English school exams are fatally flawed

Covid-19 has brought exams firmly into attention with each of the UK regions struggling to find fair ways of assessing students when many of them have been forced to either miss lessons or receive a lesser education online. 

In all this the assumption has been that we must hold final exams if we can as they are the best way of assessing students, an assumption that led Gove to drop both continual assessment and AS levels.

It is an assumption that is wrong.

Exams are inaccurate

This is clearly true. I do not think that anyone expects that if a class of children took the equivalent exams, say a Geography GCSE, five days in a row that they would all get the same marks every time.

The question is not, therefore, whether exams are accurate or not but how inaccurate they are.

How inaccurate are they?

Surprisingly nobody seems to know. The best that I can find on my Google search is an Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation paper from 2010 that states, "The results showed that, for the GCE and GCSE units analysed, at least 89 per cent of all candidates with a particular grade (other than the highest or lowest grade) have true scores either in that grade or immediately adjacent".

That does not strike me as being particularly accurate and that statistical analysis is supported by the number of successful appeals against grades. Statistics published by Ofqual show there were 1,240 appeals in 2019, up from 857 in 2018. A total of 675 of the appeals were upheld, up from 406 the previous year – an increase of 66 per cent. These may be relatively small numbers but that is not the point, they are just further evidence that exams do not always give the correct result. 

That exams are inaccurate is not an opinion, it's a simple fact, yet most commentators talk as if they were perfect.

Sadly even education professionals make this mistake. When I was a school governor an LEA Inspector was concerned that our Teacher Assessment grades varied significantly from the results of the subsequent exams and the firm assumption was that the exams were right and the teachers were wrong. I asked them how accurate the exams were and they had no idea, to be honest I am not even sure that they understood the question.

Exams are just one data point

Many people will remember dealing with inaccurate measurements in school science lessons and part of the solution is simple, repeat the experiment many times and assess that actual results from the spread of results achieved.

So, if the class did take the equivalent exams five days in a row we would have five results for each child to work with and could, for example, take a simple average (mean or median, there are arguments for using both methods) of the five results and use that. This would not be perfect, five is still a small number, but it would be many times better than what we actually do.

Continual Assessment may have issues with personal biases etc., and I would not want to deny that, but it does provide a lot more data to make the final assessment from than a single exam ever can and there are ways to address the other concerns which would make some form of Continual Assessment a fairer method.

This, of course, is how assessment works in most workplaces during the Annual Appraisal process with employees having to cite examples of their work throughout the year as well as seeking feedback from multiple sources.

Conclusion

One data point that is measured imprecisely can only ever be right by chance (like a stopped clock) and that is why exams as used in English schools are fatally flawed.

Gurteen Knowledge Cafe: The University of the Future

It is great news that David Gurteen is planning to run several Knowledge Cafes in London this year and good news that I was able to make the first one.

Keeping with the good news, it was held at Regent's University, in Regent's Park funnily enough, and it is always nice to have an excuse to go there. The travel worked reasonably well (Richmond to Hammersmith to Baker Street and then walk) and I got there around 6:15pm which gave me plenty of time to have a few veggie sarnies and a cup of coffee before the event started at 6:30pm. I also had the chance to say "hello" to a few of the other regulars.

The reason we were there was to discuss The University of the Future.

At first glance this is of little interest to me but, on the other hand, I was involved with schools for several years, I like to go out of my comfort zone and I love Gurteen events.

The session was expertly introduced by Peter Sharp who, amongst many other things, has a PhD in Knowledge Management and has worked in the field of business management and professional skills at Regent's University.

In a few drawings (a welcome change from the usual slide format) he explained some of the pressures that universities were under in several areas including money, expectations on all sides, and competition.

That set the conversations rolling. As usual we did these in three rounds of small table discussions (with people moving to different tables in each round) before having a group discussion at the end. Also as usual I took very few notes at the time because the conversations got in the way and what follows is a mix of these notes, additional memories and subsequent analysis in a desperate attempt to produce something coherent.

I do not usually comment on the conversations themselves but it is worth doing so this time because they had a different feel. Having universities as the theme attracted a lot of people from universities which tended to restrict the scope of some of the conversations and they were restricted even further, in my experience, as they seemed to have come with their answers prepared rather than waiting for the conversations to provide some. They were still good conversations, perhaps I felt that because I was an exception to the universities rule (there were others), and I both enjoyed the evening and learned from it.

Peter Sharp opened by contrasting Balir father (50% to go to university) to son (apprenticeships are better) but we never addressed that argument directly as the argument for apprenticeships was not in the room. I think that was a shame as there are clear issues with the universities model and I would have liked to hear how outsiders playing in the same area feel.

If we look at a cube (sorry, I cannot draw this) with numbers of people along one axis (say 0-6 million), their ages along another (say 0-100) and then all the things that universities might provide to students (academic teaching, clubs and sports, social interaction, etc.) then universities fill a very small part of that cube in that they provide some of those services to only 50% of the population for only 3 or 4 years.

There are many other providers of all of these services and the cube is fully populated. The big question for universities, I feel, is deciding where to be in that cube. For example, it may make sense for them to be more engaged in life-long learning so that they can use their skills, knowledge and facilities to provide formal education after graduation instead of leaving this to professional bodies (e.g. Institute of Chartered Accountants) and probably the easiest way to do this would be to absorb such bodies.

Michael Porter famously said, "The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do" and I think that applies here. There are lots of things that universities do (e.g. sports) and/or are interested in doing (e.g. teaching life skills like critical thinking) that may be best left to others with universities commission these services for their students for the period that the have them.

Part of this is to ensure that useful skills, like critical thinking, are not exclusively the property of the 50% or so who go to university but are available to all. Someone ranted in the final whole-group session on how this focussing reasoning skills on just the elite had enabled Brexit and Trump. It was me.

There are a lot of players and potential customers in the university world, in its broadest sense, and I think university will operate better if they become part of the community rather than just a campus.

[The photo from the event was copied from cooperativelearning.works who also wrote a blog about it.]

Discussing school places in Kingston

For several years I was deeply involved in education in Kingston. In addition to having two children who did all their schooling here I was a school governor for just over ten years and through that spent time on various Council committees, including the Schools Organisation Committee which, for a while, was responsible for balancing supply and demand for school places.

I am not directly involved any more but it is still a subject that I am interested in so I was attracted to a local meeting that my MP, Zac Goldsmith, organised to discuss local schools.

It was held in St Luke's Church which was just a stone's throw away from my former house in Kings Road. As it was a church I had never been there before though I had been to several children's birthday parties in the hall next to it.

New School in North Kingston

The bulk of the meeting was taken up with the new school in North Kingston that was due to open in 2015, understandable given the location of the meeting and the recent announcements about the school, e.g. the appointment of its first Head.

We were told that the new school places were not needed until 2015, which must have been a change from previous projections we were given when it was hoped to open the school a couple of years earlier.

Work was being done on the design of the school but this cannot be shared yet as the development contract was under negotiation. They should be available over the Summer.

There was, "No question that the school will open." It was on budget and almost on time. I think that the Planning Application will not be straightforward, especially regarding traffic, and time could become even more of a problem.

To enable the school to be produced faster and cheaper the current building, the North Kingston Centre, was due to be retained rather than demolished. This was a change from the original proposal.

The school will focus on the STEM subjects. This prompted a few questions from the audience, especially from parents whose children's interests lay in other areas.

Several questions were also asked about the sports provision. A large school is being squeezed on to a small site which will support just a hall and some small all-weather pitches. It was explained that the school will make use of the nearby Hawker Centre and also the distant facilities owned by the University and College.

The final problem that the school faced was competition from Grey Court School in Ham. After some troubled years this was now rated as outstanding and so was likely to be the first choice school for many parents in the area.

There was quite a bit of talk about governance of the new school and this is where the Tory councillors started to lose the plot with the bizarre claim that Free Schools improve community engagement. This claim looked very silly when it was explained that the new governing body will only have around 8 people on it to represent all of the stakeholders. When I was a governor we had 3 community governors in a team of 12.

The admissions policy was expected to follow Kingston's and there was no reason to think that it should be different but it seemed odd that they were waiting for the new head before making that decision.

The question on the possible name of the new school brought the most reaction from the audience, especially when it was announced that the final decision was due to be made later that evening and that only the parents of one year-group had been consulted.

The four short-listed names were all horrible. "Kingston Academy" and "River Park" were too general and "Hawker Academy Secondary School" and "The Cesar Picton Free School" were far too long and contained meaningless information about the current structure of the school. Why not just go for the much simpler "Cesar Picton School", or even "Tudor School" which was its original name?

My conclusion from the discussion was that the new school already faced some serious problems in its cramped and busy location, competition from Grey Court and lack of community engagement. There was a real possibility that it would open as a second-choice school with all that would entail. And that's assuming that it gets planning permissions which is by no means certain because of the impact on traffic.

Other school issues

The last part of the meeting considered other aspects of schooling in Kingston. It also became a lot more political with the Tories (it was their meeting) constantly saying how bad the Lib Dems were in Kingston and making simplistic comparisons with Richmond which had been run by the Tories for the last four years.

In doing so they conveniently skipped over the fact that a third of Richmond secondary pupils do not get in to their first choice school. An odd definition of success.

This started with more nonsense about free schools with the claim that Kingston had not done enough to encourage them (even though it was said earlier in the meeting that new school places were not needed until 2015). This is palpable twittery as the whole point of free schools is that they have nothing to do with councils.

The Tories think that the gasworks area is ideal for a 2FE primary school (I'm not convinced) but RBK only owns the triangular car park close to the station. A land swap is being considered but a triangle of land surrounded by main roads is not an ideal place for flats either.

Another mad claim made by the Tories was that Councils departments do not speak to each other so, we were told, Planning did not know that Education wanted to build a new school in this area. The truth is that the school was included in the recent planning brief.

If I was worried about progress on the new North Kingston school I was more worried about the possibility of the Tories getting their hands on Education again. Let's not forget that they closed Tudor School in the first place.

The DfE is deliberately using biased and misleading data

A recent conversation reminded me how angry this chart from the Department for Education (DfE) made me at the time and so I decided to revisit it. My complaint is two-fold; this is blatant political promotion from a supposedly neutral civil service and, more importantly, that the data is deliberately meaningless and is designed to mislead.

Free schools are an ideological approach from the Conservatives and the best that you can say about them is that the jury is still out. Some have succeeded, some have failed spectacularly and have been forced to close already, and overall the Ofsted results are, if anything, a little below the national average. I can see why the Conservatives want to spin Free schools as a success but there is no excuse for the DfE to do so.

But what really gets me is the numbers and the way that they are being used.

The infographic boasts of 174 new schools and of 150,000 new school places without giving the context to these numbers that is needed to understand them.

174 new schools is trumpeted as good news which suggests that this is making a difference to eduction in England. What it does not say is that there are approximately 25,000 schools in England so the 174 new Free schools is a meagre, and meaningless, 0.7%. Not only is 174 not good news, it is not even news.

Similarly the 150,000 new school places sounds good until you realise that there are over 8 million school children in England, so this is an increase of around 2%. This is a slightly more significant number but it tells you nothing about the demand for these places. If, for example, the demand for places has risen by more than 2% in the last three years (which is quite likely considering the population growth overall and the increasing number of children in recent years) then this small growth is actually a failure.

There has been much said recently about our children's poor performance in mathematics, and we have even shipped in teachers from China to try and help, but the aim to improve numeracy is not helped by the DfE using numbers in such an unintelligent and biased way.

What is even worse is that I am sure that they know what they are doing and that this use of biased and misleading data is deliberate. And that is shameful.

Humanist Debate: Fair Admissions

My second debate with South West London Humanists took me in to familiar territory. Not that long ago I was on Kingston Council's Schools Admissions Forum, I was Chair of Governors of an LEA Primary School at the time, and the issue of faith schools came up there when a local boys' school wanted to become a C of E school and was denied (twice) by the Forum with me voting against both times.

The debate was led by Richard Thompson, a BHA Education Officer who is working on their Fair Admissions Campaign. He started off by giving us some information to explain the problem.

One third of. Schools are faith schools, circa17% of primary and 13% secondary applications are faith base. As an example,London Oratory has 9 different Categories of Catholic in their admissions policy, this is followed by other Christian groups then, er, nobody. Children cannot go to one Jewish school if have a TV in the house.

Some church schools maintain their ethos without a religious slant to their admissions.

The BHA opposes faith based admissions as segregation reinforces divisions. It also gives non-religious people less of a choice and, in some cases, no real choice at all. If you live in a village with just one school and it gives preference to, say, Christians then other people have no local school to go to.

Faith schools are state funded so this inequality is being done in our name as tax payers.

The BHA have produced a map of faith schools that show just how big the problem is.


Only three other countries allow religious selection, these are Ireland, Israel and Estonia. This is not a club that the UK can be proud of belonging to.

Some faith schools vastly skew intake when looking at the demographics of the local area, e.g. FSM or EAL.

Free Schools can only have 50% faith selection and the Government could easily make this apply to all schools. That would not completely solve the problem but would go a long way towards it and would be a relatively minor change of policy, i.e. something that politicians should be argue for easily.

The scene having been set we then had the debate, first in groups around our tables and then, having gathered our thoughts, we shared the main points with the whole room.

After pursuing several avenues, our table kept coming back to one basic principle, state-funded schools should not be allowed to select children on the basis of the alleged faith of their parents.

Other good points were made but we kept coming back to this one and there is a risk that by arguing against lots of little points in the schools' admissions policies that we win some of those but lose sight of the big one.

Does Education Need Theories?

Not sure how I came across Big Ideas, through Twitter probably, but it led to a challenging discussion on education in a London pub.

The tempting title Does Education Need Theories? was introduced by Paul Standish, a professor at the Institute of Education, where he heads up the philosophy section of the Department of Educational Foundations and Policy Studies. The challenge started there with references to people called Piaget, Marx, Nietzsche, Lyotard and another Marx. I had heard of some of them but this did little to help my understanding of the arguments.

However, there were enough words that I could manage and the main themes emerged clearly. These (broadly) concerned encouraging students to take an open approach to learning (all subjects, all methods and lots of questioning).

The topic was then opened for debate and I made quite a few contributions without, I hope, embarrassing myself too much over my relative lack of knowledge of education theory and practice.

The format was a little less conversational than I expected (I am more used to the KM meetings run by LIKE etc.) and we essentially had a question and answer session with the speaker (not facilitator) responding to all the comments made. This relative formality was reflected in the layout of the room too as we sat in neat rows facing the speaker at the front.

The talk succeeded in making me think plenty of new thoughts, which is why I go to this sort of thing, and I noted a few of them.

• We have moved, worryingly, to teaching to the test and this has worsened to students learning to the test and avoiding anything that does not directly improve their marks.
• Politics interferes in education against the best research evidence. The example I gave here was of the comprehensive Cambridge Primary Review which was immediately dismissed by the government without even reading it.
• Why do we teach mathematics beyond the basic arithmetic that people need for normal living? In contrast, we do not teach grammar any more yet everybody reads and writes.
• The computer is the hidden teacher that we all have. We learn to adapt to what the computers want us to do rather than behaving naturally.

It was a lively debate and I would have stayed on for the more informal part of the evening had not another date in Richmond dragged me away. The evening did enough to get me back for another Big Ideas event even though I left this one with the niggling worry that we had not even addressed the main question about the purpose of education.

Safeguarding2.0 - making children safer

I'd like to tell you about one of the best meetings that I have ever been to; and it was for a good cause too.

Safeguarding2.0 is an initiative, seeded by FutureGov, that is looking to see how/if web2.0 technologies can be used to help make children safer. Playing chess on Facebook is great fun but can we do something really useful with the same technologies?!

I got involved in the initial scoping workshop, thanks to a Twitter friend (a twend?!), back in August and last week we returned to the LGiU to get an update on the project and to suggest some future directions.

Around the table we had an impressive mix of people involved in different aspects of safeguarding and/or web2.0 and it was this mix that made the meeting so good. I judge the success of a meeting by how much I say (am I engaged and contributing?) and how many notes I take (am I learning?) and this scored heavily on both points. One of the purposes of writing this article is to try and crystallize some of those learnings.

Scoping the problem

As a consultant, my natural instinct is to draw diagrams and preferably a 2x2 matrix but so far I've not managed to get below 3x3 when describing the key factors.

1) The child's needs are clearly central to the debate and here I suggested that we should invert the familiar needs triangle that shows the neediest children at the top where the triangle is thinnest. If we invert it then the thick end mirrors the physical case file and shows that the needs (and risks) are greater and more agencies are involved with more interventions.

2) The age of the child is important as that drives things like the balance of input from the child and the family and the agencies involved, e.g. schools.

3) There are a range of stakeholders involved that goes something like Child > Family > Peers > Professionals > Community (not convinced that's a linear progression though) and each of these plays different roles and so could be helped in different ways. For example, professionals could benefit from better ways of sharing information and the community could benefit from being able to raise concerns.

Insights

A number of light bulbs flashed for me during the meeting, this is just some of them.

Story telling is what matters. and face to face communication is needed in order to tell the full story about the more complex cases, notes in a case file won't do it.

Most, if not all, of our processes and technologies are based on our bureaucratic view of the world which often does not match the client's. For example, we insist on formal meetings at set times whereas they prefer to communicate by text message when the mood is right for them.

Spreadsheets and reports from IT systems present a flat view of the world (unlike the bulging case file). There is a need to use some clever data visualization to better encapsulate a case.

If we can do FixMyStreet, why can't we do FixMyCommunity?

We need to find a way to include positive messages in any improved communications. If we just report concerns and bad observations then we'll get swamped in negativity. If a child at risk comes to school beaming and saying what a great weekend they had then we need to capture this too.

Networks are more efficient that hierarchies in dealing with complex situations but you need some sort of hierarchy to get accountability.

Social Workers have made the choice of working with people, not computers, and we should understand and respect this.

Some possible solutions

A few specific ideas came to mind in the discussion but these are just scratching at the surface of what could be done. Some of these are quick and easy whereas others are much more difficult and would probably require Government support.

An iPhone app for social workers could keep track of their contacts for each case and their appointments etc. while out of the office.

A Twitter-live application (there had to be one!) to enable low-level conversations between professionals so that they can share the sort of gossip they would have if they shared a workplace, possibly with some sort of read-only-once technology to address data protection concerns.

A self-help website for older children along the lines of PatientsLikeMe (this TEDtalk shows how it works).

A FixMyCommunity website that allows the general public to notify authorities of concerns they have for vulnerable people, young or old. Obviously there are lots of ways that this could be abused so it's not an easy option but the benefits could be great.

Virtual meetings (chat, video, text, etc.) to enable children to engage with professionals in a way and at a time that suits them.

Story analysis (this may be what SenseMaker does) to determine patterns from stories and so improve risk analysis.

End note

I think that this project has a good chance of delivering real and important benefits and I am very pleased and a little proud to be associated with it.

A new secondarey school for North Kingston?

There has been a clamour for a secondary school for many years and it's a cause I can sympathise with as the nearest school the Kingston Council was able to offer me for my youngest son was two bus rides away in the south of the Borough. He didn't go there.

Now a project rise in pupil numbers means that the Council is looking to build 16 extra classrooms for children starting secondary school in September 2015 and it wants to provide half of these, 240 places, in a new school in North Kingston.

So far so good but the problem is that they have failed to find a suitable site but are going ahead with their proposal anyway. The formal consultation has started and I went to a public meeting held by the Council last week to gather residents' views.

Their preferred site was, ironically, a secondary school until it was closed by the Council around twenty years ago. It now houses the Adult Education Centre and is squeezed in between another secondary school (selective, girls only) and a primary school that is growing to three forms of entry.

And that's the problem; the site is simply too small and cannot cope with either the additional buildings or the additional students and staff movements.

The Council knows this but is hiding behind the story that these are planning matters, ignoring that it's the Council that does planning and they've had a year to discuss this with er, themselves, to see what is, or is not, possible.

To make matters worse they admit that there are significant planning issues yet they have no alternative plan for providing the 240 extra places should this site prove to be unsuitable (which it will). The best they can do is spill over to the nearby sports centre which is also very problematic as the centre is very busy and is built on Metropolitan Open Land.

They also have no plans for relocating the Adult Education Centre or for the new school buildings if/when student numbers fall again.

Planning school places is a key council function and one which has a major impact on every family yet time and again Kingston Council has proved to be utterly useless in this respect. It's a compelling argument for taking this power away from them.

Welcoming the Cambridge Primary Review

Having a keen interest in Primary Education (I have been a school governor for more than a decade) I was naturally interested in the most comprehensive review of the area for forty years and so jumped at the chance to go to the public launch of the debate at the RSA.

The Cambridge Primary Review is broad in scope (hence the report's title), thoroughly researched, well presented and makes some specific actionable recommendations.

On the evening, the report's author, Professor Robin Alexander, introduced the report eloquently and convincingly and justified the enthusiastic round of applause from the packed audience.

The other panellists brought different perspectives to the debate that stressed the scope of the review and the quality of the evidence behind it.

It is a long report, the full version is around 500 pages, and so we were only presented with some headlines and this is my summary of that summary.

Teaching, not testing, raises standards.

The curriculum needs to be extended well beyond the current narrow focus on English and Maths. Arising from this is the need to change the method of assessment (i.e. get rid of SATS) and the way we deploy and train teachers, including the need to have some specialist teachers in the Primary Sector just as there are in the Secondary.

Every Child Matters is still important.

There is a need to focus more on speaking, communication, chatting, debating and dialogue. Children need to learn how to talk more.

The debate on the report has started but well intentioned and well argued though it is I suspect that the powers that be (i.e. politicians) will continue their recent trend of ignoring authoritative research when it is not completely in-line with their own thinking.

I am also concerned, as a Change Management Consultant, that the review has not made a compelling case for change and so it is easier to ignore.

I hope that I am wrong on both counts and I will be doing what I can to promote the report and it's findings, starting with this blog.

Not understanding data very well at all

I went on the training course for school governors on interpreting data hoping to learn something but with the concern that it might simply be a rehash of arguments I have had with the Local Authority at governors' meeting.

In the event my hope were dashed and it proved to be a pointless evening. I'll try and explain why.

The course focused entirely on the analysis of certain data sets around pupil performance. But to use data properly you have to understand how it has been collected and presented.

There are many problems associated with testing children's performance, including the difficulty in setting tests that are consistent in what they measure (e.g. is this year's test set the same way as last year's?), difficulties in setting questions that are fair to all groups (e.g. asking our children to describe a day on the beach when most have never been to one), subjectivity in marking (e.g. range of vocabulary), accuracy in marking (each year thousands of papers are challenged by schools and sent back to remarking) and variations in performance caused by a pupil's emotional and physical state at the time of the test.

These sorts of issues should be familiar to anybody who has ever done any sort of scientific experiment where you look at the possible causes of error and try and find ways around them. The most obvious approach here is to take several readings and use an average.

The testing of children makes no attempt to correct for errors and so is implicitly suspect and what nobody can tell me is how suspect. Without this basic understanding of how the data has been collected, any further analysis is meaningless.

Another worry was that one of the presenters of the course did not seem to understand the basic principle that a half of schools will always be below average or that while a large number of children are tested overall in our, fairly typical, school is it only around 55 children which is not a statistically significant sample size.

To end a bad evening on a bad note, I was given this certificate of attendance which is now filed alongside my certificate for the 25m crawl (failed) in recycled paper heaven.

Funding Early Years should be easier than this

The last meeting of the Kingston Schools Forum deliberated at length on the funding of Early Years, that is settings (nurseries to you and me) for pre-school children. The Government, quite rightly in my opinion, wants to increase the provision in this sector and to achieve most of this expansion through the Private, Voluntary and Independent (PVI) providers.

Local Authorities need to introduce a funding formula for all Early Years providers, i.e. those maintained by the Local Authority itself and those maintained by the PVI sector, to ensure that funding is fair and is also sufficient for the increased entitlement children have to nursery education.

The problem is that a simple and reasonable aim has been turned by Kingston Council into a complex formula that takes 7 pages to explain and requires a further 6 pages of examples to tr and bring some clarity to proceedings.

Because the formula is too complex (as it is with the main formula for funding mainstream schools) nobody really understands it and even fewer understand the implications of it so we run the risk that it will not work and this does not become apparent until it is too late to fix.

School admissions is a broken process

I have repeated experience of trying to get children into the school of their choice as a parent, a governor, a local government officer and, occasionally, as somebody who sits on Admissions Appeals Panels. These panels give parents who are unhappy with the school that they have been allocated to appeal against this allocation to an independent body whose decision is binding on the Local Authority.

Most of the appeals have little chance of success as the main grounds on which an appeal can be supported are that the school has failed to follow their published admissions policy or that this policy is unfair, and any competent admissions authority is not going to make these basic mistakes.

But the whole admissions process is quite complicated with parents specifying their preferred schools in priority order in October and then getting a letter in March that simply states which school they have been allocated, it does not say how this allocation was arrived at. Disappointed parents are told that they have the right to appeal and will often chose the appeal route simply because they are unhappy with the result of an opaque and complex process when a better understanding of the process could reassure them that they have been dealt with fairly, even if they do not like the end result.

What makes the situation even more difficult for parents is that many schools have now adopted some form of semi-independent status (Foundation, Voluntary Aided, etc.) which means that the school sets and manages its own admissions policy independently from its Local Authority. Most schools in this position have adopted their Local Authority's admissions policy as their own with some minor modifications but some have made quite significant changes.

It is these modifications that make the situation unnecessarily complex for parents as they have to try and understand the subtlety of the admissions policy for each school that they are interested in and it is easy to miss the little differences between them when they all look much the same and are all worded in stilted education jargon.

I do not want to go through the specifics of any of the cases that I have heard at an Admissions Appeals Panel recently (and I am sure that legally I am not allowed to either) but there were a couple of points that came up in general discussion when we were comparing the admissions policies of various schools in Kingston that I do want to highlight.

Firstly, some schools' admissions policies are confusing because they are very badly worded. Even as an expert in admissions I found that I had to read some of them several times to work out what they meant.

Secondly, some of the policies had clauses that unnecessarily (and possibly illegally) discriminated against some applicants, particularly those that could not apply by the October deadline. This is a serious issue for people that move within or into this country after October as they then have no realistic chance of getting their child into a popular school that has this clause in their admissions policy.

The Government has done much in recent years to try and improve the fairness of school admissions and while a lot of progress has been made there is still a lot more to do. In particular, schools need to check that their policies are simple, clear and do not discriminate. Until they do, there will be plenty more work for the Admissions Appeals Panels.

Getting inclusion right

Inclusion is recognised as one of the strengths of the school that I am a governor of but it is not something that we take for granted and we are looking to further improve our Inclusion Policy.

All schools practice inclusion to some extent as, at its simplest, inclusion means taking account of children's individual needs in lessons. For example, teachers are used to dealing with children who have Special Educational Needs, speak English as an Additional Language, are Gifted and Talented or have a disability.

But there is much more to inclusion that that. Full inclusion is making sure that nobody within the school community (pupils, staff, parents, visitors, etc.) are excluded from any school activities (teaching and learning, arts, sports, trips, meetings, etc.).

Full inclusion is probably not achievable, e.g. there could be parents with physical disabilities that the school is just not equipped to deal with, but it is a worth aim and in aiming for it we hope to identify and correct some practices where we are currently unintentionally excluding some people.

For example, do we have a mix of books in our library to attract children with different cultures and lifestyles? When I was at school all the books that I read seemed to be about children at private boarding schools (Billy Bunter, Jennings, Malory Towers, etc.) which was hardy something that I could relate to!

Some of the other areas that we need to check for their inclusiveness are curriculum, uniform, menus, learning resources, performing arts, play equipment, etc. And some of the possible reasons for exclusion that we need to consider in each case are culture, language, life-style (travellers, children living with grandparents, etc.) and religion.

A small example shows the sort of thing that is required. In 2002 many schools opened early on days that England was playing in the World Cup so that pupils (and staff) could watch the games. We did that but we also did the same from the other nations represented in our school, particularly South Korea.

Why I am remaining a School Governor

There are quite a few changes going on at the school where I have been a governor for the last fourteen years, and I am really worried that Kingston Council is forcing us down the wrong path, so I thought that this was a good time to sit back from the current crisis, re-examine why I am a governor and then nail my colours on what should be done firmly to the mast.

Let’s start with the good news.

The school that I am involved with is a wonderful, warm, welcoming and achieving place. But do not take my word for it, here are a couple of stories told by Ofsted in an inspection report.

“Older pupils look out for and help the younger ones as ‘buddies’ in the playground, as prefects and as playground patrollers, looking out for pupils who are lonely or having problems and sometimes resolving conflicts. These very good relationships were often reflected during the inspection in the way pupils helped each other in lessons. For example, a Korean pupil who had been in the school for only a short time was helped to join in a scientific investigation by her partner, who successfully encouraged her to become part of her group.”

“There were many instances observed where pupils of different capabilities and backgrounds worked with each other and gave each other support or help. Autistic pupils, in particular, were welcomed into classrooms. One Year 4 autistic pupil was helped to enjoy a games lesson on the school field by one pupil in particular who helped him to join her group and encouraged him to take part in the activities.”

We have worked hard with the children, their parents, school staff, volunteers (particularly Age Concern), other childcare workers and the wider community to build a school that is truly inclusive, respectful and motivated.

The school has been prominent, if not dominant, locally in all sorts of activities, including the written and performing arts, bridge and chess. One of our pupils even won a national competition for a story.

We offer our children a whole range of experiences that many of them would not normally get at home and they excel at them. They enjoy them too.

I am proud of the (very) small part that I have played over the last fourteen years in the development and success of the school.

But now comes the bad news.

The school serves a relatively disadvantaged area, and gets fewer resources than similar schools to help address, this which results in relatively low results in the Standard Attainment Tests (SATS) taken by pupils in the final year at primary school. Kingston Council is upset by this.

At our last governors’ meeting, a representative of Kingston Council twice said very clearly that the purpose of our school is to give our children a foundation in English and Mathematics to enable them to learn at secondary school. No mention of other subjects, no mention of arts and sports, no mention of social skills; just English and Mathematics. I could not disagree more.

The Council’s relentless drive for English and Mathematics has absolutely nothing with helping children to make the most of their lives, it is all about hitting targets set by the Government in these subjects and Kingston Council does nor care what it does to try and make these targets.

Schools are strongly encouraged (forced even) to hold extra classes outside of normal school hours for children deemed to be underperforming, to find excuses to exclude these children from the tests and to make the children take many practice tests.

The end result can improve standards in these two subjects but at the huge cost to the children and staff who both find that the school becomes an unhappy place. The children are forced to practice and take individual tests; the joy and companionship are taken out of learning. And the staff are scared that they will be blamed for any perceived failure by their children. The number of senior secondary leaders sacked each year has increased five-fold, with at least 150 dismissed in England last year, research suggests.

This relentless pursuit of exam results is putting children off school and despite a lot of effort, and money, being put in to trying to keep children in school they are staying away in increasing numbers. The only surprise is that anybody is surprised.

Outside of Kingston the tide has firmly turned away from a strict focus on just two subjects and this trend was given a major boost by a recent authoritative report from Cambridge University which concludes that children in England are getting a primary education that is too narrow and warns that too much emphasis on testing the basics could "impoverish" learning in areas such as the arts.

What next?

I am more convinced than ever that the approach our school is taking is the right one for our children and for our community and it would be wrong to let Kingston Council destroy that. Therefore I will remain a governor to try and stop this.

But the main reason I am going to stay a school governor is the reason that I became one in the first place – my skills and experiences can help the children of the school and that is help that I am more than willing to give. It’s all about the children.

Poor choice for Kingston's schools

Kingston Council keeps reminding those of us who work in Education that they are officially rated as "outstanding" by Ofsted and their attitude is never less than smug. But the customers of their services know that this is nonsense and there is a lot wrong with schooling in Kingston.

We learnt this week that Kingston's secondary school place choice is among London's worst with only half the applicants for secondary school places in September getting a place at the first choice school. About 125 children are being asked to settle for their fourth, fifth or sixth choice place and 25 have nowhere to go at all.

The situation in the primary sector is not much better and next September up to 300 children will start their school lives in new temporary classrooms. This is in addition to the temporary classrooms that had to be built last year when Kingston Council got its planning seriously wrong.

Getting a place for their children at a school of their choice is the main thing that parents want from their council and Kingston is failing in this in both the primary and secondary sectors. Something has to change. A new council administration next year might be sufficient but it may require the government to give more power to citizens, as they keep saying they plan to do.

Truancy

The news that there is a truancy jailing every two weeks is bit of a shock. This is the pinnacle of the iceberg that has seen 10,000 parents being prosecuted for not getting their children to school. Sadly, this seems to have had no impact on truancy rates which are still rising and I guess that they will rise even more when the school leaving age is raised from 16 to 18.

School attendance is clearly an important issue and as governor it something that we discuss fairly regularly, particularly as schools have attendance targets. The argument for attendance that we preach is simple (ignoring the fact that it is a legal requirement), we cannot teach your child if they are not in school.

For the vast majority of children attendance is either not an issue or is something that we can manage by working with the parents etc. The question is what to do with the children for whom this approach does not work?

I do not thing that replacing the carrot of learning with the stick of a fine or imprisonment is the answer as they do not fit the "crime". There is no damage that the fine can be used to repair and going to prison does not make you a better parent. This makes the sentence nothing more than a punishment.

The families with truancy problems tend to be socially deprived so this punishment is being inflicted on a group of people that society is trying to help. It is much harder for the authorities to help a family if they are also trying to prosecute them. You cannot build up trust when carrying a carrot in one hand and a stick in the other.

There are also some children for whom school is not really a suitable environment. For example, some simply do not cope with being surrounded by lots of people, especially when those people are teenagers who are not noted for being kind to each other.

I do not think that there is a single solution to truancy but the approach must be to understand the individual situation of each child and their family and work with them to achieve the best for the child, in or out of school.

BETT09

BETT is a major exhibition covering all aspects of ICT in schools.

I go every couple of years or so just to keep up to date with what is going on.

This feeds a personal interest and is relevant to my work as a school governor and as an IT consultant.

BETT is held at Kensington Olympia which is basically two halls each on two levels.

Actually, it's more complicated than that and you really need the map you are given to find your way around.

I was not really interested in finding my way around so I eschewed the map and just wandered around for a couple of hours looking at displays, demonstrations and leaflets on hardware, software, furniture, devices, websites and services.

It was a hectic and stimulating couple of hours. For example, I discovered I had a previously unknown interest in school furniture. There were a few highlights, such as the remote teaching for Gifted and Talented children, but overall there was little that was truly innovative or exciting. Almost everything was based around PCs and interactive whiteboards and virtually nothing on new platforms like the iPod/iPhone and the Wii.

Apart of the technology, BETT is famous for the way that its visitors, mostly teachers, devour the freebies, such as pens, like a swarm of unusually hungry locusts. I have enough pens to keep me going for ever so I didn't take any of them. However, I did somehow accumulate four cloth shopping bags, three other bags and a t-shirt. Not bad for a morning's work!

Building Schools for Today

Building Schools for the Future (BSF) is the UK Government's programme for rebuilding or refurbishing every secondary school with the aim of raising educational standards.

I was delighted yo have the opportunity to visit one of these new schools recently when a committee that I am on held a meeting there.

First impressions are good. The entrance area has double height glass and is an open welcoming area.

The posts are for students to record their entrances and exits, no more paper registration forms. This is good technology but does give the school rather the appearance of a tube station.

These impressions quickly change when you leave the entrance area and enter the main hall/atrium, and then it looks much more like an airport.

Some constructing is still going on, and things may improve, but while the size of the space is impressive its appearance is not.

The space lacks structure and it is not clear what the purpose of any area is. There is also a confusion of materials used including the metal and wood seen here, but also terracotta bricks, blue bricks and orange plastic.

It's all rather a mess.

On the upper floors the feeling is of a typical office with grey carpet tiles and grey doors. There is nothing here that suggests that this is a school or that it has been built for the future.

I went in to some of the classrooms and was very disappointed.

They looked just like any other classroom with normal desks arranged in straight rows facing the whiteboard at the front and with the teacher's desk in a corner.

The only noticeable difference was that the classrooms were smaller than those that I am familiar with.

The unusual features of the school can be seen in this picture from the top floor looking back across the atrium.

The two curved rooms with large windows overlooking the atrium are the Learning Resource Centre (Library!) and the IT suite.

Apparently these are the cool places to sit and be seen.

The lit area on the ground floor is toilets. The pupils suggested that these open directly on to the public areas to prevent bullying etc. but I am not convinced that this is a good idea. Being bright blue and orange does not help either.

The biggest disappointment for me was the lack of any innovation or forward thinking in the teaching areas. The classrooms were normal and normally equipped, there were no other teaching spaces (apart from the end of one corridor which had a table in it) and the solid construction gives no flexibility for the future.

It seems bizarre to me to design a school that is being built for the future around technology that is just a few years old, desktop PCs and interactive whiteboard, when it is clear that the technology will change several times over the next twenty years or so, and so will teaching styles.

This school is a missed opportunity.

Schools' funding

We have just entered a three year cycle of schools' funding in which only minor changes can be made to the formula used to allocate funding which should mean that the Kingston Schools Forum (KSF) has little to do. Sadly this is not the case.

Having just spent a year doing a detailed review of funding deprivation (children from deprived families do less well at school) we are now looking at this topic again just because one school that lost out from the changes has complained to the Local Authority.

The new review will take a few months but I have nailed my colours to the mast and fired this opening salvo.

I would appreciation a discussion at some point as to how this issue has arisen. Most years in the budget consultation schools ask for some elements of the formula to be reconsidered but I do not recall the Local Authority ever responding to a school's concerns in this way before. To be specific, similar requests by The Mount have been ignored. I would like to understand how the Local Authority reached it's decision this time as it would appear that it is behaving inconsistently and, therefore, unfairly.

I also have grave concerns about the issues we are being asked to consider in this line of enquiry. The statement is made that there is an increasing gap in the funding between schools and it is implied from this that this is a bad thing. But the gap in need between schools is far far wider than the gap in funding so a rational analysis is likely to conclude that the funding gap should be increased further.

I still fail to see why the Local Authority continues to use funding per pupil as a measure when the main costs are not incurred on a per pupil basis. These figures are also distorted by statement funding which is particularly an issue with special needs settings. And if we are to have a sensible look as schools' funding we need to consider all the income a school gets, including that from parents.

The comment about lowering standards, while welcome, completely misses several points. Every funding decision that we make that diverts money from one set of schools to another could have an impact on standards to say that this recent change could is meaningless. Secondly, despite the efforts of some of us, it has proved impossible within this authority to link funding and standards in a single debate. And thirdly, we already know that the current funding formula has an impact on standards as those schools with the most deprivation are also those with the lowest standards.

I am not sure that asking schools about their budget pressures will provide any objective information and I would question the purpose of this.

I am more than happy to continue the review of primary funding and in order to do so I suggest that the information we need about each school is funding, needs and standards.

Matthew

School meetings

As the school year draws to a close it is time to tidy up a few loose ends, which means a few more meetings than usual.

The main event was an internal workshop that we held on the effectiveness of the governing body. This was done using a self assessment framework developed by Kingston Council.

It was not always obvious that what the Council thinks makes an effective governing body is what we think it is but it was a useful, and positive, meeting that identified a few actions that we can take to improve the way that we work.

As usual, the constraint is people's time as all governors are busy so we will have to limit what we want to do so that it matches what we have the capacity to do.

And also as usual, I took a few actions myself having gone to the meeting with the intention not to.

The other meetings were less interesting but necessary. They covered topics like reviewing the school's budget, which is always difficult given the poor way that the Council's finance systems report information.

The school meetings are now over until September but there are lots of actions to complete before then.