Time for a rethink

I came across a wonderful blog the other day by @JudithKingston over at Clean Slate (http://wp.me/p2QYex-lP). If you're at all interested in education, and in how we might improve it, please please please go and take a look. As regular readers will know, I have a bit of bee in my bonnet about education, and am particularly taken by the idea of self organised learning. Judith's ideas chime perfectly in tune with my own. 

I don't think anyone still believes our existing educational system is a good one. Whether, like SuperGove, you're a fan of the rote learning of the fifties (in which case all this touchy feely context based learning nonsense needs to go) or you have a belief, as I do, that creativity and interest need to be stimulated and encouraged in a way that the national curriculum simply does not allow, I do think that we need to re-imagine the way we teach our children. 

Quite apart from anything else, the world has changed (and is continuing to change) in ways that our education system struggles to keep up with. 20 years ago a Calvin and Hobbes strip made the point that a cheap calculator could provide answers to more complex mathematical problems than the average school leaver could do if his life depended on it. 

20 years on we have access to more information more quickly than we can make use of. Google is your friend; it can tell me the name of the sixth wife of Henry VIII in less than a sixth of a second. It can list every King of England, it can tell me whether Alfred was in fact the first or not, it can teach me double entry book keeping and how to play bass guitar. I don't even have to be at a desk to ask a question; an iPhone and a half decent 3G signal will do.

Having taken La Child out of mainstream education we've been keen to see what support there may be for home schooling, and the weekend before last we visited a small school in Hampshire called The Heartwood Project. It started out life as an 'educational cooperative', a support group for home schooling, and as its initial cohort has grown so has its aspirations and the services it provides. Please do take a look at their website here: http://www.heartwoodproject.org.uk. 

The school adopts the self organised learning principle, allowing its children free reign in terms of what they want to learn and how. As they are all officially home schooled, there is no need for (and certainly no pressure on) the children to study towards or take any exams, but for those who do want to study towards exams tutors are brought in for specific subjects. Generally speaking, freedom and flexibility is the order of the day, and it seems to lead to a child led environment that the children themselves love.

And it works. The children are all either (at worst) on a level with those in mainstream education or (more frequently) well ahead of it. The idea that if left to their own devices children will veer off into some Lord of the Flies subculture and learn nothing is demonstrably nonsense. If anything, better results are achieved by a less pressured, less structured environment. But somewhere like the Heartwood Project wouldn't work without parental involvement. Being home schooled, the children are all from homes where the parents have, very obviously, taken a more active role in their child's education, so there is a question mark over how well this might work in more mainstream schooling where parents have less time to devote. But I don't think it would make a huge difference. The Clean Slate blog suggests that all learning is really down to three motivating factors:

1. survival - we learn to communicate our need for food early on, for example;

2. goals - how do I reach those tasty shoes? I have to learn to crawl. How do I become a pilot? I have to learn to fly; and

3. interest - I like this, I don't like that, I learn to avoid what I dislike, and learn how to do the things that I find enjoyable.

The point being made, of course, is that children will, almost out of necessity, be drawn to learning irrespective of whether they're formally taught. Children need less teaching and more guidance; less being told, more being asked. 

I'd love to hear from anyone who is either involved with, or has come across, real life examples of self organised learning in the UK, so please do get in touch by leaving a comment below or on twitter (@marcosbranza). 

New beginnings start here

So, La Child walked out of school today knowing that it was quite possibly the last day she'd ever have to set foot in one. 'How do you feel?' we asked her. 

A shrug of the shoulders. 'Meh,' she replied, 'don't care. Spain tomorrow!'

So much for the tears, the wails and the much gnashing of teeth of everyone else. To be fair to her, leaving this school and not going to another hasn't ever been likely to be an issue for her. Leaving one place for another has never been an issue, whether it's been a case of moving school or house (and we've done plenty of both). La Child isn't someone who finds it hard to tear herself away from things. Well, other than perhaps books. 

So this is it. The start of a whole new journey. An adventure of frighteningly large proportions. To a certain extent there's a cushion, a safety net provided by her age and abilities: if it doesn't work out, then it's easy enough to put her back in the system in a year or two without any real harm to her education, and if anything it'll give her an experience that few children have the chance to enjoy. 

No ties, free from high fees, no longer being restricted to term dates, or a particular area or country... I honestly don't think we've even begun to truly understand the freedom this is likely to give us all, or the opportunities that this is in fact going to give La Child. And I have to say, I am so ridiculously jealous of her.

My last post was all about missed opportunities and, deep down, the weight of expectation. If we achieve nothing else, then I want to ensure that La Child feels no weight whatsoever. Whatever choices she eventually makes, whatever she ends up doing, I want there to be no possibility at all that she may be swayed by what she thinks we want for her. 

I've made a thing, ever since my very first post, of not really knowing what we're going to end up doing, or where we'll end up, but that's only half true. I know where I want to end up. I know what I want to do. I want to fly. I want to make flying my life. I've always wanted to make flying my life, but the weight of expectation has always intruded. When I was 17 it was the hopes and aspiration of my parents that stopped me. I don't mean to say that they would have been anything less than 100% supportive if I had chosen flying over university, they would have been wonderfully supportive, but I knew that deep down they'd be a little bit disappointed and I didn't want them to be. Then when I started working it became an overwhelming feeling that I had to make a go of the law, that I had a career, that I've come so far with it that of course I should continue. Flying could be a hobby, a weekend diversion, it needn't be serious. Then La Child was born and the pressures shifted slightly to a need to support her, to pay the bills and the school fees. A need to give her time, something that a flying career (and the training needed to get there) would prevent me from giving her. 

Now, though... Now life has taken an entirely new path. La Child is no longer at school. La Child is a little bit older, and I can afford to spend some time doing other things. La Child no longer requires an expensive private education, so we've no longer a need to live in an expensive area near an expensive school within commuting distance of a well paying job.... We've been through all this before. Now suddenly the opportunity to finally have a go at actually achieving a long standing dream presents itself. 

There are barriers, of course. I'm older than your average newbie pilot. My eyesight's not the best. I need to sit the exams again and pass flight tests. I need to pass medicals. Houses need to be sold, lifestyles need to change. But today marks the start of what could be the very beginnings of the process, and I have to say I'm really quite excited about it, even if La Child seems entirely nonchalant. 

We're off for a two week break to Spain tomorrow. Time to talk, and plan, and look forward with a ruddy great big smile on all our faces.

Cake or Ofsted Report?

This. A thousand times, this:

“Too many non-selective schools are failing to nurture scholastic excellence. While the best of these schools provide excellent opportunities, many of our most able students receive mediocre provision. Put simply, they are not doing well enough because their secondary schools fail to challenge and support them sufficiently from the beginning. I believe the term ‘special needs’ should be as relevant to the most able as it is to those who require support for their learning difficulties. Yet some of the schools visited for this survey did not even know who their most able students were. This is completely unacceptable.”

So spake Sir Michael Wilshaw this morning on the release of the Ofsted report into the treatment of the most able students in secondary schools.

Sir Michael isn’t the most popular man in the world; Chief Inspector of Schools in England, head of Ofsted, seen as many (particularly teachers) as a bully with a hard-line style and an unforgiving approach to standards, accused of instigating a period in which teachers feel alienated and in which morale is at an all time low.

But. When someone says something that makes sense, one should always acknowledge its wisdom. And by Jove that quote up there makes a lot of sense. I’ve argued for years that gifted children are every bit in need of special needs provision as are children with learning difficulties. Gifted children come with a whole host of issues: they can be relatively mild (short attention span, very little patience, poor empathy, problem with authority, quick to boredom, constant bloody questioning) or really quite serious (dyslexia, dyspraxia, autism, aspergers, acute and debilitating sensitivity to noise or bright lights). And because of these issues it’s not always obvious that they’re gifted. There’s even a term for it: ‘dual exceptionality’, where a child is gifted but also has some form of special need. What happens is that the disability shines so brightly that it blocks out the light of the child’s other abilities, and either the disability is all and the child is incorrectly identified as needing SEN support, or the child’s other abilities compensate for the disability such that they appear entirely average and receive no support at all. That of course makes it difficult for schools to identify them, but it doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t try.

Some teachers have responded by saying that the problem isn’t in fact non- or mis-identification of the most able pupils, it’s that teachers simply don’t have the time or the resources to deal with them (this blog by @Bigchris_BRFC gives you a pretty good feel for the sort of environment some teachers are operating in). Class sizes are too large, abilities too mixed and disruption is rife, either because of bad behaviour or because of the need to deal with often quite serious special needs within mainstream schools. If we want teachers to spend more time nurturing the most able pupils, they say, then give us the time, the space and the resources with which to do it. 

That’s not an entirely unreasonable response, but neither is it the whole story. Non- and mis-identification remains an issue. The current method of identification is simply to look at the pupils who scored in the top 5% of the Key Stage 2 SATS, but that misses those with any form of dual exceptionality, and frankly therefore misses most gifted children.

My daughter, as wonderful as she is, is intensely frustrating sometimes. Because I know her abilities, because I know full well what she’s capable of, it annoys me to distraction whenever she decides not to bother showing anyone else. Even her current school, which is the first in a long line to even get close to providing good support for her, doesn’t really know what she can do. An example: my wife spoke to La Child’s class teacher the other day to ask roughly what level she was at (we’re going to be home schooling her from September, so we need to know roughly where to start her). ‘Oh,’ replied the teacher, ‘she at about a level [x] for literacy and similar for reading.’ Wife thanks teacher, teacher wonders off, La Child suddenly looks around furtively and then says in a whisper: ‘Actually, I’m probably a fair bit higher than that. I don’t really try very hard at school.’

How do you deal with that? How do schools deal with that? I can tell you how they won’t, and that’s by fiddling around with the curriculum, insisting on ‘rigour’ and assuming that the gifted kids will be the ones performing the best. They won’t be.

In truth we need to take a long hard look at what we want our education system to do and decide how best to help teachers do it. As long as we carry on tinkering here and adjusting there and constantly blaming the teachers for, well, everything all we’ll ever achieve is to alienate an entire generation of teachers and waste several generations of potential. Now that is completely unacceptable.

Let's all do the Gove fandango

He's at it again. You can't keep a good Gove down.

I can understand why various Sec States for Education keep harking back to O Levels. GCSEs in their current form no longer work (if only because so many children now achieve the highest possible grades that the exams become valueless as a means for employers to sift between candidates) and O Levels marked a golden age in education.

Except that it really wasn’t anything of the sort, of course.

O Levels (or GCEs) were for the already academically minded. Mainly exam based, they favoured boys over girls; the former were more suited to a cramming style exam rigour while the latter have traditionally been better at coursework based assessment (so, unsurprisingly, the change from O Levels to GCSEs meant that suddenly girls were beating boys in pretty much all subjects, including the previously male dominated sciences and PE). Anyone for whom (the school decided) GCEs might be too rigorous would be diverted to CSEs. CSEs were introduced to ensure that even the less able student achieved a qualification on leaving school - before their introduction the majority of less able students simply didn't take GCEs and so left school without any qualifications at all. But CSEs were the death knell for any ambition to the professions; yes, I know that people could, and sometimes did, go from a few CSEs to night school, further qualifications, into a polytechnic and into a profession, but... it was difficult, it was time consuming, and required a considerable force of will.

The whole ethos of 70s and 80s education was about splitting children into those who would, and those who wouldn’t. Clever ones in this pile, not so clever ones in this pile. The more able took GCEs and went to university, the less able took CSEs (often in a vocational subject like car maintenance) and went on to work. To a certain extent, I confess, I don’t disagree with the principle: of course there’s room for a more vocational path, why should everyone by necessity have to aim to become a doctor or a lawyer? But not enough was done at the time to ensure that those who ended up down a vocational path were doing so because it was right for them, rather than, say, because they were simply a personality type that didn’t do well at exams and who, if given the right opportunity, could shine by another method. And we're not just talking about those with a high learning potential, who of course often tend to underachieve; how many girls ended up forced down the wrong path simply because of their natural predisposition to do better with coursework rather than exams? Even now in 2013 we've yet to achieve real equality in the workplace between men and women. Prevailing sexual attitudes at the time, and since, have their part to play, but how far did this natural aid to discrimination push back the cause?

GCSEs were intended to fix that. Everybody would have their chance, they would be partly exam based, partly coursework based, cue an era of inclusivity and opportunity. Except that didn’t work either. For whatever reason more children get higher marks more regularly than ever before, and it really doesn’t matter whether it’s because children are getting better at passing them or the exams are getting easier. The fact is that as a measure of ability they now don’t tell employers enough to make any sort of judgement.

So, we need something different. Gove, bless his cotton socks, thinks that the answer is to introduce rigour. Hark back to the glory days, he says, when we could all recite Henry VIII’s wives in order and do complex trig on the back of a napkin when we needed to split the bill. But the glory days weren’t actually particularly glorious, and he’s fixing the wrong problem.

Let's leave aside for a moment the fact that learning by rote (a) doesn’t work and (b) isn’t necessary (any lawyer will tell you that he doesn't know the law any better than anyone else, he simply knows where to look for the answer), and equally let's ignore the fact that the current education system was designed to prepare children for a world that no longer exists. We need a system that can cope with children who may be very clever indeed but just not good at exams. Employers are already educated in this – if I interview someone the last thing I’m interested in is their GCSEs; how well do they cope with my questions? how do they interact with others? would I want to share an office with them? can they do the job? – and for most professions there's far less importance placed on academic qualifications and far more on analytical skills, interpersonal skills, problem solving abilities. Employers, who more and more need to prove their social mobility credentials, are looking at increasingly novel ways to ensure that there are no barriers to entry. A return to the good ol' days of GCEs and CSEs seems to be a move in the wrong direction.

Lest I should be accused of thinking there should be some sort of free for all, a great release of entirely untested workers into the market, that's not what I'm getting at. Of course children need to be tested to see whether they have learned the skills necessary to enable them to go forth and become productive members of society. But Mr Gove, this isn't the way to do it.

Stand for Bidet

So, she’s a bit bright, then? No. No, she’s not bright, she’s gifted.

Gifted? Gifted.

What, as in really very bright? No, not ‘bright’…

Is she a genius? Well, that rather depends what you mean by ‘genius’. She hasn’t quite discovered the grand unified theory just yet.

She’s only 8, I guess. Give her time. Is her IQ higher than Einstein’s? What? I’ve no idea, don’t think so. 149 on the Stanford-Binet, if you must know.

Stand for Bidet? I’d rather sit to do that, if it’s all the same. No, Stanford-Binet. It’s a type of IQ test. Others include the Cattell IIIb, the Otis-Lennon, the Miller Analogies and the Wechsler. You have to be a little careful just saying that someone has an IQ of ‘x’, because the different tests measure it in different ways. So, for example, an IQ of 149 on the Stanford-Binet is the equivalent of 146 on Wechsler and 172 on Cattell IIIb.

That’s confusing. Yes it is.

Surely there’s a better way to doing it? Well, there might be. Most of the tests will measure where someone fits on a percentile chart. So, for example, an IQ score of 149 on the Stanford-Binet will put you in the top 99.89% of the population. Put another way, if you were to walk into a room with 911 other people in it, chances are you’d be the most intelligent one there.

So she is quite bright then? For the sake of all that’s Holy….

Alright, alright, keep your wig on. So why are we even having this conversation? I thought you’d never ask. Channel 4 is about to screen a documentary called ‘Child Genius’.

That doesn’t sound at all controversial. In fact it’s already raised hackles, but not necessarily from where’d you’d expect. It’s the parents of other gifted children (or children with a ‘high learning potential’ as leading charity Potential Plus UK would prefer you to refer to them) who have raised the biggest fuss, on the basis that the documentary isn’t going to do much to help them.

Do they need help? Well, raising a child with high learning potential isn’t the easiest thing in the world.

Get the children to do it. Oh, very droll.

What’s so difficult about it then? Well, imagine you have a child with an IQ of 149. Imagine that as the child moves through its early milestones, walking, talking, reading, it does them all much, much earlier than its little friends. You’re very proud of that fact so you start to tell your friends and to your horror you find that your friends don’t seem to be particularly happy for you. So you stop telling them, and they stop asking, and quite soon you find that they stop wanting to spend any time with you, or to let their children spend any time with yours.

That’s a bit sad. Yes it is. It’s not everyone of course, but when some friends react that way it comes as a bit of a shock. And imagine that, as the child starts going through school, she really doesn’t do as well as you think she could. So you start looking into why, and you discover that she’s bored because the school want her to do what all the other little boys and girls are doing. So you think you’ll speak to the school, they know what they’re doing, they’ll help, but then you find out that the school don’t want to know. They have lots of other children to teach, and a certain way they need to teach them, and if that doesn’t work on your child, well… she’s clever, she’ll deal with it.

I thought schools had gifted and talented policies, and stuff like that? They did have, once upon a time, but money is tight.

Ah. Quite. Funding for teaching more able children got pulled a while ago, and now it’s up to schools to do what they can in any way they decide. Most don’t bother, and those that do don’t tend to have the experience or the training to do it properly. And let’s not talk about behavioural issues.

OK. I mean, imagine having a really, really clever little girl…

I thought we weren’t going to talk about… who gets easily frustrated, and bored, and who can’t always understand why other people do the things they do, and has trouble empathising. A little girl who finds it very hard to sit still, who has very little patience. Who won’t do something just because she’s told to, but has to be told why she’s being asked to do it.

That must make her popular at school. ‘Challenging,’ according to her teachers. And it doesn’t make it easy for her to make too many friends, either.

So, to recap. She’s really clever, but you end up losing most of your friends and fighting with schools, while she has the patience of a coked-up Tony Montana, says inappropriate things and has empathy issues? Erm…, well, yes. I suppose.

Sounds fun. So why is the documentary not going to help? Reinforces stereotypes. The problem has really always been the perception of others. Genius? Clever child? You must be a pushy parent who hothouses her. You’re a Tiger Parent. She must be a precocious little madam.

I assume none of those is true, then? No, they’re not. How very dare you.

Sorry. All we’ve ever wanted – and for that matter, all most parents of gifted children want – is to ensure that she gets an education that will interest her and prepare her for whatever life it is she wants to lead. Allowing her to spending 14 years getting bored at school doesn’t strike me as fulfilling our parental duties. And for what it’s worth, just so we get this one out of the way, I couldn’t personally give two hoots whether she becomes a particle physicist, artist or McDonald’s chip fryer, so long as she’s happy doing it.

Any last words to the assembled masses? Yes. Normality restored next time. A Q&A with yourself is just a little bit weird.

How dare you…