How two fundamental principles of state education have been destroyed.

This government has taken away from us two key pillars of the state education system:

1. Universal provision
2. Public ownership of the buildings and land of schools.


1. The idea of universal provision is that the school system must provide places for all within the statutory limits. In the UK at present that is, roughly speaking between 5 and 16. This should guarantee you 11 full years of education. Universal provision used to be provided by the local authorities - who also have a statutory requirement to secure the welfare of all children within its territorial limits - and overseen by central government. Because local authorities were in charge of the schools, it followed that looking after all children and making sure that they all went to school was the way universal provision was 'delivered'.

But this government has broken this link. As we know, children can get their education in Academies and Free Schools. In some areas, secondary education is now provided entirely by Academies. And here lies the problem: that collective of Academies does NOT have the requirement to provide education universally. The Academies or chains only have the job of educating those students who walk through their doors. Indeed, they have strong exclusion polices, whereby they throw students out of their schools, particularly if it looks as if the students will  not do well in the exams by which those Academies will be assessed. Likewise there is no requirement for another Academy to take them. 

This is precisely how 'universal provision' has been broken. 

From my conversations with local authority advisers, I gather that what is happening is that the LA interprets its requirement to provide welfare for all children in its authority, as having to mop up the exclusions  by providing 'off-site units'. However, such advisers are not clear as to whether they succeed in mopping up all the children and students, or not. 

All this is a fundamental break with the principles of the 1944 and 1988 Education Acts - and indeed what people fought for in the decades preceding 1944. 

Perhaps people more knowledgable than me, know how many students are being excluded from Academies, how many of these students are ending up in off-site units ('pupil referral units', PRUs) and how many are disappearing off the role altogether, particularly at the age of 15 or 16 before taking GCSEs. If you know, please post it up on my facebook or twitter thread where I'll post this article. 

2. As I've posted in a previous post, when schools convert from being local authority governance to being Academies, something happens to the buildings and land. As far as I can make out, we lose the schools and land. What was ours, held and governed by the people we elect, is now owned and governed by whoever runs that Academy. Billions of pounds of assets have been taken from us, while we go on paying for their upkeep. Whatever bi-partisan agreement between Labour, Tory and LibDem, there was about the virtue of Academies,  I don't remember that there was an agreement about this matter of us giving up the property that was ours. Rather, our representatives (MPs) have just let this happen, and the one party who could and should have made a fuss about it, Labour,  has been utterly silent.  

So, put 1 and 2 together and we can see that in a matter of 3 years, these great changes to the education system have gone through without real debate and scrutiny. 

'Here I go again' a SPaG test for 7 year olds. O gawd.

In the words of the old Hollies record, 'Here I go again...'


I have heard that the government intend to bring in some kind of Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar test to be given to children at the end of Year 2 when most of the children are 7 years old.

I am assured that this is the government's intention and was, as far as my source knew, now in the public domain. I must have missed it.

This is really rather extraordinary. As I've repeatedly said, there is no evidence that the kind of test, and the kind of worksheets that are imposed to fit the test, and the kind of education required to do the worksheets produces 'good writing'. What I'm referring to here, is the SPaG test that is being sat now by Year 6 pupils when most of them are aged 11.

There are good reasons why there is no evidence: the tests, the worksheets and the work involved in rehearsing children for the tests require teachers to treat language as if it comes in bits and it requires children and teachers to think that the best way to write (when you are at primary school)  is to think about these small bits and to think about what they're called.

Quite the opposite: if we talk about language then it's best to talk about it in the context of real writing and real speaking. If we're talking about writing, then of the many approaches available, one good one (amongst others) is to look at writing that the children enjoy and are touched by and see if there is any way in which they can have a go at doing something like it.

What's more, when we look closely at the tests and worksheets, we can see that all sorts of strange idiocies are inflicted on teachers and children (see my previous blogs), concerning so called 'rules', 'dos and don'ts' etc for which there is no real basis when you come to look at the varieties of written English - that's to say across fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, advertising, signs, instructions, website pages or even, as I've shown, the covers of books that are made up of grammar worksheets.

So what can be the purpose of all this? Some people have suggested that I have been paranoid when I claim that the ultimate purpose of this testing is nothing to do with 'raising standards' or 'rigour'. They are nothing to do with those inflated claims, for the simple reason that the majority of children are pre-set to fail the tests. That's to say they are 'norm-referenced'. The failure rate is fixed before the exams and tests are even set. Clearly, wherever you have no test, you are not immediately in the business of sorting sheep from goats, passing and failing the nation's children. When you bring in 'high stakes', national testing, that is precisely what you do.

The claim is made that this is in order to provide 'accountability' of teachers, as if the only way to find out if schools and teachers are doing OK is to fail a majority of children. As countries not addicted to this way of thinking and working have found out, there are indeed other ways of securing good learning.

So, what is happening is that there was no evidence to bring in the Year 6 test. There is no evidence to bring in the Year 2 test. If there is no evidence for it, then we should look for other reasons for it being brought in. The most obvious reason staring us in the face is that this dishes out passes to a minority and fails to a majority. The consequence of this will be to demand further tailoring of the curriculum to the test for which there is no evidence that it has the outcome of improving writing.

One irony here: the children who find the matter of talking about language easiest are those who read widely and often. That's because they have the resource in their heads of a multiplicity of text types. They are aware that there are different ways of writing. They are aware that writing itself involves choices and that writers are people who make decisions about the ways in which they write. This is, if you like, a form of abstract thinking. The process of writing itself becomes less 'natural' or 'invisible'. Such children are more aware that writing is a matter of moving language around, changing it, and experimenting with it. This is, if you like, a very solid basis for them to think about language in the abstract form we call 'grammar'.

For children who only read the few texts that school has time to give them, language is bit more 'mystified'. That's to say it appears 'transparent',  as if it is 'natural', as if it tells the 'truth'. I see this every time I perform my poems, many of which hover on the edge of reality, fantasy, exaggeration and fib. I know from the children's questions and reactions to each other, that their responses divide between those who assume that when I say 'I', it must be the truth and those who can see that this is a kind of game and that  the word 'I' is, in the jargon, 'unstable'. Is it really 'I', the real Michael Rosen, or is it sometimes the 'I' that is an entity that the real Michael Rosen can make up and change however he wants to....So when I say that when I was at school, we weren't allowed to breathe in class, this, for some is a game, for others seems like an improbable but possible truth. 'But wouldn't you have died?' say some. 'It's not real,' say the others.

As I say, all that these SPaG tests do is confirm who are the children who read widely and often. And yet, the more SPaG rehearsing and testing that goes on, the less time there will be for children to....read widely and often.

Further news on how Academies are carving up publicly owned schools

Here is another post on the thread following my 'Dear Mr Gove' letter this month. Please read previous blog and put the two together to see what's happening to the schools and land we used to own and have spent a hundred years maintaining...

" I know, first hand, of a conversation involving an executive from one of the larger academy chains. In it, he boasted that it was easy to find the money for "our cut". All you need to do, he said, is to identify the "fringe subjects" with fewer students, "get rid of 6 or 7 teachers", and you've "freed up the money" for the parasites. He didn't use the word parasites. That's mine.

So there, in a nutshell, you have the business model for the private academy chains : reduce choice and quality of education for students, sack teachers, and cream off taxpayer cash allocated to our children into your own pocket via inflated executive salaries and forcing schools to spend money on "services" provided by your other companies.

This is theft. It's corruption on a huge scale. It is being done openly, with the assent and encouragement of this Government. And nobody cares. Instead, our passive, privately-educated, media simply prints endless garbage about "failing" state schools and "weak" teachers, and academies offering "freedom from LEA control".

Under Gove, this has never been about standards. It's never been about school autonomy. It's about theft. Oh for an independent prosecutor on the Italian or American model, who could dig into this and put these thieving liars in jail where they belong. "

WHO OWNS ACADEMIES? HAVE WE BEEN ROBBED?

On my the thread following my Dear Mr Gove column this month, someone has written the piece below. Why aren't there questions in the House about this? Why aren't there features on BBC Radio 4 Today's programme about this? Why isn't the Labour Party taking this up?

"Under Gove's Academy programme, the land, buildings and assets of the school are transferred - at the taxpayer's expense - into the ownership of whoever runs/sponsors/owns the Academy.

At the school my nephew attends, for example, immediately it became an Academy last September a substantial chunk of the school grounds was sold to Sainsburys for a reported £21 million.

The Academy where my partner teaches is now owned and managed by two limited companies - one which operates the school itself, and the other which manages and markets school facilities to external organisations such as fitness clubs, football teams, adult education providers etc. The current head is the CEO of both companies and a LibDem councillor second in command.

What happens to all this land and assets, then, if the Academy needs to be brought back under the wing of the LEA or a new sponsor is sought?

The accounts of ARK Academies state that "excess funds" are transferred to the Cayman Islands by a stockbroker which just happens to be owned by ARK owner Stanley Fink. According to ARK's accounts, 60% of their funds are now held in the Cayman Islands where they are managed by yet another member of the ARK group, AMML. Fink says these are "underspends", but surely there shouldn't be an "underspend" in an education budget, or if there is why is this money not being returned to the taxpayer?

So, my question is, if an Academy fails what happens to the assets that it now owns, and what if they have been sold off or the money transferred overseas?

There still seems to be a perception that the Academy process is designed to "improve" education whereas it seems the deeper you dig it is little more than an under-the-counter asset transfer swindle."

Grammar is not the same as the grammatical terms used to describe grammar!

I have a couple of grammar booklets in front of me - the kind that is being photocopied for use in schools as a means to teach grammar in schools.




“No Nonsense English 7-8 years” published by Nelson Thornes (2005)

and

“Achieve Level 6 English Revision” published by Rising Stars (2013)




Such booklets instantly throw up a problem to do with terminology not least of which is the word ‘grammar’ itself. The word 'grammar' is used to do two things which are not always the same:




1. All language is grammatical, if we understand that language is language because it involves meaningful units (mostly 'words') which are bunched together in ways that enable speakers/writers and listeners/readers to 'make meaning'. This sticking together - no matter how it is described - is 'grammar', though some prefer the word 'syntax'. All these sentences I have written here are words stuck together. They are not randomly placed in a line. If they were randomly arranged, you wouldn’t be able to make much meaning from them.



2. There are many different ways to describe this 'sticking together', many systems, many books - going back many centuries. These are 'grammars' and people will refer to them as if they are telling you 'the’ grammar of the language. But a terminology or classification system is not the same as the thing itself. This becomes very apparent when two classification systems don't tally, (see my previous blog where I discuss 'my', 'your', 'his' etc), where for centuries people called these ‘possessive pronouns’. Then other grammarians said they should be called ‘possessive determiners’ because not all those ‘pronouns’ really do stand for another ‘noun’ as the word ‘pronoun’ seems to suggest. Though ‘his’ , say, might be clearly representing someone mentioned a moment earlier as with a sentence like: ‘David gave me his book’, some of the other ‘pronouns’ may well represent a person (or people) but not a ‘noun’. So I can write, ‘I had my breakfast this morning’ and ‘my’ is not standing for another ‘noun’. It’s doing work to indicate that the person (not the noun of me) is doing something!




By the way, if you want to know why the old grammarians called them ‘possessive pronouns’ it’s because they were describing something that has nothing to do with how sentences are constructed and everything to do with how words seem to be made. So, if you take those words, ‘my’, ‘your’, ‘his’ etc, and if you put them into a classification system that looks at them as a ‘family’ of words, they get linked to ‘I’, ‘we’, ‘you’, ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘it’ ‘they’ and ‘mine’, ‘yours’, ‘hers’ ‘his’, ‘theirs’ and ‘its’ and even with ‘this’, ‘that’ and ‘these’. This serves some kind of purpose for eg those who want to make this into a family, those who want students to have something to recite etc, but it might not fit the bill for what actually goes on when you are using the words in real language-using situations.




That’s why and how the ‘determiner’ classification came up because, it’s claimed, ‘my’ ‘your’ etc are analogous to other ‘determiners’ like ‘a’, ‘an’, ‘the’ ‘some’...




3. Some people get very attached to this or that classification system and will demand that you (or me) accept that this or that word or expression 'IS' the term from their classification system. There are moments when this might make sense - particularly in very simple sentences. We are inclined to say, that in the sentence 'The cat sat on the mat' that 'cat' IS a noun. And all seems clear.




When I posted up my thoughts about 'possessive determiners' vs 'possessive pronouns' someone replied by saying, no, they ARE 'possessive adjectives'! Why might he have said that? In some languages, you don’t differentiate between ‘his’ and ‘her’ in terms of the owner of the thing (as in ‘his hat’ or ‘her hat’). Instead you indicate the ‘gender’ of the object. In French, when you say ‘son chapeau’, you are not making any reference to whether the owner of the hat is a male or a female. It’s the hat that is ‘masculine’. Perhaps, that’s why the person who said that they ARE ‘possessive adjectives’ was so adamant about it. So, three separate terms for the same words: my, our, your, his, her, its, their and people prepared to say what they ‘ARE’.




So, something grammatical or ‘syntactical’ is going on when we say ‘my hat’ ie we are linking ‘my’ to ‘hat’ but how we describe that ‘something’ is open to debate.




The truth of the matter, classifying language is difficult because:



Language is a form of human behaviour or, more accurately, several forms of human behaviour. It’s a set of actions and processes that we do for each other, to each other, for ourselves - and so on. Because we are very different (personally, culturally, emotionally, politically) and because we serve many very different functions during each and every day, then there is no reason to expect that these human behaviours (language-usages) should be consistent and regular. (When I say ‘different’, I mean that we do things that are ‘different’ because we serve different functions and roles in society (‘class’ etc) , but also because we do ‘different’ things as a given individual in any given day, month, year or as a lifetime progresses. Why would we be consistent or regular all across these different forms of behaviour?



Each and every classification system will turn out to have problems.
These might be because: 

1. in actual usage, real human beings do not do what the classification system says that they should do. This is sometimes called ‘wrong’ or ‘incorrect’, sometimes called ‘dialect’ or ‘informal’, sometimes it is because the usage is eg in poetry, drama, advertising, signs, instructions or even on the cover of booklets to do with grammar! So, in ‘No Nonsense English’, it explains: “All sentences begin with a capital letter and always end with a form of punctuation: a full stop, an exclamation mark or question mark.”




(This is bizarre. Plenty of sentences in poetry, advertising and titling do not follow this rule. The old grammatical rule for what is a sentence is that it must include a ‘finite’ verb - that’s a verb that changes according to time (eg present and past) and changes according to whether the ‘subject’ is ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘we’, ‘she’, ‘he’, ‘it’, ‘they’, a noun or a ‘nominal group’ or a ‘noun clause’, in their singular or plural forms.




Beginning with a capital letter and ending with a full stop is a printer’s convention that applies with any certainty to writing sentences in formal, continuous prose. However, even here, the convention of capital letter-full stop may be used for phrases or clauses that do NOT include a finite verb. Most famously, as on the first page of Charles Dickens’s novel ‘Bleak House’ where we read ‘Fog everywhere.’ Meanwhile, on the front cover of ‘Achieve Level 6’, there is a construction which contains a ‘finite’ verb and which has no full stop! ‘Achieve Level 6 English Revision Key Stage 2 Includes grammar, punctuation and spelling’ with no full stop after ‘spelling’. In other words, there is some kind of hidden ‘rule’ here - never referred to, which says something along the lines that in advertising and book covers (for example), full stops aren’t needed.




Why not? Because graphic designers and printers don’t want to use them. So much for ‘rules’ being some kind of specially knowledgable bit of wisdom that we have to learn. In truth, they are conventions or agreed forms of human behaviour. In this case, it’s the behaviour of graphic designers producing what they hope are nice covers.)



2. It might be that the classification systems used to work when the language had one form but because language is always changing (ie we change it), the systems don’t work any more. An obvious example would be to say that the ‘singular’ of ‘you’ is ‘thou’. Yes, it was. It very rarely is anymore.



3. It might be that the classification systems came from a means of classifying another language eg Latin, and don’t work very well for English. The most famous of these is the ‘split infinitive’ ‘rule’. In Latin, the word that is the name of the verb and is used in certain constructions is one word like ‘amare’ which we translate usually with two words ‘to love’. In English we can use that construction (‘to’ + [the name of the verb - sometimes, not always, called ‘the infinitive’] in a variety of ways meaning eg ‘in order to go’ as with, say, ‘I did it to annoy him’. It can also be used to suggest something in the future: ‘I’m waiting for it to happen.’ It can be used as a ‘noun phrase’: ‘To love is a matter of thinking about another person.’ And there are times when it is the form of the verb most commonly (‘regularly’, ‘correctly’) used: ‘He needs to work.’ The split infinitive ‘rule’ says that you should not put an adverb between the ‘to’ and the ‘infinitive’ (if that’s what it is - some grammarians don’t think it is!), some say that this is a bit of Latin grammar being applied to an English construction. Why shouldn’t we put words between ‘to’ and the ‘infinitive’ if we want to? After all ‘to’ is not, they say, ‘the infinitive’. It’s a preposition’. So nothing to ‘split’! 

4. It might be that the classification system works when we want it to do one kind of job eg learning a language as a ‘foreign’ language, but not work so well if the speaker is a ‘native’ speaker. A case in point here, is the reciting of verbs. One of the strange things that you find when you meet people learning English is that they often have to recite our ‘strong’ verbs. First of all, very few native English speakers ever know that we are walking around using what non-English people call ‘weak’ and ‘strong verbs’. Then, very few native English speakers find themselves in a situation where we recite ‘strong’ ones. What is being recited are 
the first person singular present of the verb eg ‘sing’, followed by the first person singular simple past (or ‘old grammar’ - the ‘imperfect’), ie ‘sang’, followed by the ‘past participle’ i.e. the form of the verb that comes after ‘have’ or ‘has’ ie ‘sung’. So French school students will recite, ‘sing, sang, sung; bring, brought, brought, buy, bought, bought...’. How much use it is for them, when faced with real-life conversations or writing, is not known. 

5. It might be that a classification system works for adults but not for children. Again, that should not be surprising because it’s clear that certain kinds of abstraction are very hard for young children to get hold of or to handle. After all, we don’t teach young children how to do calculus, we don’t teach very young children how to do quadratic equations. So, I notice that most of these grammar books fudge the question of how to describe the way in English we create words and phrases like ‘playground’ ‘football pitch’, ‘corkscrew’, or ‘great rate personal loan’. The fact is that we are quite happy to say or write complicated sequences of words, some of which are ‘nouns’ some are ‘adjectives’, some are ‘participles’ like eg ‘skipping’ as in ‘skipping rope’ or ‘skipping-rope’ which are, perhaps, doing time as nouns in a ‘compound phrase’ and so on. A ‘great rate personal loan’ involves treating ‘great’ as an adjective that refers to ‘rate’ not ‘loan’, but ‘personal’ is an adjective that refers to ‘loan’. But there is a way of thinking of ‘great rate’ as an adjectival phrase that includes a noun ‘rate’. Or perhaps it’s a ‘noun phrase’ which includes an adjective, as part of an overall compound noun phrase ‘great rate personal loan’!




Again, it’s clear that there’s some ‘grammar’ or ‘syntax’ going on, but how we describe that ‘grammar’ is complicated, difficult and generally thought to be too difficult (or boring) for young children...and indeed possibly not very interesting for many non-specialists too. What’s interesting though is that most native English speakers have very little trouble stringing together adjectives, nouns and participles to create such noun phrases. We can grab phrases like ‘up and at them’ and treat them as if they are one word as with, ‘Oh he’s not a very up-and-attem sort of a bloke’. We don’t need to know a classification system in order to produce the construction.

Grammar exercise books: how debate is dressed up as certainty

Enjoying browsing booklets sold to parents and teachers to do with grammar, spelling and punctuation. They are in essence worksheets bound together. Someone should do a history of the worksheet. The great thing about worksheets is the apparent certainty of what is being 'taught'. There are only right and wrong answers. This becomes amusing when you come across a category or term that you know is contested by people who know something about the subject.




One example: my, your, her, his. In my day (1950s and 60s) these were called 'possessive pronouns'. Many linguists now say that this is a nonsense because they are not 'pronouns' as they do not substitute for 'nouns'. So they prefer to call them 'possessive determiners' ie analogous to other words that we put in front of nouns eg a, an, the, same, both - and perhaps the numbers 'one', 'two' etc...




Meanwhile, the hacks who write these bound-up grammar books put these categories and terms in front of teachers and kids as if they are definite and certain categories - and who cares a damn that they might be oversimplifications, illogical or inaccurate! Who cares that they don't take any notice of what the latest thought and wisdom on the matter from people trying to make sense of a very difficult and complex subject.

The new experts on "written communication" according to Liz Truss

In September 2013, Minister Liz Truss said:




"1 in 4 children is leaving primary school without a firm grasp of spelling, punctuation and grammar. The new test encourages schools to focus on these basics.

British businesses are very clear - written communication has never been more important. Children need to be able to spell well and write proper sentences to get on in life."


Questions:

1. "British businesses" may or may not be expert on all sorts of things, but why should we think that they are experts on the relative importance (over time) of 'written communication"?

2. If children need to be able to spell well and write "proper sentences", where is the evidence that doing tests in spelling, punctuation and grammar at 11, is the way to do it? Where is the evidence that the kinds of decontextualised lists and exercises and tests being used to train children to do the SPaG test, help children with their "written communication"?