth, hits a child and kills her.  A ship’s captain takes an extra turn to run along the coast to give his passengers a fine view and show off to those on shore, but on this occasion the sea race is stronger than usual and pushes the boat onto the rocks where it is holed and many passengers are drowned as it keels over.  Like a violent assault to the head, these are all irresponsible actions which increase the chance of a ‘tragic accident’, for which the perpetrator must bear some responsibility.

What is learned from such events?  What does the perpetrator learn?  That the perpetrator learns something must be one of the important outcomes of a criminal justice system, whether in school or in a court of law.  Presumably we would wish the perpetrator to learn not to do the same thing again, that such actions run the risk of causing a much more serious consequence than s/he intended.  However what they may learn is that if something worse happens than you intended to happen, then it’s not so serious, in fact it’s not really your fault, because you didn’t intend it. Indeed the adversarial system may encourage perpetrators to believe such a line.

This may well be the message which the community at large, including other potential perpetrators of similar crimes, takes from these events and how they are dealt with. This is the issue which the defence counsel addresses in asserting that there would be no public benefit in holding the perpetrator accountable; perhaps ‘his mental health might suffer if he were sent into custody.’  It is true that the socialisation processes in our custodial system, intended and unintended, might further brutalise a teenager with a propensity for violence.  However there might be mental health consequences of not sending the teenager to custody.  In this case, as in so many others, it seems that a restorative process should be part of our social response.  Rather than forcing victims and perpetrators into contrary adversarial positions, the perpetrator’s penitent actions / remorse / contrition, can become part of the solution, for the victim’s family, and also for the perpetrator him/herself.  In accepting responsibility, s/he sometimes can experience resolution him/herself.   Every occasion in a school setting is an occasion for learning about living.

Of course, in this case a restorative process will make no difference to the victim. The victim is dead, whatever was, and now is, the intention of the perpetrator.  And the thoughtless, or careless, or self-justified, actions of the perpetrator caused his death.

All in all it’s a terrible situation and the best we can do is to honour the victim and those who knew and loved him and to hope that something has been learned.

I mourn Euan Craig.

I pray for him and his family and honour his memory.

I pray for the headteacher and teachers of Rosshall Academy, who now have to help that school community understand what happened, and learn from it – learn about how different people with different values can come to live together in one space, learn about responsibility and risk and learn how to put the values of democratic community living into practice in their daily lives.

 

 

 

 

Let’s make Scottish education fairer for all

If you’re interested in education, you might have noticed my recent article in the Times Educational Supplement:

Clear career pathways must be opened to all

I admit I’ve got a thing about this so this is just a bit of a rant.

It comes from having spent the best part of my life working with teenage kids in Scotland and witnessing in almost every job I have held – teacher, subject head, adviser, headteacher, headteacher trainer – the preferential treatment we give to young people who are academically able. Don’t get me wrong.  I love those kids and loved teaching them.  It’s really important that young people strive to develop their skills and understanding and that we set the bar high for those who can reach up towards it.   However there are lots of kids who don’t learn easily through the kinds of more abstract decentred thinking required once studies in subjects like Maths, Science and History go up towards the level of the Scottish Higher.   Yet these young people are able in other ways.  As the ‘work’ becomes more abstract and related to examination performance, they find that they are constantly not doing so well as others.  Who wants to spend time working away at something they are not good at?  They tolerate school till they can get on and do something else.

It’s true that we’re getting better at recognising and valuing other skills and abilities than the academic.   Curriculum for Excellence is meant to do this in some ways – the ‘profile’ at age 15, pedagogies like co-operative learning which encourage learning together, not just isolated individual performance on paper.  Yet there’s no sign of that progressing into our post-15 arrangements.  All the energy and effort seems to have gone into curriculum design further down the age range, yet it is in the post-15 arrangements that those who are not academically inclined get the worst deal.  If they have good family connections to work they are interested in, or the links between their schools and local Colleges are good, they may tolerate school learning until they can get out into something that suits them better.

However in the complex job and training environment of the 21st Century, many young people and adults don’t understand the different training and education routes that are available.  There are good careers advisers in schools and other settings, and we do have a focus now in Scotland on positive post-school placement, but for many young people in this group, their post-school experience is of random, chance access to opportunities which they do not fully understand.  It could be argued that the same scenario presents itself to those who have Highers, then find ways to progress into Higher Education or Advanced Further Education – it’s just that they experience this confusion about the work environment they are about to enter at a later stage.  I agree that part of what this is about is the impact of changes in the global economy and financial markets and that’s affecting everyone in or out of work.  My argument isn’t really about that.  It’s about the educational experience these youngsters have while still in the school system.

The Scottish school curriculum treats them as second class citizens – keeps them busy till they can move on elsewhere, while focusing most attention on the kids who are going to stay on and complete a fifth, then a sixth year.  This is not about the teacher, or headteachers for that matter.  I’ve….we’ve…. spent our careers compensating for the weakness of the national curriculum arrangements, valuing the individuals despite what the curriculum seems to say about their value – developing relationships that overcome unfairness through respect.  It’s about our failure as a civic community to develop a 15/16+ curriculum that gives equal value to each child.  I believe it is our biggest failure as it feeds down into the lower reaches of the secondary school.  It remains to be seen whether Curriculum for Excellence, with its vision of a broad general education for all to age 15, can overcome this structural failing.  In my view, that will depend in part on whether schools continue to be judged on the basis of examination performance at age 16, rather than the broader set of performance indicators that I argued for in previous articles/blogs:

What should happen after a young person leaves school in Scotland

How to improve Scottish schools: six main problems and their solutions

The negative consquences for Scottish education of inspectors continuing misuse of examination statistics

People tell me that this just reflects the reality of our society. Some people are worth more than others.  Thank God we don’t think that in schools – or at least we try not to.  In our limited and feeble way, we battle against contrary social and economic forces by trying to put some democratic ideals into practice, however inadequately.  For some of my thoughts on that, see Democratic Schooling in Scotland

This rant is now over!