Middle is the new right: but they're telling us the left has got to be middle!

We're going to hear a lot about the 'middle ground' over the next few weeks. Martin Kettle is going on about it in today's Guardian. The 'theory' is that a) there is a middle ground b) it's nice being in the middle ground c) the left has to get the middle ground.

I see the following as a problems to this theory.

1. Simply saying there is a middle ground doesn't mean that it exists.

2. People are not simply one thing or another. Many people have mixtures of views some of which correspond to views that are traditionally 'left', some traditionally 'right'. These apparent differences and contradictions arise out of the fact that life contradicts itself. I may have reactions that stem from my economic situation which are in contradiction to, say, the views I have of royalty or people who 'speak nicely'. 

3. At any given moment, people's views and actions move and applying the metaphor of left, middle and right may not correspond to them. So to take the example of 'immigration'. It would appear from the way the media speak that 'immigration' is now officially a 'problem'. This makes it more serious and more dangerous for all of us than say, the consequences of the bankers' gambling crisis, the austerity measures put in place following that, tax avoidance/evasion and climate change. If a politician doesn't say that immigration is a problem that 'shows' that he or she is 'not listening' or is not in the middle ground. This means that coming up with some plan that will a) prevent people coming to live here, b) prevent Brits from living outside the UK c) probably result in EU migrants having to go back to the EU is now 'middle ground'. 

4. Same goes for Trident renewal. It is apparently 'middle ground' to be in favour of Trident renewal. In fact, there is a right wing argument against Trident renewal - spend the money on tooling up the regular army. Simplistically reducing Trident renewal to 'middle ground' is just demagoguery or what I would call testosterone politics: my weapons are bigger than yours - see me defend UK better than you by building more weapons. 

5. Same goes for any form of nationalisation. So though I lived through the 50s and 60s when trains, gas, electricity, water, education, health, coal, steel were all publicly owned and that's how we lived (presumably in the middle ground of that) it is now left to wish any kind of return to those times.


So we will get many siren calls for the 'middle ground' when in fact (I would argue) a set of right wing ideas has filled the 'middle ground' - or if you prefer, the scheme left, middle and right is like a sheet of transparent plastic, marked out with 'left, middle and right' on it'. Underneath this sheet, reality has moved rightwards. Middle is the new right.

Immigrants: ah but what about the self-employed?

It's been pointed out to me that 'migrants undercut self-employed people's' rates and fees.

i've replied like this:

I agree that self-employment is a different category - I should know, I'm a self-employed person. The problem with it though is that it's largely outside legislation and that's how a lot of the self-employed like it. Everything about it is 'voluntary' our stamps, our fees, our ability to fix those fees, how we are paid...etc. We all know of self-employed people who get paid under the table (it's not just Sam Allardyce). There is no way of addressing the problem of 'undercutting' without bringing self-employment under rigorous legal control. The problem is that many self-employed people would run screaming to the press about that, saying that the only way they can survive is getting paid on a wink and a nod, and don't we 'all' benefit from cheap building work, home help, gardening etc etc? So, the fault again, is not with migrants but about the whole non-legality of the self-employed sector.

Hello Labour politicians. I've scripted an opening line of a speech on immigration for you:

Hello Labour politicians. I've scripted an opening line of a speech for you:

"I've listened to people's concerns about immigration. I think many people falsely blame migrants for living-standards cuts engineered by George Osborne."

After that opener, feel free to use anything from my previous two blogs to back up your argument. 

"Listen to people's concerns about immigration'? You mean concerns you created!

There is level of hypocrisy and two-faced conning going on over migration.

On the one hand, politicians want migrants to come to help them balance the books. They want  young, strong, clever people to come to Britain to work on building sites, run the transport system, health service, work in new industries and work on farms and in the food industry. The taxes migrants pay, pay my state pension. It definitely isn't my NIC that's paid for it. That was spent years ago.

Meanwhile, governments Labour and Tory have failed to welcome and trumpet this replenishment to the economy. They have failed to make provision for the arrivals by building, renewing and expanding the social housing stock - council homes. Why should those brave Caribbeans of the 1950s and 1960s, say, who came to work on the building sites and in transport and health (in particular) have had to put up with the lousy, rack-rented housing of, say, Paddington? What horrible trick was it, to get them to come, to build up the post-war economy and say to them: 'You can go and live in the worst housing in London. Tough on  you!'

If that wasn't bad enough, we then get the same politicians - or their heirs - saying, 'We must listen to people's concerns about immigration'!!! Where do these concerns come from? They come from the fact that you politicians didn't make provision, you didn't trumpet the contribution the migrants have made and go on making. You just thought you'd get that contribution at the cheapest possible price to the Exchequer. You politicians created the conditions in which people 'have concerns'.

And if that wasn't bad enough (!) you have oafs and liars like Boris Johnson who hope that by constantly flirting with racist or near-racist words and phrases, they can conjure up votes and popularity. 'Good old Boris. He tells it how it is.'

Nearly every racist, every anti-migrant, every scapegoater in history has done it in order to win or secure power - a power that ends up in repression for everyone. The issue of migration or the 'racially inferior' or any such, is a means to an end: power. And when power is won, the repression required to move migrants about, to select and segregate people becomes (or even starts out as) a repression of all.

One story from history: the Nazis got to power in part by saying that 'the Jews' were the cause of Germany's problems arising out of the First World War and the uprisings within Germany by Communists and Socialists. 'The Jews' were, they said, behind both. This was one of the ways that they won power - legally through the ballot box.

The first political acts they took were against everyone - not the Jews. They were the Reichstag Decree and the Enabling Acts. The effect of these was the end of political parties, the end of a free press, the beginnings of martial law, the locking up of the leaders of the Communist and Socialist Parties, the locking of trade unionists. Acts against 'the Jews' came very soon after. The first concentration camp - Dachau - was for Communists, Socialists, trade unionists and dissidents.

The racism directed at the Jews was one of the means by which the Nazis won power, one of the means by which they could re-shape democratic politics into a dictatorship and a totalitarian state, and a way in which they could re-shape the economy so that it was free of any organisation which could fight for better wages, better conditions, pensions and holidays. Racism was used as a means by which they could attack everyone bar the army, the small business people, non-Jewish professionals,  and the super-rich.

"Listen to people's concerns about immigration'? You mean concerns you created!

There is level of hypocrisy and two-faced conning going on over migration.

On the one hand, politicians want migrants to come to help them balance the books. They want  young, strong, clever people to come to Britain to work on building sites, run the transport system, health service, work in new industries and work on farms and in the food industry. The taxes migrants pay, pay my state pension. It definitely isn't my NIC that's paid for it. That was spent years ago.

Meanwhile, governments Labour and Tory have failed to welcome and trumpet this replenishment to the economy. They have failed to make provision for the arrivals by building, renewing and expanding the social housing stock - council homes. Why should those brave Caribbeans of the 1950s and 1960s, say, who came to work on the building sites and in transport and health (in particular) have had to put up with the lousy, rack-rented housing of, say, Paddington? What horrible trick was it, to get them to come, to build up the post-war economy and say to them: 'You can go and live in the worst housing in London. Tough on  you!'

If that wasn't bad enough, we then get the same politicians - or their heirs - saying, 'We must listen to people's concerns about immigration'!!! Where do these concerns come from? They come from the fact that you politicians didn't make provision, you didn't trumpet the contribution the migrants have made and go on making. You just thought you'd get that contribution at the cheapest possible price to the Exchequer. You politicians created the conditions in which people 'have concerns'.

And if that wasn't bad enough (!) you have oafs and liars like Boris Johnson who hope that by constantly flirting with racist or near-racist words and phrases, they can conjure up votes and popularity. 'Good old Boris. He tells it how it is.'

Nearly every racist, every anti-migrant, every scapegoater in history has done it in order to win or secure power - a power that ends up in repression for everyone. The issue of migration or the 'racially inferior' or any such, is a means to an end: power. And when power is won, the repression required to move migrants about, to select and segregate people becomes (or even starts out as) a repression of all.

One story from history: the Nazis got to power in part by saying that 'the Jews' were the cause of Germany's problems arising out of the First World War and the uprisings within Germany by Communists and Socialists. 'The Jews' were, they said, behind both. This was one of the ways that they won power - legally through the ballot box.

The first political acts they took were against everyone - not the Jews. They were the Reichstag Decree and the Enabling Acts. The effect of these was the end of political parties, the end of a free press, the beginnings of martial law, the locking up of the leaders of the Communist and Socialist Parties, the locking of trade unionists. Acts against 'the Jews' came very soon after. The first concentration camp - Dachau - was for Communists, Socialists, trade unionists and dissidents.

The racism directed at the Jews was one of the means by which the Nazis won power, one of the means by which they could re-shape democratic politics into a dictatorship and a totalitarian state, and a way in which they could re-shape the economy so that it was free of any organisation which could fight for better wages, better conditions, pensions and holidays. Racism was used as a means by which they could attack everyone bar the army, the small business people, non-Jewish professionals,  and the super-rich.

Jeremy Corbyn: Talking of migrants...

Jeremy Corbyn, please say loud and clear, over and over again (because I know that this is what you think and believe):

1. Migrants didn't impose the austerity wage freeze, cuts to the NHS, education budgets, closures of libraries. That was Osborne.

2. If migrants are on low wages, that's because employers are breaking the minimum wage law. Get the employers.

3. Migrants didn't bring in council house sell-offs, migrants weren't the ones who stopped building new council houses.

4. Migrants didn't gamble with trillions, lose it down the black hole of lousy loans, nor get us to bale out the gamblers.

The media political commentator reflects on a great year attacking Corbyn

The media political commentator has a great year and jots down his record for what he's said and done this year:

"1. Attack Corbyn day and night.
2. Support leadership challenge.
3. Support Owen Smith.
4. Carry on attacking Corbyn
5. Corbyn wins.
6. Say that Smith was never going to win anyway.
7. QED - as a commentator I'm really credible and wise."

Evidence on last year's SATs for whoever wants it

Below is the evidence I sent into the National Association for the Teaching of English when they called for comments on last year's SATs. I notice that the Select Committee on Education is now calling for evidence too.


I offer my testimony below to anyone who wants to use it in any way they like.


(One area I have missed out in the testimony below, is the fact that children who used a comma or semi-colon in the right place and broadly of the right shape, could receive no mark, if the comma was the wrong angle, the semi-colon was too big. I have recorded this in detail in an earlier blog. The effect of these right punctuation but supposedly wrongly positioned or angled punctuation was that borderline passes became fails. This could have the effect of a school being not 'outstanding' or not 'satisfactory' and therefore suitable for forced conversion.


Let us picture the idiocy of that: a school has to be turned into an academy (which will not necessarily make it better) because a child correctly put a comma where it should be but drew it 'wrongly' angled. This is education 2016!)


Below is the evidence I gave to NATE:

I observed at close quarters the way the tests worked as one of our children is 11 and was doing the tests.

1. The booklets that schools use to train the children to do SATs have mistakes in. Some of these arise out of the fact that the terminology used in the GPS test keeps changing and the people who produce the booklets or the schools can't keep up with the speed of change. It is pointless for the authorities to say that they have produced a glossary to clarify things when schools are squeezed for budgets and need the booklets quickly. 

The booklets contain mistakes in how questions are worded. So, for example, I noticed that one of the questions had two possible answers. Close observation of previous years' tests showed that this was the case in the tests themselves. 

2. One of the systems the tests use is multiple choice. The people designing the tests must be aware that this poses the so-called 'plausibility of the distractor' problem. This means that one multiple choice question does not necessarily have the same weight as another. One multiple choice question can have very plausible distractors ie three alternatives all of which could be true, while another mcq could have implausible alternatives. The marking of an exam can't distinguish between these. This applies to the GPS tests and makes them less valid.

3. There are non-grammatical elements in the GPS test, most notably questions about antonyms and synonyms. These have no grammatical content and are simply in the test for historical reasons. 

4. The antonym question this year was for the word 'fierce'. This emphasised the incorrect and pointless use of words ripped from context. There is no antonym for 'fierce' when it is taken from context as exemplified by such variant usages as e.g. a fierce argument, a fierce storm, a fierce speech and - more recently a fierce singer like Beyoncé. 

5. The terminology for types of sentences is one example of how GPS terminology is problematical. So, this kind of grammar classifies sentences into four types. (This in itself is highly questionable). One of these types is called by GPS a 'command'. However, behind this definition is the need for this sentence to include an imperative form of the verb. In the questions on this, the child has to choose which of four is a 'command'. However, at least one of the sentences in last year's test included the modal 'must' which in common usage is of course a 'command'. In other words, 10 and 11 year olds are asked here to reject their common sense of the word 'command' - which is, after all, knowledge about language - in order to select one specific usage as a means of spotting the imperative.

6. Several of the terms that are compulsory for GPS are highly specific terms and it is not clear why they have been included e.g. 'fronted adverbial', 'determiner'. The term 'fronted adverbial' is clearly a 'fuzzy' term as it seems to apply to phrases that are essentially 'adjectival'. It also complicates matters concerning differences between single words (ie adverbs), phrases (ie collections of words that have no verb) and clauses (ie collections of words that include some verb form or another not necessarily finite). 'Determiners' has created a new layer of classification over and above 'articles' which now includes such words as 'every' and 'each' but no one can decide if it includes numbers. In other words a category has been introduced which has no clear boundaries and it is by no means clear how it is useful.

7. Some of the punctuation that is considered right or wrong is clearly not right or wrong. The Oxford or 'serial' comma is outlawed when it is in fact common and correct usage. This was a question on this year's paper. The commas re distinguishing between defining or non-defining relative clauses have become redundant in many accepted places. 

8. The requirement that 'exclamations' must begin with 'How' or 'what' and include a finite verb is clearly an absurd use of the word 'exclamation'. 

9. The GPS test continues to use language ripped out of context, artiificially constructed sentences, which creates a curriculum spent looking at language that children do not read, write, hear or speak. This is a major problem. Language belongs to all of us, not to the people who devise such sentences and such usages. The sub-text to this seems to be concerned in prescribing such sentences as 'ideal'. However, written language is much more diverse than this, as expressed through poetry, adverts, brochures, notices, bulletins, emails, texting, song lyrics and much more besides. If the purpose of these tests is to reveal the grammar of written English, it fails on that count alone as it does not reveal the variation in grammar of the varieties of written English. There are text books on this. I referred to them in my talk at NATE two years ago. 

10. All language is in context. There is always a context for all language. The context for the language of the GPS is the fact that it was not introduced because of the intrinsic properties of grammar, or grammar-teaching. It was introduced for the sole reason that a tests in grammar supposedly produces right or wrong answers. This is stated quite clearly in the Bew Report (2011) which is the sole justification for introducing this test. This point was an add-on to the Bew Report after the April interim report and was added on without a single academic reference piece of evidence. The test was solely designed to test teachers not children as it came under a brief to report on 'accountability'. The idea is that teachers' are tested on their ability (or not) to teach GPS. This is the true context for this particular use of language. In other words, the grammar is twisted into absolute alternatives in order to fit the requirement to be right or wrong. This is precisely where Nick Gibb fell down in the famous Martha Kearney interview. To all intents and purposes he wasn't wrong, it was the test that was wrong. Gibb 'wobbled' over whether 'after' was a preposition of subordinate conjunction when this is a matter of dispute between linguists themselves, as evidenced by Geoff Pullum's comments on the matter. There is no reason other than the test's requirement to produce right/wrong answers for this to be an absolute matter of being a subordinate conjunction or preposition. 

11. There is a further problem concerning the sole use of this kind of grammar as a way of describing language. Essentially, it's a system to describe language that is derived from meaning and structure. However, at least as important a determinant is what might be called 'social function' or 'use in context'.  The reason why the terminology changes or varies is because ultimately this kind of grammar is self-referential. It can only keep referring to itself in out of context situations. This is why ultimately there is no resolution to the subordinate conjunction OR preposition argument. Again, when terms like 'command' or 'exclamation' are used, these are words that refer to social function and yet the 'grammar' requires specific grammatical structures for these terms to be valid. This is a confusion and trivialisation of language use. There is a serious and useful discussion to be had with children about 'ways of commanding' or 'ways of exclaiming' and examining the differences in tone and meaning in these. Reducing it to tick-boxing particular forms of the verb or sentence is virtually useless in terms of language-use. 

12. Talking of language-use, the most pernicious aspect of all this is the effect it is having on children's writing. In the exemplification required for e.g. 'working at the required level' many of these GPS features have to be obeyed. The consequence for all this is that we are arriving at 'writing by numbers' - teachers teaching writing according to the number of these grammatical features being included. Meaning, purpose and function have become sidelined. This is writing in order to fit an idealised picture of correctness rather than concentrating on how to interest, excite, persuade and convince. The core basis of what in fact was the classical education (!) ie 'rhetoric' has been dropped. Ironically, in the rush for 'core knowledge' (in this case, 'grammar') another aspect of traditional core knowledge (rhetoric) has been dropped. 

13. Historically speaking, it is quite clear that other ways of examining language have been trialled and these tests represent a rejection of these. So in the early 1970s, the Schools Council, representing hundreds, if not thousands of teachers, teacher-researchers and academics, working with M.A.K. Halliday, produced 'Language in Use' an extensive programme of 110 units involving school students of all ages investigating language in use. A teacher's booklet produced by Peter Doughty accompanied the units. This was and still is a model for how such work can be produced and then modified through practice. It is important to remember that GPS came from a completely different process: it was imposed through one stroke of the pen - a comment made in the Bew Report of 2011 and 'accepted' by Michael Gove. There is no evidence of teacher input and no evidence of knowledge of pedagogy involved. The knowledge of language that is embodied in the test is of one specific kind only. There is no evidence offered as to whether most children of this age really understand the terms being used, no evidence that it helps children write for a purpose. 

14. We urgently need to open up the discussion again as to what kinds of 'knowledge about language' are age-appropriate and useful in primary schools. 

Momentum for children is the only political event for children around? Oh please!

I've just posted this on the thread following Suzanne Moore's article about Momentum organising creches and events for children.




In the 1950s we sang Stephen Foster songs - many of which were actual or derived from 'N-word' minstrel shows and traditions see 'O Susanna...' which gave us the image of the idiot African American, along with 'Darkies [sic] Sunday School' and others.

One of my favourite books was called 'The Meeting Pool' and it was only when I picked up a book in Singapore on images of South East Asia in children's books, that I discovered that the representation of Chinese people in the book were entirely along the lines of all Chinese people being deceitful, sly and dirty. Coral Island is almost unreadable, Thackeray's poem about 'the Chinaman' (which I was supposed to learn off by heart) is absurdly nasty. One of my favourite poets, Edward Lear, relies a great deal on the idea that foreign words and names are of themselves necessarily absurd, odd, or just intrinsically funny. Spike Milligan - someone else I adored - assumed that all people in India or Pakistan were absurd and/or funny just because of the way they talked and that he was entitled to take the mick because he was born in India. I won't even start on the representation of disabled people, Jews and of course the whole of womankind largely restricted to domestic roles, or waiting for lovers to turn up.

When such things were raised in the early 1970s, we were inundated with a torrent of mockery and abuse about such things being 'politically correct' but truth to tell, between 1700 until quite recently, it's clear that children's books "contributed to" an 'ordering' of society into hierarchies in relation to men and women, upper class, middle class, working class and vagrants, white and black, British versus the rest, and so on. Of course, not all people accepted that ordering and plenty of us had parents who would point out such things even as we read them...or put alternatives in front of us.

Books we regard as 'classics' like 'Children of the New Forest' - in its full version is a highly political examination of the two main strands of Protestantism in and following the Civil War and how they might or should unite rather than fight each other but of course also has to deal with the legitimacy or otherwise of the monarchy. Is there any important reason why you get the blind spot from a blind, lame person and the great existential threat to Peter Pan comes from someone who's got a 'hook'? Long edited out is the Blyton version of the doll story where the black doll desperately wants to be white. Dahl was wise enough to modify the Oompah Loompahs from their original form as 'pygmies', prior to 1939, there was hardly a children's book which simply showed working class people living their lives without being beset with drunkeness, thieving or violence. A look at the boys' magazines 1880-1920 is an unrelenting tale of British might and right, over 'fuzzy-wuzzies'.

Back in the classroom in the 1950s, it was the height of the Churchill cult, my local authority primary school had a 'Churchill House' along with Fleming, Bannister and one other, as if Churchill was a non-political figure!

If you want to know how 'political' children's TV is, then remember when 'Playschool' (which I worked on in 1971) had black presenters like Floella Benjamin, they were inundated with foul racist abuse. The initiative to have Flo was itself political - one that I would agree with - and people who opposed it saw it that way too and hated us for it. Of course it was a conscious move to say, 'this is who we are', even as Enoch Powell and others were saying 'hell will break out because this is who we are'.

None of the above is an argument for censorship or banning. I'm not going there in this post. It is simply to say that the argument that Momentum for children is somehow some uniquely political initiative is a nonsense.

More news from the land of purges in the Labour Party

This is NOT my story. It's by someone who put this post up on Facebook.

"So I've been given the boot from the Labour Party for 'inappropriate comments' on social media. People employed by Labour have been through my Facebook and Twitter and cite one tweet over 18 months ago (before I was a member) where I call Tristram Hunt a "f**king tw*t" during the Andrew Marr show. The tweet received no likes or retweets so I am essentially being expelled for shouting at the TV.
Meanwhile Labour MPs are allowed to openly attack Corbyn and us supporters calling us all sorts - bullies (Angela Eagle), anti-Semites and Nazi apologists (John Mann), in need of heart transplants (Blair) and Jess Phillips wants to stab Jeremy Corbyn in the front. I could go on.


On Thursday social media was full of Labour MPs cheering on Tory MP Ann Soubry calling John McDonnell 'a nasty piece of work'.
Then there's Owen Smith ally and former Blair spin doctor, John McTernan who, after being asked to tidy his desk at work, threatened a junior member of staff saying "C*nt, you will be c*nted" in a reply-all email to the office.

Tristram Hunt, is amongst other things, the man who told Oxbridge students that 'the top 1 per cent' must take back the leadership of Labour.
He and his like have spent the last year not politically engaging but plotting, scheming and using every lever they still have a hand on in the party and the media to character assassinate Corbyn and his supporters. They have hired PR companies to bad mouth him, they have banned branch meeting of the membership who overwhelmingly support him.

Yet in a hangover haze I say, in simple accessible language, what millions think to no one on social media and I get kicked out.

I probably shouldn't have chosen the expletives I did to describe Tristram Hunt, but I don't see them purging the right for the same thing.

Here's another example of who Labour is purging

"My daughter Rachel has just been expelled from the Labour Party. She can't apply to rejoin for five years. She is a full member of the Labour Party. She has never been a member of any other party.
She retweeted two tweets from the Green Party:
*one saying the Greens supported the striking teachers in the recent NUT strike. Rachel was on strike.
*the other was the funny video with the kids acting as Tory ministers.

This purge is beyond ridiculous."

from Alan Gibbons, writer, campaigner (also purged).

We weren't 'taught' to despise those who failed, we imbibed it through hint, gesture and rumour

Every day at primary school we were told who would pass and fail, we were 'placed' in class according to our positions in the tests, 

we were told that the 'other' class would all fail, 

we developed a sub-culture that feared local famous kids we knew as 'dangerous' (on no basis whatsoever), 

we knew that many families had a reward/no reward system (usually a bike) for kids who passed/failed, 

and a hundred other signs and gestures and attitudes and rumours. 

All I have to ask myself is how those of us who passed would typify those who would fail, and a put-on cockney voice comes to mind, and a supposedly 'thick' or 'dumb' way of thinking. 

Ironically for me, at precisely that moment (1957) my dad was teaching dockers' children in Walworth Comprehensive saying how brilliant they were at performing 'Antony and Cleopatra'!!!

I was 'taught' to despise or fear those who fail - education the grammar school way.

Those of us who went to grammar school were taught (even if we didn't necessarily accept it) to fear or despise those who failed. This also had an effect of despising or fearing the part of yourself that failed or might fail. These feelings and thoughts can last for the whole of your life. They are what Raymond Williams called 'structures of feeling' and can be as much part of what we usually call politics or history as The 1832 Reform Bill. 

There were no mechanisms within the system that I went through to pay even token respect to the idea that the human race is made up of people with different kinds of abilities, or even that, every person has a range of abilities and capabilities, or that these can change over time. 

It was all very binary - 

success/fail; 

heads people/hands people; 

good/bad. 

All very handy for the system. 

Not good for people.

Roger McGough said it: no streaming in cemeteries - or grammar schools

Streemin

Im in the bottom streme
which meens Im not brigth
Don’t like reedin
Cant hardly ryt

but all these divishns
arnt reely fair
look at the cemetery
no streemin there

How people are being eliminated from voting for Corbyn. True.

This is a true post and not one of my ironic monologues! It comes from someone - NOT ME - who posted this on my Facebook account.

REPEAT: THIS IS NOT A STORY ABOUT ME OR BY ME. IT'S BEEN WRITTEN BY ADRIAN VOCE.

ADRIAN VOCE WRITES:
""Yesterday I voted in the Labour leadership contest. Two hours later I received a letter from Iain McNicol, the party’s General Secretary, saying ‘It has been brought to our attention with supporting evidence that you have publicly shown support for the Conservative party, including on 22 April 2015’.


That threw me. Anyone who knows me, or who has read much of what I’ve published, will know how unlikely it is.


I trawled by Twitter account and found that on the date in question, 22 April 2015, I had re-tweeted David Cameron’s comment about something that Alex Salmond had said, dripping with irony, about his supposed influence on the Labour Party. Salmond’s comments were clearly a joke and I challenged Cameron for trying to represent them as a serious point. I’ve screenshot the tweets below.


I’m assuming this is the alleged offence and find it quite depressing that even this level of petty, blatant gerrymandering, which must cost them a fortune in staff time, is so shockingly incompetent as to not understand the nature of what they were digging up as ‘evidence’.
But even if my tweet had been in support of the Tories, I JOINED THE PARTY FIVE MONTHS AFTER THAT DATE. Does Labour not want to attract people from other parties? I think they need to look again at the Math. Quentin Davies, who defected from the Tories to Labour as an MP, was made a life peer for his troubles. I’m more likely to have once supported Man United than I am to have ever supported the Tories (I’m Liverpool: it’s a tribal thing), and I’ve been thrown out on my ear.


Anyway, the letter goes on (and on): ‘... the Labour Party's rules state: ‘A member of the party who joins and/or supports a political organisation other than Labour … shall automatically be ineligible to be or remain a party member… You are therefore ineligible to remain a member of the Labour Party. If you have received a ballot and cast a vote, it will not be counted.


‘Under … party rules you may apply for re-admission but this must be made directly to the National Executive Committee … Such applications shall not normally be considered by the NEC until a minimum of five years has elapsed...’


My Granddad was a shop steward at Camell Laird the shipbuilders. My Mum was named after Ramsey MacDonald’s daughter. My Dad was a social worker and a lifelong socialist. I’ve voted Labour all my life. Shit, they even gave me a gong for some work that I did with them when they were last in government.


I can’t see them being in government again for a long time, but that wouldn’t stop me supporting them. This will though. What just happened seems to me to be not only undemocratic but also anti-democratic. A political party that manipulates and subverts its own electoral process like this cannot claim to stand for fairness. Labour has seriously lost the plot. Whoever wins this contest, it is tearing itself apart. I doubt that I will ever vote for them again."

"Here at the DfE we're working on tests for children to get into the grammar school..."

'Here at the DfE we're working on the test that children will do to get into the 'New' grammar schools. We have been told that a) a single one-off test is not a good way of getting disadvantaged children into high attainment schools because better off parents find a way of 'gaming' the test. b) creating selective schools will depress standards in nearby non-selective schools.

So, the ideas we're working on are:
1) secret tests, where no one - apart from us - knows that the child is being tested. We just creep up on them, and administer a test. We're told there might be ethical problems with that.
2) Secret grammar schools. No one knows that we have created a selective school. Pupils are just directed towards them, and so the non-selective schools don't know that their intake has been 'top-sliced'.
3) We open digital files on all children and teachers at primary schools have to enter the children's weekly test data on files that we hold at the DfE. Part of the information here is parental income. We draw up a definition of disadvantage in relation to this, and monitor the data coming in. If the data is sufficiently promising over 5 or so years of primary school and there is the right 'disadvantage profile' we approach the child's parents and suggest there is a place for them at the 'New' local grammar. The formal approach should also include warnings about how that child's chances of achieving anything will be severely limited by going to a non-selective school. This last might be tricky in that the staff at that non-selective school might object.


Anyway, that's what we're working on at the moment. Thank you.'

There is going to be no meritocracy anywhere near you.

Greening and May are going to give us a 'meritocracy'. Oh please.

For there to be a meritocracy under capitalism, you would have to abolish any mechanism by which wealth can be passed on from generation to generation (that ain't going to happen), any mechanism by which anyone can avoid tax of any kind (that ain't going to happen), abolish all forms of private education (that ain't going to happen). All three of these mechanisms are in place precisely in order to avoid us having a meritocracy. Tinkering around with grammar schools (or not) isn't going to affect that.

'Creatures of the Night', Arthur Butterworth, my poems RNCMusic.

These links are to this concert:

Arthur Butterworth Creatures of the Night

Daniel Parkinson conductor
Piccadilly Symphony Orchestra

The RNCM Concert Hall will be transformed into a world of adventure as we visit the Carnival of the Animals and recreate the passing of the hours in the English countryside. In this performance of Arthur Butterworth’s Creatures in the Night, the orchestra will recreate the sounds of the animals musically and we’ll be using lighting and other clever tricks, immersing the audience in the action! A guest presenter will read a brand new narrative by the award-winning children’s author Michael Rosen, we’ve commissioned illustrations to project during this event and there will also be audience participation…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBklBKGKJlM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cu5R4hX2hQQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8SWqqoV8_Q

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHNsIE2YbS4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJsJ1bdzLoY

Here is the evidence for how Read Write Inc training has switched to 'mixed methods'

Teacher's note to me about the Ruth Miskin, Read Write Inc training.

" I had training end of July and then get writing top up last week. Only last lot said children can take real reading book home to read alongside rwi book. The suggested reading books are to be read to the children in class but def told they can take them home and read."

My commentary:

This represents a shift. Taking a 'real reading book' home (as opposed to a phonically regular ReadWriteInc book) will inevitably involve children in reading through using other methods than phonic decoding. This is at heart what is meant by 'mixed methods'.

I have seen no announcement by Ruth Miskin or anyone at Read Write Inc about why or how they have moved to this position. But it is a change. And an important one. 

Does Read,Write,Inc instruction include giving 'real books' to Year 1s to read for themselves?

If you use Read, Write, Inc., and have been on a recent training course with them, can you write and tell me what you were told about including 'real books' with Yr 1 or Reception children in your initial reading programme? (My email address is in the top right hand corner of my website.)

(A bit of history here: in the big argument about phonics, there were supposedly three positions: 1. Phonics, first, fast and ONLY. 2. Mixed methods. 3. Real books only.

re: 3 - 'real books only'; I've only ever met one person who really advocated a no-phonics-at-all approach but it became convenient in the big sell for phonics in recent years to suggest that this was what everyone was doing in the 1980s. They weren't.

re: 1 'first, fast and ONLY". The people who've advocated a daily session of Systematic synthetic phonics have at various times in my earshot or correspondence explained to me that the 'only' part of 'first, fast and only' was important in order to avoid 'confusing' children with 'real books' as, they said, this leads children to use non-phonic methods to read ie 'guessing' and 'using context' and 'whole word - look-and-say' methods, (even though all phonics schemes have 'red words' or 'tricky words' which you learn as 'look and say'!).

In fact, teachers who have been seen actively mixing the phonics books with 'real books' have on occasions been ticked off.

re 2 - 'mixed methods' - you can go online and read how those of us who believe this are hoaxers, liars, self-deceivers, back-sliders, at heart 'anti-phonics' etc etc. )

OK - that's the context.

Now, I always understood that the phonics schemes approved by government, recommended by government (including Ruth Miskin, govt adviser recommending that schools buy her schemes, and the govt subsidising schools to buy those schemes) didn't advocate that children themselves look at 'real books' in the initial stages of learning to read. You could read TO them, but they couldn't look at the books themselves. Nick Gibb, told me that to do this was 'confusing' for children and diluted the phonics method.

If you go to the Ruth Miskin training site, (here it is: http://www.ruthmiskin.com/en/resources/stories-matched-to-read-write-inc-literacy-and-language-units/) , you will see that the Ruth Miskin method now includes her advocating a specific list of 'real books' which fit with her Read Write Inc materials. It specifically says that the children can take these books home. They have to be the recommended ones, and they have to have been read to the children. The point is though that a) they are not phonically regular and b) the children can read them themselves.

This is 'mixed methods'. And it involves using 'real books' and the moment you do that, the reading process 'escapes' from phonics and phonics only. Children use 'mixed methods' no matter what we as adults say they should do.



Does anyone know how long this arrangement has been in place? [UPDATE: I NOW KNOW THAT IT WAS INTRODUCED A MONTH AGO] If you can say exactly what you were told about this, please do. I have been told by plenty of teachers that they were instructed by Ruth Miskin trainers in the past to ONLY use the Read Write Inc instruction books with Yr 1 starter children, and not 'real books'.

Why is this crucial? Because actually, this is what all the fuss has been about. (let's leave the phonics screening check, to one side, for the moment). Whether teachers can or should use 'mixed methods'.

Anyway - on another matter - beware all stats saying that children's reading is improving or not improving unless you know exactly how that 'reading' has been measured.

Is it 1) saying out loud a list of phonically regular words? 2) saying out loud a list of phonically regular and not phonically regular words? 3) saying out loud a passage from a 'real book'? 4) a test that also involves comprehension?

If ever you are confronted by someone telling you 'the tests show...' or 'the research shows...' please first run this little check over what it is they are actually saying.

"Where schools in an area are organised on selective lines the overall impact is to depress the educational performance of these communities as a whole"

Jesson looked at selective and non-selective local authorities and found that where schools in an area are organised on selective lines (as in 15 of the 152 local authorities) the overall impact is to depress the educational performance of these communities as a whole. He wrote ‘A government committed to raising standards for all must not exclude from its agenda those currently educated in ‘secondary modern’ schools – these pupils are currently seriously disadvantaged in GCSE performance by the way that their schooling system operates. Maintaining that disadvantage should not be an option’ (vii).

vii Jesson,D (2006) Performance of pupils and schools in selective and non-selective local authorities Centre for Performance Evaluation, University of York in in Hewlett, M, Pring,R and Tulloch M (2006) Comprehensive Education:evolution, achievement and new directions, University of Northampton Press:


Source: Comprehensivefuture.org.uk

'100,000s of children knowing they've been told that they're not good enough to go to the grammar school'

"Welcome to this Tory Party press conference where we continue to lay out our programme to create grammar schools. I think you will all welcome the fact that by increasing the number of grammar schools, we are dramatically increasing the number of children who we can categorise as: 'children who've not got into grammar schools'.

This is very exciting. At the moment, hundreds of thousands of children languish in schools where they haven't had selection imposed on them. They just go, in a very uninteresting way, to a comprehensive.


In areas where there'll be grammar schools, there'll be hundreds of thousands of children living with the knowledge that they've been told that they're not good enough to get into the grammar school. What an achievement for modern Conservatism.

Thank you and good night."

Increase number of grammars = increase in number of poor children penalised by selection

Here is a maths problem:

1. Poor children at schools in areas where there is selection do worse than poor children at schools where there is not selection.

2. Poor children at selective schools do very slightly better (one eighth of a GCSE grade) than poor children at non-selective schools.

3. Through mechanisms not yet made clear, the government say that they will increase numbers of poor children at selective schools. This may help that tiny number by one eighth of a GCSE grade.

4. According to the law of ratios, however, increasing selection will penalise more poor children in the non-selective (ie Sec Mod) schools than now.

5. QED increase number of grammars, increase number of poor children being penalised by selection.

6. My maths was never good. Am I wrong?

When was the 'only' bit dropped from 'first, fast and only' phonics?

I gather that the latest way in which the Ruth Miskin phonics package in the very first weeks of Year 1 is now delivered (according to the training and what you buy) goes like this:
1. Phonics instruction for half hour a day using Miskin materials.
2. Using Miskin texts as written by the Miskin team. These are phonically regular.
3. Using a 'real book' - not by Miskin, but specifically chosen by Miskin in the Miskin package that the school buys into. This is not phonically regular.
4. Note: the sequence can go 1, 3, 2, ie using the non-phonically regular text before the regular one.


Isn't this a departure from 'first, fast and only'? I heard several people from the phonics camp explain quite clearly that the beginning of Year 1 was too early for children to be looking at and being taught using non-phonically regular texts - including Nick Gibb who told me personally that it was 'confusing' for children at this point. When did the prescription of non-phonically regular texts come in to the Miskin package? Has it been included in e.g. Jolly Phonics or any other of the prescribed and govt. ratified schemes?

Isn't this an example of the 'mixed method' systems, so derided and scorned by some in the phonics camp?

I am writing to Justine Greening for permission to set up My Front Room Grammar School.

Dear Justine Greening

At present our two children attend a comprehensive school. This is a bad idea, because, as you've pointed out, the only way to get a good education is through selection by ability.

I have an idea. I will turn our front room into a grammar school. To do this, I will need to select so I am in the process of writing an exam to decide which of our two children can come to My Front Room Grammar School. I've seen from your speeches that I need a poor child to join us. I am in the process of finding one.

My two and the poor one will do the test. I will make sure that two of them - not the poor one - don't pass. These two will be sent back to the comprehensive school, which is now not comprehensive because it doesn't include anyone at My Front Room Grammar School.

I hope you think that this is a good idea and makes My Front Room Grammar School eligible for government funding.

Best wishes
Michael Rosen

Selection means rejection, inequality, and a lousy curriculum at KS2.

What is emerging from what we might laughingly call Tory 'plans' for schools, is that there will not be a universal 11-plus system in England,  but a much more improvised ad hoc one, whereby anyone or any group who wants to set up a selective school (and fulfils some as yet unspecified criteria) will be able to.

In other words, the government will set up what is in effect a selection competition: schools will compete with each other to get the 'best' pupils - however that is decided, presumably by new tests.

This is to be modified by some kind of commitment that these schools will find (?), get (?), procure (?) poor pupils. One form for this is for a selective school to sponsor a primary school in a 'poor area'. And these new selective schools are to have some kind of income-meter which measures parents' income in order to supposedly guarantee that this doing-well-by-poor-kids system is working.

It doesn't take much imagination to see some problems here:

1. Selection is not inclusion. If you select,  you exclude. Selection is rejection. Some won't get in. Even if all schools were allowed to select, the competition for selection excludes. What's more, instead of schools co-operating - a proven method of school improvement, as demonstrated by Tim Brighouse - schools will compete to exclude: a sure fire way of creating sump schools. It's inbuilt into such a system. Guaranteed.

2. There is a bureaucratic nightmare, open to many abuses if there is in effect a new kind of means test for identifying poor people. People can hide income, can hide changing circumstances, particularly in the new world of self-employment. The system will be 'gamed'. And a new layer of bureaucracy will have to be created to monitor all this. More jobs paid for by the DfE that are not helping children in classrooms. More inspection!

3.  A raft of new tests will appear further enriching the bloated exam and testing system. These test-designers will produce vast volumes of BS about how their tests are valid, reliable, fair etc etc ways of discerning 'ability', 'aptitude', 'intelligence',  but about ten years later, it will be shown conclusively that all they showed was the relative ability for parents to pay for tutors. There is no such thing as a test that can't be coached for.

4. Meanwhile, primary schools will be under even more pressure to make the curriculum match the tests, while the test is designed to select - not to find out what children know. This will involve even more of a distortion of the purpose of education than exists with KS SATs. These tests will be restricted to right/wrong answers, forcing the curriculum to focus even more on right/wrong teaching and learning. What gets squeezed out here are the arts as a whole, plus real enquiry, invention, and interpretation. Anyone concerned about the content of education, should be concerned about these new proposals.

5.  The old 11-plus system made a half-hearted effort to be 'fair' in terms of provision of grammar schools across the country. It didn't succeed. One area might provide as many as 40% places, others as little as 20%. It was uneven. This was recognised as being a major flaw in the system as the theory had been that the 11-plus was an 'objective' assessment of ability and/or intelligence and the system responded to it. In fact, what happened was that the system provided places for just as many as that local authority decided. The number wasn't fixed by those who could perform tasks in a test, but by some bureaucrats in an office deciding how much money they would spend. It was cynical and outrageous. However, if that was bad, the unevenness that will occur with these Tory plans will be huge. There will be some areas with very few selective schools, some with many. There will be very different reasons for this and some researchers and journalists will earn good money and sound 'radical' showing this, as if somehow the system as a whole could be made fairer by providing a few more grammar school places.

6. Unevenness and inequality are written through this whole proposal. There will be many kinds of unevenness and inequality because that's how the inventors of this scheme like it. They pretend they loathe the role of the state in education whilst the state is creating patterns of inequality at the stroke of the pen. Far from removing or lessening inequalities, this whole proposal will give birth to hundreds of local wangling and wrangling over places, income, money per pupil, pupil-staff ratios and so on. The system will have many losers. It turns education into a battleground of competing consumers.  Ultimately, this is because the people behind this plan believe in something very basic: that the best outcomes arise from competition. They are not interested in the best education for all. This is a point of philosophy. They believe that the more you can get human beings to compete with each other, the net result will be better - whether that's in the making of cars, or the 'production' of educated 16 and 18 year olds. This philosophy is what is at the heart of this proposal. The fact that competition always results in failure is, in their book, the point. They want and need failure-people to work for those that succeed. This in their book is the natural order. We haven't progressed from 'the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate'. This business of going out hunting for poor kids to stuff into grammar schools is mix of cosmetics ('hey look what we're doing for the poor, aren't we kind, nice and good people? ') and doing what the system does anyway - which is succeed in providing a route to university and/or well paid jobs  to some kids from poor backgrounds. But their addiction to competition is really an addiction to failure. They need a system that produces failures to feed the low-paid economy they have been working so hard to create since the crash of 2008. This proposal will help them achieve that goal.

New secret measurement of primary schools will follow

If more grammar schools come in, stand by for a new kind of secret measurement of primary schools coming in: how good a school is at getting kids into 'the grammar'. In fact, it will be a measure of how many middle class parents who want their kids to go, but from the outside it will look as if one school is 'better' at getting kids in and another not so good. 

This will then have a knock-on effect on what is taught and how it is taught in order to keep up with this kind of 'demand' in certain areas. This will be tied to the kind of questions that are asked on the exams that select - heavily loaded towards right/wrong answers, 'grammar' and 'verbal reasoning' (IQ). 

I suspect that much of this will revive the flagging IQ business anyway, with people accepting the idea that 'ability' is the same as doing IQ questions.

Your comma was too far below a line that wasn't there. Exam surrealism at the DfE

The marking of Key stage 2 SATs GPS is revealing something pretty nasty at the heart of high stakes testing.

Here are some examples:

The children were asked to 're-arrange' some words to turn a statement into a question:

'They are listening to music.'

for which

'Are they listening to music?' is the correct answer.

(note: this is a test of what all children immersed in English can do when speaking. It's only when they get into exam situations that things like this become a problem for them. The word 'rearrange' is likely to give some children more problems than the task itself! )

In giving this correct answer, some children made what are deemed 'errors' or 'mistakes'. So one child inadvertently put a capital 't' for 'they'. This then makes that child's answer 'wrong'. No mark. Zero. The child showed that he/she had the knowledge to answer the question but zero marks nevertheless.
[UPDATE: IT'S JUST BEEN POINTED OUT TO ME THAT THIS CHILD WAS DOING THE 'RIGHT' THING: HE/SHE REARRANGED THE WORDS AS GIVEN, THAT INCLUDES USING 'THEY' WITH A CAPITAL 'T'. IF THESE WERE CUT-UPS AND INVOLVED MOVING CUT-OUT WORDS AROUND ON THE TABLE, THE SAME 'ERROR' WOULD BE MADE. THIS UPDATE SHOWS THE ZERO MARK TO BE EVEN CRAZIER.]

So, yes, of course, the children and teachers have all been told that everything has to be 'right' for the answer to be 'right' but more holistically, we can see that this is tosh. The child has done the task correctly, but made a different kind of 'error'. (A computer would have corrected this, by the way, even as it is correcting my writing of this blog!)

Ultimately, this doesn't penalise the child, it penalises the school. If there is a cumulative effect of such mark-downs, the school can and will be turned into an academy. If it's an academy, it will be turned into another academy.

If people reading this think this is an exceptional case, there are others:

No mark for a 'p' not descending below the line; 

a semi-colon not being 'on the line' (but there was no line); 

a full stop missing; 

a comma too far below the line (there was no line).

Welcome to education England, 2016.

(By that, I mean that we all know that this marking will have a knock-on effect on how teachers teach - not their fault, and how much time children will have to spend on making sure that their commas don't go too far below the line of a line that isn't there. This way a test that is supposedly on 'grammar', 'spelling' and 'punctuation' actually becomes a test in motor control. )

Thoughts on 'comprehension' in the primary school

I've written many times before how 'decoding' is not the same as 'reading'. In short, I've suggested that 'reading' has to be do with 'meaning' - why else would we read?

In theory, the curriculum in primary schools covers 'reading for meaning' or 'reading with meaning' or  'reading with understanding' and called it 'comprehension'. Even so, this still leaves me thinking that there's something wanting. Do we read in order to 'comprehend'? I don't think so. We probably read in the hope of comprehending, or with comprehension. But we really read because we want to 'get' something from a passage, scene, book, poem etc., don't we?

How might we call this something? The stuff we 'get' or want to 'get'?
Entertainment, enlightenment, some kind of 'truth'?
And how do we get to it?

Key to getting there is through making analogies: we compare what we are reading (or think we are reading) with moments in our lives (experience) and with other 'texts' (intertextuality). These acts of comparison are crucial in our means of understanding and getting 'value' from a text.

But what is the 'value'?

Some say, it's learning empathy. Others might want to call it 'morality' - what's fair, what's not fair, what's right, what's wrong.

But there's also something to do with abstract thought. We come out of the specifics of the text and the analogies we have made,  with generalities about, say, fear, anger, love, jealousy and how we might behave in such circumstances and/or how the protagonist(s) behaved.

We may also make generalities about the text being 'good' or 'bad' or 'saying...x' - an overall 'evaluation', then.

Also in here, we should also think more psychologically about 'compensations' and ways in which texts can appear to satisfy or support our needs, desires and anxieties.

When you look at transcripts of children responding to books - as I have, as I've been marking my students' essays - you can see very different ways in which children behave when given books and poems.

You can of course ask them questions which will 'prove' they have comprehended. These are the right/wrong answers much loved of examiners. However, these won't show that children can have 'informed opinions' or 'interpretations'.
Where do these come from?
1) Because, I the teacher, told them to have them?
2) Or because, through careful work using trigger questions, they arrived at them?
3) Or does it also come from reading for pleasure linked to open-ended discussion?
4) Is that always with the teacher guiding or sometimes with the pupils in pairs?
5) Or a combination of all of these approaches?

Somewhere in this process, too, are some micro-moments. When you read the transcripts, you can see children swapping views as they try to 'catch' or 'capture' what a particular moment in the story or poem is about or for. These often sound and feel like discoveries. You can hear the children being excited as they feel that they have revealed something about what's 'in' the story.  In those moments, it's very interesting what happens when they make analogies with their own lives or other texts they know. It is really a kind of hidden generalising. In order to do it, you have to invent a category (you may not name it) like, say, falling down, and then you talk about 'falling down' moments for a bit. That's what's been called a 'schema'. Then you may well end up talking about the dangers of 'falling down' and 'consequences' and whether people in the book and/or real life behaved well or badly when there was someone 'falling down'.

Though this doesn't look like abstract thought, it involves a form of abstraction: selecting out of the particular and generalising that experience. It may or may not end up with an abstract noun. There's a movement that starts from implicit abstraction to explicit abstraction.

Squeaky-bum time in Tory-land

It's all getting squeaky-bum in Tory land:
1. Over decades, Tories play race card trying to hoover up xenophobic votes rather than explain that immigration is paying pensions and providing services e.g. Thatcher and 'swamped'.
2. Tories never explain that EU migration is non-negotiable and applies equally to Brits abroad who benefit from it.
3. Tories think they can swing a 'remain' vote in order to isolate Brexiteers because it's been their permanent split.
4. Brexiteers succeed in getting a lot of votes purely on basis of saying that Brexit means fewer immigrants, therefore your standard of life will go up. The fact that this is a lie, is hardly countered by anyone.
5. A non-Brexit PM takes over, who immediately realises that she can't and won't and doesn't want to deliver a change in immigration policy. Presumably, she thinks she can ride out the storm when the anti-immigration people notice - perhaps by yet more xenophobic crap and 'slapping down' on something or other.
6. for the record: standards of living are lowered by governments in league with big business fixing wage rates, cutting services, introducing zero hour contracts, and phoney self-employed status, not building social housing, privatising services, whilst allowing trillions of unpaid tax to be taken out of the country. They are not lowered by migrants. If employers don't pay minimum wages that's because employers do that and are not locked up for doing it.