Will you support a Reclaim Our Schools campaign?

Downhills Primary school protests against forced academy

I wrote this article for Green Left's EcoSocialist broadsheet that was distributed on October 20th.  I would be interested to hear from anybody who would support a local Reclaim Our Schools campaign:

Michael Gove may have been making a shambles of education policies over the last couple of months but his position has, if anything, strengthened within the cabinet. The rebellious right-wing of the Tory Party hail him as one of the government’s few successes and his policies are becoming more extreme in response.

Looking beyond the GCSE marking fiasco and the failure of several free schools to open on time, it is clear that a contradictory combination of privatisation and greater central government control of schools is succeeding in dividing and fragmenting the education system.

Labour has failed to oppose these moves, tainted as it is by the fact that it started the process. Stephen Twigg has been ambivalent about free schools and academies and Lord Adonis’s recent intervention suggesting that private schools should sponsor academies ‘taking complete responsibility for the governance and leadership’ will undermine democratic accountability further.

We need a massive popular campaign, such as that for the NHS, to build opposition to Gove’s policies, perhaps under the heading of Reclaim Our Schools (‘Keep Our Schools Public’ may confuse people!)  The possibility of such a campaign was clear in the case of Downshill Primary School in Haringey when pupils, parents, teachers and governors took to the streets to demonstrate against Gove’s decision to force the school to become an academy.

In campaigning to Reclaim Our Schools we could:

• Resist academy conversions
• Oppose free schools
• Call for a good, local, democratically accountable, school for every child
• Campaign against the Coalition Government’s ruling that any new school must be either a free school or an academy
• Campaign for all free schools and academies to be reintegrated back into the local authority community of schools
• Press for democratic accountability through elected governing bodies and local authorities
• Demand fair admissions arrangements and fair funding
• Demand that all schools should accept children with special needs and be resourced as necessary
• Oppose Gove’s examination reforms that look likely to return us to a two-tier system and mean that many students would leave school without any qualification
• Call for the end of the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check which the NUT Survey showed 9 out of 10 teachers thought was ‘A lode ov owld rubbish’
• Press for quality teacher assessment of pupils rather than SATs
• Encourage ‘bottom up’ curriculum and learning innovations lead by classroom teachers rather than  ‘top down’ imposed curriculum and learning strategies
• Reform inspection so that it becomes a positive professional partnership rather than a politicised pressure on schools to conform to the government’s agenda
• Argue for the needs and interests of children to be put back at the centre of the education system rather than the needs of industry or the UK’s position in international comparison tables
• Make ‘Reclaim Childhood’ a central demand for children who are presently the most tested, pressurised and (in the case of the annual ‘dumbing down of exams’ campaign), rubbished generation.

Learning for a full life rather than just work, no taxation without representation, and the right to enjoy childhood – who could argue with that?

There's a great article by Michael Rosen on the upcoming Year 6 tests HERE

Don't let Reading Recovery get squashed pleads teacher

 I hope Michael Rosen doesn't mind me pinching this from his blog LINK but it is very relevant to children, parents and teachers in Brent.  I was trained to be a Reading Recovery teacher and taught it for many years, Tt is carried out very successfully in both Brent schools where I am chair of governors and in other primary schools across the borough.

It is an intensive, structured, 1:1 daily lesson by experts and so is 'expensive' - but it works.  With the change of college heading up the scheme, the possible demise of Brent School Improvement Services that provides training and continuing support, the government's exclusive emphasis on a particular phonics teaching method, and funding cuts, Reading Recovery is under threat.

This heartfelt post by a Reading Recovery teacher was carried on Michael's blog.

I am a Reading Recovery teacher. RR is based on more than 40 years of research and analysed data. It is proven to be cost effective. It works. The government knows it works. But it is not run as a business. RR's only purpose is to help children learn to read...

When we read we bring together 3 sources of information:
Visual, which means the words and letters and punctuation and layout etc
Structure, which means what is it possible to say in this language?
Meaning, does it make sense?

Children and adults who can read are using these automatically. When children learn to read, right from the start they are bringing together the 3 sources of information, as you well know.

When children who can read make mistakes on the phonic screener it is probably because their brains are overriding the nonsense; they are trying to make meaning because that is what reading is.
Lots of the readers at my school did not do well at the phonics screener. The head teacher was shocked - it is a high achieving / outstanding school in all other aspects. She said "But I can read and I know what the non-words say?" I said, "Yes but you are not 6 years old and you were expecting it. You are maybe more used to the world trying to catch you out?"

And from now on there will be even more phonic drilling, so that next year the schools will get 'better results', and the govt will say, 'Told you so, phonics is the answer'. We (but not me!) are going to be teaching children to deliberately switch off the use of structure and meaning and just decode using visual information like a robot can do.

At the moment the children get 30 minutes phonics a day and 10 minutes, if they are lucky, a WEEK reading with their teacher. They hardly ever get read to, just for the fun of it. Teachers don't have time for this. Given many children's impoverished oral language, these days, research shows that little children should be getting 3 stories a day. This never happens. Never.

Although I would make very different use of the time, 30 minutes phonics a day does have some relevance to real reading of real words, but is now going to morph into even more time spent on learning to sound out nonsense words.

Interestingly, the contract for supervising ECaR which also looks after Reading Recovery, has been removed from the Institute of Education and given to a university (Edge Hill) that is also now going to be responsible for pushing phonics schemes at us. The phonics people have been working very hard to squash RR and it looks as if they have done it. RR is trademarked and copyrighted etc, so is not available for someone to step in and make £millions out of it...

£millions have already been made out of phonics but it would seem the train is not yet full of gravy.

My soul is destroyed.

Do subscribe to Michael Rosen's blog it is a vital and entertaining ongoing  critique of the Coalition's damaging education policies.

Children's authors slam phonics tests

A item from the Guardian to give teachers heart over the holidays. Three cheers for our children's authors!

More than 90 of Britain's best-known children's authors and illustrators have called on the government to abandon its plans to introduce early-year reading tests, warning that they pose a threat to reading for pleasure in primary schools.

The former children's laureate Michael Rosen is leading the writers' charge against a phonics-intensive approach to teaching young children how to read.

A letter to the Guardian signed by 91 names including Meg Rosoff, Philip Ardagh and Alan Gibbons says millions is being spent on "systematic synthetic phonics programmes" even though there is "no evidence that such programmes help children understand what they are reading".

Rosen told the Guardian: "It does not produce reading for understanding, it produces people who can read phonically."

The letter calls on the government to abandon plans for reading tests, specifically the phonics screening check at the end of year one and the spelling, punctuation and grammar (Spag) test at the end of year six.
The former requires five- and six-year-olds to sound out the letters of a short word or nonsense word and blend them to make the word (for example: emp, sheb, shelf, splok, blow, pine).

Rosen claimed schools were coaching children through the process and at least half were still failing. Many were failing because they were trying to correct the nonsense words, he said, for example saying "strom" as "storm".

"It is incredibly baffling to most parents because it sounds as if they are being told that their child has failed at reading, which is not the case," he said.

The proposed Spag test is to be sat by children at the end of primary school as a way of addressing what the government sees as a lack of attention given to spelling and grammar in recent years.

Rosen said it would mean teachers spending months on a "drill, skill and kill" programme, "trying to get them to pass this thing. It's bad enough with Sats. Anyone who has a year six child will know that for the past six months up until the Sats test, our children have been drilled and drilled, doing paper after paper, when they could have been writing, reading and playing with language in all kinds of ways.

"They have no evidence that any of this stuff they've imposed will actually improve children's writing. If they produced it, perhaps we'd have to shut up, but they don't."

The letter highlights a recent Ofsted report, Moving English Forward, which recommended that the government should call on schools to develop policies on reading for enjoyment. "To date there has been no such move by government," it says.

Instead the government has concentrated on phonics programmes. "As a result, more school time will be devoted to reading as an academic, test-driven exercise; less time will be available for reading and writing enjoyment.

"We deplore this state of affairs and consider that the quality of children's school lives is about to be altered for the worse."

"We're going on a Gove hunt, what a beautiful day, we're not scared!"

Michael Rosen, broadcaster and writer, publishes an entertaining blog HERE as well as monthly letters in the Guardian.


This one LINK is particular relevant as some Brent schools consider converting to academies:

Dear Mr Gove,

 Letter from a curious parent

I know you're proud of your policy of creating academies, but something happened on 23 April that pressed my panic button. You told the Commons education select committee that eight academy schools have been served with "pre-warning notices" because they are severely underperforming. I immediately thought, how come? Aren't academies the solve-all, the system that will rid us of "underperforming" schools? For the record, let's say it out loud: we now know that academies can and do fail. Perhaps, though, I should suspend my judgment, because the great advantage of the academy system is that the moment something goes wrong, the parents' complaints will be heard and the secretary of state will be on to it?

Let's look closer. First, we're not allowed to know what or where these academies are. With local authority schools, we have accountability and transparency with online Ofsted reports, sometimes followed by local newspaper headlines and TV fly-on-the-wall documentaries, but with academies, we have the schools that dare not speak their name. And we have the academy accounts that dare not be made public.

Even so, should I have confidence that the matter is being handled competently? It doesn't seem so. The education select committee chairman, Graham Stuart, tried to work out whose job it was to deal with what parents think about these underperforming academies. Was it the Young People's Learning Agency – now closed – where parents with children in local authority schools used to go with their complaints, or perhaps the Education Funding Agency?

No one in the world, least of all you, seemed to know. When some parents (who are presumably under some kind of gagging order to not reveal where this is going on) called the YPLA, they were told this wasn't in its remit. The Special Education Consortium seems to have approached the EFA to find out if this was in its remit. Nope. The EFA said that dealing with complaints about academies wasn't its problem either. I'm sure you would agree that it's a shame these parents can't talk to the press about their frustrations in this matter.

The problem was: it was no one's problem. Not the YPLA's, not the EFA's, not yours. It's not good enough, is it? In fact, it's a scandal. Can I make an observation? Over the last 20 years, your predecessors and you have been very keen to point the finger at what they say are "underperforming" schools. You have even taken action to force through a conversion job, turning a "failing" local authority school into a seemingly un-fail-able academy (not so un-fail-able, huh?). Yet when we look at your own process of governance, we find it's underperforming. It's not enabling parents' complaints to be heard. That makes it not fit for purpose. What's more, you didn't know about it. You're underperforming as well.

That to one side, should we be confident these academies will improve? All we hear from you is that if things don't get better, "action" will be taken. What is this action? I read this week that you're very keen to up the involvement of the Church of England in education. Perhaps you have a plan up your sleeve where clerics from areas where congregations have shrunk could be redeployed taking over failing academies?

While we're on religion, can I ask you about the Bibles? I have a clear memory of you saying that you were going to put Bibles in every school. Did you buy the Bibles? If not, why not? Alternatively, if you did buy the Bibles, where are they? In a self-storage depot? I can see them now: thousands of brand-new Bibles jammed into steel boxes in Safestore just off the A1 near Biggleswade. Maybe they're waiting for your team of CofE recruits. And how much is it all costing? I do hope it's not another case of underperforming.

Is this 'freedom from control' Michael Gove?

Michael Gove in his arguments for academies and free schools always emphasises that they will be 'free of local authority control' and further can make their own decisions about the curriculum. Of course the real situation in local authority schools is that strategic direction is decided for each school by a representative governing body with elected parent and staff representatives alongside members or nominees of  the democratically elected local authority.  He fails to mention that academies and free schools, directly funded by the government, are in the final analysis under government control - in effect 'nationalised' schools.

His advocacy of 'freedom' is limited however. He is keen to put foward his own ideas about what should be in the curriculum, including British narrative history, and exposed his nascent authoritarianism last week by putting pressure on schools in Islington and Haringey to cancel pupil trips to the weekend's Tottenham Palestinian Literacy Festival where children's writer and broadcaster Michael Rosen was due to speak.Children were going to take part in workshops on human rights and living under occupation and encouraged to enter a creative writing competition.

Schools decided not to take part after being contacted by the Department for Education officials who asked them if they were meeting their responsibilities under the 1996 Education Act (Section 407) to provide both sides of opposing political views. The festival was organised by a branch of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

Jeremy Corbyn MP for Islington North, who supports the festival, said: "It was a great opportunity for children to understand the wealth and joy of Palestinian literature and a little of the history of the region. It's not in any way biased, but a festival which encourages children to broaden their horizons. The children were looking forward to it."

There are some interesting comments on the Evening Standard's website about the decision LINK including this one with which I strongly agree::

I find it astounding that the Education Secretary has stepped in to prevent schools having access to a literary festival. It's a repressive and frightening decision, and also a breach of the Human Rights Act.

To quote from article ten.

"Everyone has the right of freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This Article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises."

By not allowing schools to take part, Michael Gove is denying the right of freedom of speech, which is a matter of great concern, given he's a government official.

This comment gives the literary background:

Poetry has always been the Arab world's dominant literary form. When Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish died in 2008 he was honoured with a state funeral and three days of national mourning. (I recommend the long poem 'The Siege' for starters) Mourid Barghouti is another Palestinian poet of international stature - try 'Midnight' (Arc Press). Lately, Palestinians writing in English have distinguished themselves in the field of memoir: you could start with Ghada Karmi's beautifully written 'In Search of Fatima'; Raja Shehadah's personal guide to the West Bank 'Palestinian Walks' (Winner of the George Orwell Award), and Karl Sabbagh's Palestine: A Personal History' Ghada and Karl were key speakers at the Festival, as was Selma Dabbagh, whose first novel 'Out of It' is due to be published by Bloomsbury this winter. I do hope you explore these writers, whose stories fill in the huge gaps left by our media when it comes to the Palestinian narrative. As a member of PSC - an anti-racist organization - I myself will be working to help challenge Gove's outrageous and potentially slanderous decision.

The curriculum of our schools has always been a contested area and the clash was probably at its sharpest when Margaret Thatcher and Norman Tebbit  abolished the progressive Inner London Education  Authority. Tebbit accused ILEA schools of  driving children to truancy by teaching  'anti-sexist, anti-racist, gay, lesbian, CND rubbish' in schools. Margaret Thatcher said, 'You know about political indoctrination in some of the inner cities. Well, I could show you examination papers.... I sometimes look at the Continent, where they have not only a core curriclum but a core syllabus. That would be an enormous leaps for us to take, because my generation still recoils from having a system that any government could manipulate...What we are considering is whether we should take that leap.'

Both Conservative and Labour governments did take that approach and Gove is moving towards imposing his own control under the guise of opposing that of  local authorities.

Interestingly on March 31st  2010, before the General Election, Liberal Democrat Friends of  Palestine warned about a Conservative win:

If the Conservatives win the election, the influence of the Greater Israel lobby –those extremists who believe Israel has a right to add to its territory by swallowing up land it conquered in 1967, rather than by negotiating fair boundaries with thePalestinians on an arms-length basis - will increase. Extreme Conservative views are exemplified by those of Michael Gove MP. Find out about them at http://www.ldfp.eu/gove.htm

Needless to say that link no longer works - the page has been removed.