Here's part of a letter I received in 2008.
I hope that in the future we'll all talk and write like this. Every single one of us.
"At a time when the local government sector, more than ever before, must find new and more creative ways of delivering to meet the diverse needs of its communities, this year’s conference will explore the ways in which cultural services can impact on the priority needs of local communities,delivering shared outcomes and driving service improvements. The cross cutting benefits of placing culture at the strategic centre of local policy-making and delivery have been much vaunted, but the time has come to move from vision to delivery, and there are structures, mechanisms and partnerships emerging to help facilitate this. The new-style Local Area Agreements (LAAs), to be introduced in 2008, will be the delivery vehicles for agreed community outcomes and will provide the focus of the new local authority performance framework. Culture must be positioned strategically for this transformation of the local government landscape, and we must be able to convince others of these benefits.
We hope this year’s conference will empower service deliverers to put culture at the heart of their strategies and solutions and provide the tools needed to deliver better outcomes on behalf of their communities. And by attracting policy makers and strategic thinkers from other sectors to the conference we hope to provide the opportunity for constructive dialogue to enable us to put the vision into practice.
We'd be delighted to hear your thoughts and opinions as a key cultural educator and communicator. Culture has the power to break down barriers, cross boundaries, and capture people's imagination and unlock their creativity. We'd love to hear from you on why you feel culture is of value to local communities and why national and local government should be looking to culture for solutions beyond traditional service silos."
Thursday, 27 March 2014
Wednesday, 26 March 2014
British, British, British...but er...not.
This was a very odd programme:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03yzjy6/A_Very_British_Renaissance_The_Renaissance_Arrives/
BBC 'A Very British Renaissance'.
Its theme was that the Renaissance came to Britain, very few of us know about this, the presenter, James Baxter was going to tell us about things that we didn't know about, this Renaissance was brought to this country by foreigners but once it was here it was very, very, very British.
I haven't rewatched it but I suspect that the words 'English' and 'British' were repeated at least 10 times.
It was odd because it explained in fascinating detail how non-British people like Holbein came to Britain and introduced art that people in Britain hadn't seen before (said the presenter) and therefore changed that particular art form...or, people like Wyatt, travelled to Italy, learned about something in his particular art form (poetry), came back to Britain and started writing using this foreign form.
The argument then claimed that certain adaptations took place which then made this form (eg the sonnet, architecture, making of sundials, portraiture etc) 'British'.
This strikes me as a rubbish and misleading way of looking at culture. Consider another way: taking all the same examples eg of artists coming to Britain or British artists travelling abroad. Consider then that this is a matter of 'interculturalism', the sharing of cultures. And rather than this proving some kind of chauvinistic tosh about it all being so uniquely 'British', it proves something much more interesting: namely that much (perhaps all) of what we keep calling 'British' is in fact 'intercultural'. So Wyatt took the Petrarchan sonnet from Italy and of course adapted it according to his class, culture and sex to do what he wanted it to do. It's just banal to say that he rendered it 'British'. The result, the sonnet we read is neither 'British' or 'Italian'. It's an intercultural item and all the more exciting to see it and understand it as that.
I suspect that there's an agenda here. A huge amount of programming on BBC 2 and BBC 4 uses this term 'British' - whether it's in cooking (baking), jazz, rock music, or any of the arts. Is the BBC suddenly nervous that the concept of British has been 'undermined' by 'multiculturalism'. Has the word 'British' in its own corporation name been diluted by jonny foreigner? Is it all slipping out of control? Or is there some kind of cheapjack wooing of the licence fee going on with the Charter up for re-examimation, so instead of defying the murdochisation of the media with a belief in culture for all, there's some crude attempt to say that the BBC should at least stand up for Britishness - whatever that's supposed to be?
I don't know.
All I know is that even as the programme ground on and on boasting about the Britishness of what it was showing it was proving just how mixed culturally it all was. And, I for one, was excited and interested in seeing just how mixed these items were.
A case of telling one thing but showing another!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03yzjy6/A_Very_British_Renaissance_The_Renaissance_Arrives/
BBC 'A Very British Renaissance'.
Its theme was that the Renaissance came to Britain, very few of us know about this, the presenter, James Baxter was going to tell us about things that we didn't know about, this Renaissance was brought to this country by foreigners but once it was here it was very, very, very British.
I haven't rewatched it but I suspect that the words 'English' and 'British' were repeated at least 10 times.
It was odd because it explained in fascinating detail how non-British people like Holbein came to Britain and introduced art that people in Britain hadn't seen before (said the presenter) and therefore changed that particular art form...or, people like Wyatt, travelled to Italy, learned about something in his particular art form (poetry), came back to Britain and started writing using this foreign form.
The argument then claimed that certain adaptations took place which then made this form (eg the sonnet, architecture, making of sundials, portraiture etc) 'British'.
This strikes me as a rubbish and misleading way of looking at culture. Consider another way: taking all the same examples eg of artists coming to Britain or British artists travelling abroad. Consider then that this is a matter of 'interculturalism', the sharing of cultures. And rather than this proving some kind of chauvinistic tosh about it all being so uniquely 'British', it proves something much more interesting: namely that much (perhaps all) of what we keep calling 'British' is in fact 'intercultural'. So Wyatt took the Petrarchan sonnet from Italy and of course adapted it according to his class, culture and sex to do what he wanted it to do. It's just banal to say that he rendered it 'British'. The result, the sonnet we read is neither 'British' or 'Italian'. It's an intercultural item and all the more exciting to see it and understand it as that.
I suspect that there's an agenda here. A huge amount of programming on BBC 2 and BBC 4 uses this term 'British' - whether it's in cooking (baking), jazz, rock music, or any of the arts. Is the BBC suddenly nervous that the concept of British has been 'undermined' by 'multiculturalism'. Has the word 'British' in its own corporation name been diluted by jonny foreigner? Is it all slipping out of control? Or is there some kind of cheapjack wooing of the licence fee going on with the Charter up for re-examimation, so instead of defying the murdochisation of the media with a belief in culture for all, there's some crude attempt to say that the BBC should at least stand up for Britishness - whatever that's supposed to be?
I don't know.
All I know is that even as the programme ground on and on boasting about the Britishness of what it was showing it was proving just how mixed culturally it all was. And, I for one, was excited and interested in seeing just how mixed these items were.
A case of telling one thing but showing another!
Thursday, 20 March 2014
Gove had to listen to the science educators
Today, at a conference of primary science specialists, I got an interesting insight into the uneven way in which education policy is being arrived at. As many people reading this will know, when it comes to the English and History curricula in schools, Gove's fingerprints are all over the curriculum and - more importantly - the tests which de facto determine the curriculum. This has caused advisers to resign, send letters of protest and professional associations have sent written submissions which have been almost entirely overlooked. Decades of experience have been overlooked.
But what has happened with science.
It does seem as if Gove and gang have been forced to listen to what experienced teachers of science have told them. The draft curricula were rewritten. The science teachers and advisers seem to think that a truly awful document (the draft) has been thrown out and something much better has replaced it, though reservations were expressed about the fact that the notion of 'science' in primary schools was being weighted - perhaps too heavily - towards biology. A bit of a return to 'nature study' some felt.
So there is a clear politics going on here. Gove et al think that English, literacy and literature are essentially their property, their fiefdom. They seem to think that it's theirs to play with. They surround themselves with a tiny group of experts of one particular persuasion and have pressed ahead with curricula, tests and exams that are of their cultural and political colouring. When it comes to science, they appear to be out of their depth or ignorant and so are forced to accept what the most enlightened end of the profession is saying about science education.
Part of this is the long-standing (and woeful) neglect of science in British culture. A modern state founded on the massive stolen wealth of the British Empire found it less necessary to be at the cutting edge of science and technology than those countries (in particular, Germany) whose empires were much smaller. This country created a ruling elite whose knowledge of science, engineering and technology has nearly always been minute. The training to know how to rule was derived from studying 'the humanities' in private schools - most of which are not known for an active interest in science and technology. As we know from the Thatcher, Blair, Brown, Cameron regimes a further twist to this bias was delivered by the belief and practice that the country's wealth could be delivered fro m the financial sector. And as we now know, the wealth was always clustered round the top, trickle-down was like some Marvel Comic fiction, and the kind of wealth created within the financial sector is 'bubble wealth' - eventually it bursts.
So culturally speaking, science and technology play a role not much different from the way jazz is treated: it's cool, cerebral, clever-clever, background noise-ish - and under-funded. This is shown in the way Secretaries of State for Education talk - or not talk - about science. Gove's speeches are littered with references to novelists, poets, playwrights and historical figures but very rarely to, let's say, haemoglobin, cantilevers or pollen.
It also tells us that Gove views his job (and I don't think he's any worse than his predecessors here) is not really about 'education' as a whole. That's to say, neither the whole child/student, nor the whole spectrum of knowledge and know-how. It's more as a kind of cultural commissar, taking up positions on what are really matters of artistic taste (or what I would call 'prejudice'). When he and others in his place talk of 'standards' it's over an extremely narrow landscape predetermined by their own background, not much more than something self-serving: 'look at me, I grew up to be great by learning my verbs, so everyone should do that too.'
But what has happened with science.
It does seem as if Gove and gang have been forced to listen to what experienced teachers of science have told them. The draft curricula were rewritten. The science teachers and advisers seem to think that a truly awful document (the draft) has been thrown out and something much better has replaced it, though reservations were expressed about the fact that the notion of 'science' in primary schools was being weighted - perhaps too heavily - towards biology. A bit of a return to 'nature study' some felt.
So there is a clear politics going on here. Gove et al think that English, literacy and literature are essentially their property, their fiefdom. They seem to think that it's theirs to play with. They surround themselves with a tiny group of experts of one particular persuasion and have pressed ahead with curricula, tests and exams that are of their cultural and political colouring. When it comes to science, they appear to be out of their depth or ignorant and so are forced to accept what the most enlightened end of the profession is saying about science education.
Part of this is the long-standing (and woeful) neglect of science in British culture. A modern state founded on the massive stolen wealth of the British Empire found it less necessary to be at the cutting edge of science and technology than those countries (in particular, Germany) whose empires were much smaller. This country created a ruling elite whose knowledge of science, engineering and technology has nearly always been minute. The training to know how to rule was derived from studying 'the humanities' in private schools - most of which are not known for an active interest in science and technology. As we know from the Thatcher, Blair, Brown, Cameron regimes a further twist to this bias was delivered by the belief and practice that the country's wealth could be delivered fro m the financial sector. And as we now know, the wealth was always clustered round the top, trickle-down was like some Marvel Comic fiction, and the kind of wealth created within the financial sector is 'bubble wealth' - eventually it bursts.
So culturally speaking, science and technology play a role not much different from the way jazz is treated: it's cool, cerebral, clever-clever, background noise-ish - and under-funded. This is shown in the way Secretaries of State for Education talk - or not talk - about science. Gove's speeches are littered with references to novelists, poets, playwrights and historical figures but very rarely to, let's say, haemoglobin, cantilevers or pollen.
It also tells us that Gove views his job (and I don't think he's any worse than his predecessors here) is not really about 'education' as a whole. That's to say, neither the whole child/student, nor the whole spectrum of knowledge and know-how. It's more as a kind of cultural commissar, taking up positions on what are really matters of artistic taste (or what I would call 'prejudice'). When he and others in his place talk of 'standards' it's over an extremely narrow landscape predetermined by their own background, not much more than something self-serving: 'look at me, I grew up to be great by learning my verbs, so everyone should do that too.'
Monday, 17 March 2014
Starred review from Kirkus for 'Send for a Superhero' (Candlewick in US;Walker in UK)
SEND FOR A SUPERHERO! [STARRED REVIEW!] Author: Michael Rosen
Illustrator: Katharine McEwen
Review Issue Date: April 1, 2014 Online Publish Date: March 17, 2014 Publisher:Candlewick
Pages: 40
Price ( Hardcover ): $16.99
Publication Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN ( Hardcover ): 978-0-7636-6438-1 Category: Picture Books
An over-the-top comic-book adventure within a bedtime story aims for laughs.
Veteran children’s-book writer Rosen (Aesop’s Fables, 2013, etc.) proves he knows what kids like and what they are like. The story begins as Dad reads a comic book to “Emily and little Elmer” at bedtime: Filth and Vacuum are on their way to Earth to take over the world. Within the comic book, savvy schoolboy Brad 40 tries to warn Miss Nice and Class Perfect. In the frame, Elmer gets excited by the story, and Emily becomes impatient with his interruptions. Back in the story, Brad 40 alerts Mayor Troubleshoot of the dreaded duo’s approach, and the Mayor mobilizes the heroes. Unfortunately, neither Steel Man, Super-Flying-Through-The-Air-Very-Fast-Man nor Incredibly-Big-Strong-Green Man can fend off Filth and Vacuum. Brad 40 calls on Extremely Boring Man to come to the rescue. With his gray-on-gray outfit and seemingly endless monologue about selecting what to wear, he has a slumberous effect on everyone, including Filth and Vacuum—and Elmer and Emily (as if, Dad!). McEwan alters the style of illustration and palette to cue the back and forth between the stories. The comic adventure is laid out in frames with urgent declarations and sound effects, with a printed-on-newsprint effect, whereas the scenes with Elmer and Emily are often on full-bleed pages and pulse with saturated colors.
Although this approach has been used before, rarely has it been executed with such hilarious results.
(Picture book. 4-8)
Sunday, 16 March 2014
Big push to make education the next big market.
Because of the way education has become a matter of what any Secretary of State for Education wants, it's become very hard to keep up with what's really going on.
So, think back to NewLab who bustled into power shouting, 'Education, education, education' and turned this commitment into a parody of nineteenth century hospital, asylum, prison and school regimes, with every minute of every day laid down. Whether this was good for children or good for teachers doesn't seem to have been debated. It was, in truth, an electoral ruse, cooked up by David Blunkett. He thought that it out-Toried the Tories with its authoritarian, prescriptive and 'disciplined' way of going on, thereby leaving NewLab untouchable, unimpeachable by the Daily Mail (NewLab's criterion of success). That was the theory.
Bit by bit, we figured out that this method and this model wasn't based on any educational principles but was a direct transfer across to education of a business model of training and production. The child was to be 'produced' by the same systems that were being used to produce the labour-power ('skills') of a 'trained' labour force or indeed the same systems used to produce a mass produced car or biscuit: in a sequence of tiny, separate processes enacted on to the trainee or raw material. The fact that human beings (ie the children and school students) are not 'raw material' and that learning doesn't proceed in this tiny step by tiny step way, was irrelevant. It was, supposedly, Daily-Mail proof.
Now, it was possible to criticise this and point it out. I, along, with many others did and we soon discovered that those in authority were impervious to it. That's because they had discovered something else: if parliament has given you absolute power (which is the case with the Secretary of State for Education), you can do whatever you want. For a hundred years or so, education had been run through a system of 'checks and balances' between the ministry, civil servants, the inspectorate, local authorities, teachers' organisations, academics (researchers), and 'Reports' - the big commissions set up by government to research and advise on policy. This new totalitarian method took plenty of us by surprise, particularly as the politicians concerned were rather good at disguising it: they appeared to want to 'listen', they appeared to want to 'consult' even as they did precisely the opposite.
With Gove, we have someone who does a lot of opinionating. He takes centre stage and expresses opinions about learning, culture, history, children, schools and it's very easy to take this at face value. Plenty of us, me included, spend some time trying to read the runes, trying to figure out what his 'ideology' is and then we try to map this ideology on to his 'policy'. We argue with what he is saying.
What if we are wholly or even partially wrong to do this? What if Gove is playing a game? And the game goes like this:
"I, Gove, have a set of opinions about learning, culture and children and I will express these. At the same time, I have a deeper and more important set of convictions about the economy and the 'correct' way for things to be run and organised. Essentially, these tell me, Gove, that the best way to run all (and I mean, all) human affairs is through the market. The market is a place of freedom, it's though the market that people can best express themselves, best get what they want and need. Yes, the market does produce failure but in the end this is all to the good, because failure is produced by bad practice, bad management and bad teaching...and we all hate this, don't we?"
I, Rosen (!), am not going to argue with that for the moment, as I want to run with the consequence of what I think Gove is doing here, if I'm right about where he's at.
So, Gove, finds himself in charge of education - rather than, say, something to do with the economy. The question then for him is not really an educational one (in the way most of us think about education), it's one of how to marketise education. He knows that his problem here, though, is not simply liberal opinion, or 'the left'. He has a problem inside his own camp - 'traditionalists', if you like, who believe in a segregated, state-supervised system. Only very few people within the government believe in the total marketising of education. Put it cynically: they think that the exam-addicted, segregated system gets them the results they want....more or less. That's to say, the consequence of making education a national competition where the distribution of the results is fixed, means that education delivers up a neatly parcelled up segregated workforce, top, middle and a very large bottom ie those who 'fail', don't make the grade.
I think that Gove is working to a slightly different blueprint and Academies and Free Schools are staging posts on the way to what he's after. Academies and Free Schools represent a hybrid between the state system he's working to get rid of, and a fully privatised system he would like to see in its place. We see him hinting at this with his comments about having no objection to schools making a profit. We see this in the removal for the need for teachers in Academies and Free Schools to be qualified - and therefore not unionised. Meanwhile, big corporations are trying to figure out how best to make a raid on 'the curriculum' and Academies are the ideal vehicle. In an ideal world, as far as the corporations are concerned, a 'national' curriculum would simply be an obligatory 'core' curriculum (as is emerging in the USA). The 'education' to 'consume' this obligatory core would then be 'delivered' by no more than a handful of giant corporations, selling their curriculum software into schools. The core curriculum would only nominally be approved by anyone who knows about education but implemented with great trumpetings about standards and rigour - as happened for example with the imposition of the Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar test for 10 and 11 year olds - done with no pilots, no general debate, no research, no evidence. As the test is so reductive and only required 'right and wrong answers' (the Bew Report's own words), it is ripe for being turned into a)software programmes to 'teach' it and b) computer marking.
There are various models for the provision of these 'products', but in the jockeying for power in this new frontier for capitalism, one model is for the provider of the 'platform' (ie the server) to win monopoly control in a given area and off the back of this, to end up as the sole provider of the curriculum as delivered on to school students' tablets and PCs. This seems to be what google is doing in the US, where local councils accept google as the provider of superfast broadband, give them sole rights to provide internet access and the corporation comes in on the back of this with curriculum 'content' for school students' tablets and school interactive white boards.
Meanwhile, any of the present restrictions on corporations running the internal market of schools for their own benefit will be removed. So, we have seen in the US that corporations that sponsor schools also appear on the logos, provide their products within their schools (eg Macdonalds lunches in a Macdonalds sponsored school), and what we presently call 'education' will be geared even more towards the notion that the sole purpose and content of education is in order to provide the 'right' frame of mind to be the 'right' kind of employee. This requires a particular kind of acceptance of routine and authority. It requires a particular kind of passivity and acceptance of all rules and all structures as 'given' and 'correct'. It requires an acceptance that the 'knowledge' and 'skills' being dished up in that school at that time is the sole knowledge and sole skills that are needed or desirable (ie the exact opposite of a questioning, reflective approach to education or indeed the individual student).
We can see this kind of veneration of business and the market within education in the statements from someone like Liz Truss, indicating that what 'business' says about eg 'written communication' is self-evidently right. Or indeed that business leaders are self-evidently the sole voices that should be listened to when it comes to education.
I suggest that what is going on is a major revision of what we understand education to be for and about. Any ideas we might have had that education was somehow separate from 'business' or 'capitalism' will have to be thrown out. It will be even more than it is, part of capitalism. The only exception to this - irony of ironies - may well be the big private schools - which can go on being run as charities and can go on providing a 'liberal' education (music, theatre, art, technological and scientific experiment, debating societies, etc) which incidentally enable its ex-pupils to learn the intellectual apparatus and techniques required to be our rulers and top lawmakers and even some of our top artistic practitioners!
So, think back to NewLab who bustled into power shouting, 'Education, education, education' and turned this commitment into a parody of nineteenth century hospital, asylum, prison and school regimes, with every minute of every day laid down. Whether this was good for children or good for teachers doesn't seem to have been debated. It was, in truth, an electoral ruse, cooked up by David Blunkett. He thought that it out-Toried the Tories with its authoritarian, prescriptive and 'disciplined' way of going on, thereby leaving NewLab untouchable, unimpeachable by the Daily Mail (NewLab's criterion of success). That was the theory.
Bit by bit, we figured out that this method and this model wasn't based on any educational principles but was a direct transfer across to education of a business model of training and production. The child was to be 'produced' by the same systems that were being used to produce the labour-power ('skills') of a 'trained' labour force or indeed the same systems used to produce a mass produced car or biscuit: in a sequence of tiny, separate processes enacted on to the trainee or raw material. The fact that human beings (ie the children and school students) are not 'raw material' and that learning doesn't proceed in this tiny step by tiny step way, was irrelevant. It was, supposedly, Daily-Mail proof.
Now, it was possible to criticise this and point it out. I, along, with many others did and we soon discovered that those in authority were impervious to it. That's because they had discovered something else: if parliament has given you absolute power (which is the case with the Secretary of State for Education), you can do whatever you want. For a hundred years or so, education had been run through a system of 'checks and balances' between the ministry, civil servants, the inspectorate, local authorities, teachers' organisations, academics (researchers), and 'Reports' - the big commissions set up by government to research and advise on policy. This new totalitarian method took plenty of us by surprise, particularly as the politicians concerned were rather good at disguising it: they appeared to want to 'listen', they appeared to want to 'consult' even as they did precisely the opposite.
With Gove, we have someone who does a lot of opinionating. He takes centre stage and expresses opinions about learning, culture, history, children, schools and it's very easy to take this at face value. Plenty of us, me included, spend some time trying to read the runes, trying to figure out what his 'ideology' is and then we try to map this ideology on to his 'policy'. We argue with what he is saying.
What if we are wholly or even partially wrong to do this? What if Gove is playing a game? And the game goes like this:
"I, Gove, have a set of opinions about learning, culture and children and I will express these. At the same time, I have a deeper and more important set of convictions about the economy and the 'correct' way for things to be run and organised. Essentially, these tell me, Gove, that the best way to run all (and I mean, all) human affairs is through the market. The market is a place of freedom, it's though the market that people can best express themselves, best get what they want and need. Yes, the market does produce failure but in the end this is all to the good, because failure is produced by bad practice, bad management and bad teaching...and we all hate this, don't we?"
I, Rosen (!), am not going to argue with that for the moment, as I want to run with the consequence of what I think Gove is doing here, if I'm right about where he's at.
So, Gove, finds himself in charge of education - rather than, say, something to do with the economy. The question then for him is not really an educational one (in the way most of us think about education), it's one of how to marketise education. He knows that his problem here, though, is not simply liberal opinion, or 'the left'. He has a problem inside his own camp - 'traditionalists', if you like, who believe in a segregated, state-supervised system. Only very few people within the government believe in the total marketising of education. Put it cynically: they think that the exam-addicted, segregated system gets them the results they want....more or less. That's to say, the consequence of making education a national competition where the distribution of the results is fixed, means that education delivers up a neatly parcelled up segregated workforce, top, middle and a very large bottom ie those who 'fail', don't make the grade.
I think that Gove is working to a slightly different blueprint and Academies and Free Schools are staging posts on the way to what he's after. Academies and Free Schools represent a hybrid between the state system he's working to get rid of, and a fully privatised system he would like to see in its place. We see him hinting at this with his comments about having no objection to schools making a profit. We see this in the removal for the need for teachers in Academies and Free Schools to be qualified - and therefore not unionised. Meanwhile, big corporations are trying to figure out how best to make a raid on 'the curriculum' and Academies are the ideal vehicle. In an ideal world, as far as the corporations are concerned, a 'national' curriculum would simply be an obligatory 'core' curriculum (as is emerging in the USA). The 'education' to 'consume' this obligatory core would then be 'delivered' by no more than a handful of giant corporations, selling their curriculum software into schools. The core curriculum would only nominally be approved by anyone who knows about education but implemented with great trumpetings about standards and rigour - as happened for example with the imposition of the Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar test for 10 and 11 year olds - done with no pilots, no general debate, no research, no evidence. As the test is so reductive and only required 'right and wrong answers' (the Bew Report's own words), it is ripe for being turned into a)software programmes to 'teach' it and b) computer marking.
There are various models for the provision of these 'products', but in the jockeying for power in this new frontier for capitalism, one model is for the provider of the 'platform' (ie the server) to win monopoly control in a given area and off the back of this, to end up as the sole provider of the curriculum as delivered on to school students' tablets and PCs. This seems to be what google is doing in the US, where local councils accept google as the provider of superfast broadband, give them sole rights to provide internet access and the corporation comes in on the back of this with curriculum 'content' for school students' tablets and school interactive white boards.
Meanwhile, any of the present restrictions on corporations running the internal market of schools for their own benefit will be removed. So, we have seen in the US that corporations that sponsor schools also appear on the logos, provide their products within their schools (eg Macdonalds lunches in a Macdonalds sponsored school), and what we presently call 'education' will be geared even more towards the notion that the sole purpose and content of education is in order to provide the 'right' frame of mind to be the 'right' kind of employee. This requires a particular kind of acceptance of routine and authority. It requires a particular kind of passivity and acceptance of all rules and all structures as 'given' and 'correct'. It requires an acceptance that the 'knowledge' and 'skills' being dished up in that school at that time is the sole knowledge and sole skills that are needed or desirable (ie the exact opposite of a questioning, reflective approach to education or indeed the individual student).
We can see this kind of veneration of business and the market within education in the statements from someone like Liz Truss, indicating that what 'business' says about eg 'written communication' is self-evidently right. Or indeed that business leaders are self-evidently the sole voices that should be listened to when it comes to education.
I suggest that what is going on is a major revision of what we understand education to be for and about. Any ideas we might have had that education was somehow separate from 'business' or 'capitalism' will have to be thrown out. It will be even more than it is, part of capitalism. The only exception to this - irony of ironies - may well be the big private schools - which can go on being run as charities and can go on providing a 'liberal' education (music, theatre, art, technological and scientific experiment, debating societies, etc) which incidentally enable its ex-pupils to learn the intellectual apparatus and techniques required to be our rulers and top lawmakers and even some of our top artistic practitioners!
Saturday, 15 March 2014
Media do Tony Benn
"...and as his followers prepare for his funeral, it seems as if we have just seen the death of the last ever socialist. As all agree, it's goodbye to a very nice but also a very silly example of this extinct species. Tim Plonker, Media News, somewhere in the heartland."
[off screen aside: "The point is we've got to keep making it clear that everyone loved him but no one agreed with him..." "Yes, that's it, Tim. I think we did that, cheers."]
[off screen aside: "The point is we've got to keep making it clear that everyone loved him but no one agreed with him..." "Yes, that's it, Tim. I think we did that, cheers."]
Gove nicked our schools and handed them to his mates
Further to the question of 'hey Gove, where have the title deeds of our state schools gone?' there is a post on the Guardian comment is free site, in response to the story about Gove's criticism of Etonians in the cabinet.
I offer it with no comment. People better informed than me can judge whether it's on the button or not...
Start:
"Since Gove took over - schools all over England failing, free schools being shut down, academy companies being stripped of control of schools
Absolute CHAOS - so why did Gove deliberately create such chaos
Each time a school becomes an academy the council must hand over the title deeds for the school if it has them (avg value £5m per school)
As over 2,000 schools have been forced to become academies that is £10 billion (min) state assets Michael Gove has demanded the title deeds be handed to him
I wrote an FOI request to Michael Gove's department and asked him where are the title deeds to England's schools
After 3 months he still refused to answer - I had to involve the information commissioner who wrote and demanded they answer within 10 days
And now we find out why Michael Gove did not want to answer
the reply I got
The department of Education has absolutely no record of any of the title deeds for the school - not in paper format or electronic format
Now as councils held title deeds for state assets safely for decades - and Michael Gove used the Academies Bill to force councils to hand them to him - the Secretary of State For Education -
Where are all the title deeds for the schools Mr Gove
At the end they told me to write to a company the Tory Party Treasurer is on the board of - and ask the private company if they know what Michael Gove has done with the title deeds for state assets
Any good magician will tell you - create a distraction - to get away with the trick
And the trick here is - Michael Gove transferring £10 billion of state assets to private companies - where no payment was received for the state assets - and taxpayers forced to pay over £50,000,000 in legal fees alone to fund the trick
Thatcher sold state assets - Michael Gove gives them away - and some of the companies he gave them away to - just happen to have very prominent Tory party members on the boards - with us even paying all legal fees
Now I live in Scotland - but if it was my school that became an academy I would be writing to Michael Gove right now - and speaking to my councillors right now and demanding to know where are the title deeds for my school - because these schools are state assets (or they were until Michael Gove disposed of the title deeds with absolutely not a thing on record in the Dof E)
that's what you call magic
Now the reality is Michael Gove has set up Southern Cross For Education - where
Academy companies have the title deeds for schools - they can sell them - and then sign extortionate leases to rent them (and the money goes offshore to the Cayman Islands as "excess funds")
Now Gove changed the law to say Academy's don't have to publish their accounts publicly - unlike every other charity in the country
And Gove changed the law to say No Academy trustee can be held liable for any losses
And Gove is currently trying to change the Academies bill to say instead of the title deeds going to " the proprietor of the school" - to "someone associated with the school"
Now does that mean the Tory Party Treasurer, instead of putting your school's title deeds in Ark Schools name - he can instead put your school's title deeds in the Tory Party Treasurer's name
Now if that is not "cronyism" of the most absolutely shocking sort - I don't know what is
Serious investigations need to be asked as to how Michael Gove can have "lost" the title deeds for £10 billion of state assets without a trace - after councils kept them safe for decades!"
End
I offer it with no comment. People better informed than me can judge whether it's on the button or not...
Start:
"Since Gove took over - schools all over England failing, free schools being shut down, academy companies being stripped of control of schools
Absolute CHAOS - so why did Gove deliberately create such chaos
Each time a school becomes an academy the council must hand over the title deeds for the school if it has them (avg value £5m per school)
As over 2,000 schools have been forced to become academies that is £10 billion (min) state assets Michael Gove has demanded the title deeds be handed to him
I wrote an FOI request to Michael Gove's department and asked him where are the title deeds to England's schools
After 3 months he still refused to answer - I had to involve the information commissioner who wrote and demanded they answer within 10 days
And now we find out why Michael Gove did not want to answer
the reply I got
The department of Education has absolutely no record of any of the title deeds for the school - not in paper format or electronic format
Now as councils held title deeds for state assets safely for decades - and Michael Gove used the Academies Bill to force councils to hand them to him - the Secretary of State For Education -
Where are all the title deeds for the schools Mr Gove
At the end they told me to write to a company the Tory Party Treasurer is on the board of - and ask the private company if they know what Michael Gove has done with the title deeds for state assets
Any good magician will tell you - create a distraction - to get away with the trick
And the trick here is - Michael Gove transferring £10 billion of state assets to private companies - where no payment was received for the state assets - and taxpayers forced to pay over £50,000,000 in legal fees alone to fund the trick
Thatcher sold state assets - Michael Gove gives them away - and some of the companies he gave them away to - just happen to have very prominent Tory party members on the boards - with us even paying all legal fees
Now I live in Scotland - but if it was my school that became an academy I would be writing to Michael Gove right now - and speaking to my councillors right now and demanding to know where are the title deeds for my school - because these schools are state assets (or they were until Michael Gove disposed of the title deeds with absolutely not a thing on record in the Dof E)
that's what you call magic
Now the reality is Michael Gove has set up Southern Cross For Education - where
Academy companies have the title deeds for schools - they can sell them - and then sign extortionate leases to rent them (and the money goes offshore to the Cayman Islands as "excess funds")
Now Gove changed the law to say Academy's don't have to publish their accounts publicly - unlike every other charity in the country
And Gove changed the law to say No Academy trustee can be held liable for any losses
And Gove is currently trying to change the Academies bill to say instead of the title deeds going to " the proprietor of the school" - to "someone associated with the school"
Now does that mean the Tory Party Treasurer, instead of putting your school's title deeds in Ark Schools name - he can instead put your school's title deeds in the Tory Party Treasurer's name
Now if that is not "cronyism" of the most absolutely shocking sort - I don't know what is
Serious investigations need to be asked as to how Michael Gove can have "lost" the title deeds for £10 billion of state assets without a trace - after councils kept them safe for decades!"
End
Thursday, 6 March 2014
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.
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.
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.
Wednesday, 5 March 2014
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. "
" 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. "
Tuesday, 4 March 2014
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."
"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."
Monday, 3 March 2014
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.
“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.
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.
Sunday, 2 March 2014
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"?
"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"?
How government education policy is put into practice...
Below is a correspondence.
To follow it, you have to start at the bottom and work up - I've numbered them 7 to 1.
(That's only because I'm too lazy to cut and paste it the other way. I've just copied it from email.)
A few personal details are 'redacted' and put into square brackets.
I offer it as an example of how government education policy is put into practice.
Any comments on this - you can go to twitter or facebook, where I've posted the link
---------------------------------------------------------
7.
To: Sue Murray
I think you're missing the point.
What I'm suggesting to you is that there are many poets, teachers, advisers and institutions which have expertise in the field.
The issue is whether the government wanted to work with these people - as it was being set up.
By the way the curriculum is not 'national'. It applies only to local authority schools in England ie not in Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland ,nor in Academies, Free Schools, or the private sector.
From: Sue.Murray@mangomarketing.com
To: [me]
Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2014 17:09:19 +0000
Subject: RE: Michael Rosen
---------------------------------------------------------------
6.
Hello Michael,
As far as I understand it, children are now required to learn and perform poetry as a statutory part of the new national curriculum for English which starts in September 2014. Historically it has never been mandatory.
Poetry by Heart has been created to help teachers who many not know how to introduce it into their teaching nor how to engage children.
Sue
Sue Murray
Managing Director
Mango Marketing Ltd.
1B The Quadrant Courtyard
Quadrant Way
Weybridge
Surrey
KT13 8DR
Tel: +44 (0) 1932 829077
Fax: +44 (0) 1932 827576
Mobile: 07789 993304
www.mangomarketing.com
CIPR - 'Outstanding Agency of the Year 2011 - silver’ award
Gold Award Winner - CIPR Pride Awards 2007
Silver Award Winner - CIPR Pride Awards 2009
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
5.
From: michael rosen
Sent: Friday, February 28, 2014 4:53 PM
To: [my agent]
Cc: Sue Murray
Subject: RE: Michael Rosen
"I had no idea that poetry had to be 'introduced' into primary schools!
Is there no poetry going on in schools?
Are there no teachers, advisers and poets with expertise in this area already?
Doesn't a group of us spend hundreds of hours a year visiting schools?
Haven't I, for one, been doing this for forty years?
isn't there a poetry centre at the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education?
Does the DfE have our addresses so that we might have been brought into discussion about this?
When it comes to learning poetry by heart - this misses the point.
How do we find out how best to get children to WANT to read, enjoy and learn poetry?
Is there any work already on this subject?
Isn't there a research project underway from the University of Leicester?
Hasn't Michael Lockwood from the University of Reading done research on this?
Hasn't James Carter done work on producing books on this?
As for poetry in primary schools, what was the collection that Paul Cookson and Pie Corbett which sold hundreds of thousands of copies ? A collection that was put together precisely because the government had instituted poetry sessions in the National Literacy Strategy - a framework still largely used in schools when it comes to poetry?"
end of quote
please feel free to circulate
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
4.
From: [my agent]
To: [me]
Subject: FW: Michael Rosen
Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2014 16:42:55 +0000
Hi Michael,
See below. Would you like to offer a comment?
Best wishes,
[my agent]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
3.
From: Sue Murray [mailto:Sue.Murray@mangomarketing.com]
Sent: 28 February 2014 16:41
To: [my agent]
Subject: RE: Michael Rosen
Hello,
Yes of course – here is the URL to the information on Rising Stars’ website.
http://www.risingstars-uk.com/series/poetry-by-heart/
It is all about supporting the Government’s aim of introducing poetry into primary schools.
I may not need him but wanted to know which poets were happy to be quoted or potentially interviewed and which weren’t.
I hope that helps
Sue
Sue Murray
Managing Director
Mango Marketing Ltd.
1B The Quadrant Courtyard
Quadrant Way
Weybridge
Surrey
KT13 8DR
Tel: +44 (0) 1932 829077
Fax: +44 (0) 1932 827576
Mobile: 07789 993304
www.mangomarketing.com
CIPR - 'Outstanding Agency of the Year 2011 - silver’ award
Gold Award Winner - CIPR Pride Awards 2007
Silver Award Winner - CIPR Pride Awards 2009
------------------------------------------------------------------------
2.
From: [my agent]
To: Sue Murray
Subject: RE: Michael Rosen
Dear Sue,
Thanks for getting in touch. I’ll put it to Michael, but before I do, would you be able to let me know a bit more about the resource?
Many thanks,
[my agent]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
1.
From: Sue Murray
[to my agent]
Sent: 28 February 2014 16:32
Hello,
Mango Marketing is the PR agency for publisher Rising Stars. Rising Stars paid to use a poem written by Michael Rosen in their ‘Poetry by Heart’ resource for schools.
I am keen to promote the resource to the national and education sector media and would like to be able to offer Michael Rosen for comment.
Is this something he would be willing to do?
I look forward to hearing from you.
Sue
Sue Murray
Managing Director
Mango Marketing Ltd.
1B The Quadrant Courtyard
Quadrant Way
Weybridge
Surrey
KT13 8DR
Tel: +44 (0) 1932 829077
Fax: +44 (0) 1932 827576
Mobile: 07789 993304
www.mangomarketing.com
CIPR - 'Outstanding Agency of the Year 2011 - silver’ award
Gold Award Winner - CIPR Pride Awards 2007
Silver Award Winner - CIPR Pride Awards 2009