Greens issue radical education challenge to 3 main parties

Regular readers will realise I have been away for a few days. I have been in Liverpool for the Green Party Conference where we debated Education policy on Saturday:

The Green Party has sharply differentiated its education policy from that of the three main political parties in revisions adopted at the weekend.

Moving the revisions I said:

The neoliberal project is based on the premise of unlimited growth and unrestrained exploitation of the earth’s resources and sees society purely in terms of the market, competition, private acquisition and consumerism. This leads to the marketisation of education through the privatisation of schools, erosion of democratic accountability and the narrowing of the curriculum policed by testing and Ofsted.

Our rejection of this model enables us to put forward an education policy that is child-centred and provides everyone with the knowledge and skills to live a fulfilled life, restores local democratic accountability, teachers’ professional autonomy and children’s right to a childhood.

The revised policy that was overwhelmingly approved with only two or three votes against commits the Green Party to:

·        Abolish the current SATs and the Year 1 Literacy Screening Test and rigid age-related benchmarking

·        Recognise the great variance in children’s development in the early years and the need to offer developmentally appropriate provision including the important role of play in early learning

·        Strengthen the role of local authorities in terms of funding and the enhancement of their democratic accountability

·        Oppose free schools and academies and integrate them into the local authority school system

·        Restore the right of local authorities to build new schools where they are needed

·        Adopt an admissions policy that recognises every child and young person’s entitlement to access a fair, comprehensive and equal education system, regardless of their background

·        Embrace a diverse range of educational approaches within that system

·        Replace Ofsted with an independent National Council of Educational Excellence which would have regional officers tasked to work closely with LAs. The National Council would be closely affiliated with the National Federation for Educational Research (NFER)

·        Ensure every child in the state funded educational system is taught by a qualified teacher

·        Reject performance related pay

Existing policy on the Curriculum which replaces the National Curriculum with a series of ‘Learning Entitlements remains unaltered.

Commenting after the policy changes were adopted I said:

We know that many despair of the current policies of Michael Gove and Tristram Hunt’s pale imitation and the great and reckless damage they are doing to the education system, teachers’ morale and children’s well being. We have clearly set out an alternative vision that replaces competition with cooperation, coercion with partnership, and fragmentation with cohesion.

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."