I don’t want governments of any political colour determining what textbooks are used. It will be too tempting for them to choose only books with their own ideological slant.

“Do I think there’s a sinister element about the whole thing? No. Rhetoric about 1984 is far from my mind”

Maybe not but if the goverment wish to have such control over learning in this way then we stop children thinking for themselves and we need everybody thinking and learning of their own accord surely otherwise we all think like the Secretary of State. 1984 is close enough to your mind to mention it.

“more important is focussing on the hypocrisy of the government and the needs of students”

Boy do I agree with this!!
Education is about the needs of students not teachers, not parents and not government.

There may well be even worse faults in the fine print of Ed Balls proposals. This Governemnt has a record in recent years of trying to hide its worst propsoals in inconspicuoous clayses and paragraphs. That apart, the three worst faults seem to be:

1 There is no way known to humans or to angels by which the central Education Department (however renamed) can judge what is best in the individual classroom. Local Education authorities at least know they are too remote to judge. (I say this with knowledge. I am an old central Education Deaprtment bureaucrat.)

2. The best teachers make the most difference to the education their pupils receive. No government anywhere in the world has found a policy that begins to match the effect of the best teachers. Ed Balls proposes to give himself powers to stop the best teachers teaching as thery judge best.

3. Teachers who know what they are doing and want to educate will ignore any use Balls (or whoever) tries to make of these powers. The only way to enforce a use of these powers will be to discipline or sack good teachers for teaching well.

@ 3

What about the bad teachers? Should they stay in a job because they are teachers or be removed? Re-trained? Told to go get a job elsewhere, just not teaching?

@ OP

I am just as guilty of this as any teacher – I’d rather eat my own liver than teach a course on the Suffragettes. Not because I am against women’s rights or women’s history, but simply because I find the whole course boring.

I think that is where you have just about hit the nail on the head!

I had an English teacher who had to sit in on a maths lesson and she read the newspaper – when asked why she was doing that she said openly that she hated maths and teaching maths – it turned out to be one of the best maths lessons we had had. Not much maths done, of course, but a better understanding as to why teachers pick certain subjects.

All this targets bollox is just total shite!

The education system needs teachers who are passionate about their subjects – that will rub off onto the pupils.

My view is that Ed Balls, again, has it wrong – no surprise there then – but get rid of bad teachers, get rid of the LEAs and fund schools directly with them having a core curriculum. If you can get the parents and kids engaged in their learning then all the better, because to me one of the areas that is failing is showing that education is so, so important.

@ 1, Richard…I agree, it would be better if governments didn’t determine what was in a textbook – but who should, do you think? I mean, if we’re talking about a systematized effort at thought control, then sure, the government are the most likely candidate. However, we need to recognise that other systems have their pitfalls – e.g. inherent ideological bias. This includes the system that works according to “the market”.

@ 2, Elizabeth…you think the passage of this law is going to stop children thinking? I don’t. Moreover, I think there are much bigger obstacles to overcome when it comes to motivating children not merely to learn but to actively demand the right to learn and the right to have a say in what they learn. Poverty is the major one; you don’t find grammar school kids saying in lessons “I don’t care” or “I don’t like reading”.

I’m against the notion of the State taking this power – but you dramatize it.

@ 3, Yes, your third point came to my mind as well – a worrying proposition and one which is likely to have a chivvying effect on other teachers. Most teachers I’ve spoken to on the subject regard government policy on teaching and on teacher training as jargon-filled fantasy and hoop-jumping and ignore it when possible. The one thing they can’t ignore is if they get sacked – but I suspect the unions may have something to say.

@ 4, One of the most preposterous things I can think of as regards teaching is the condensation of subjects – e.g. history and geography into Humanities. I’m a qualified historian and the idea of being forced to take a future job as a Humanities teacher makes me furious – not least because I’ve yet to meet a geography teacher qualified to teach history, and frankly I wouldn’t be qualified to teach geography. I think “bad teachers” can sometimes be to blame, but more often, as you express in your example, that phenomenon is related to bad management.

And it is, as you say, caused by “targets”, “performance management” and the distance between even a single school’s management and their teachers.

I find the whole notion of increased centralisation in education upsetting. Let teachers teach. Surely it’s better if even crap ones – and they do exist, and they are plentiful – are allowed to teach to their limited strengths.

I’d much rather have one single, independent examination board. I find the fact that there are three boards ludicrous. How does this help maintain standards? All it does is create a market, whereby teachers will go with the exam board that is best for them – i.e. the easiest one (and there are differences – big ones).

http://www.lazystudents.org

David you said

“you think the passage of this law is going to stop children thinking? I don’t. I’m against the notion of the State taking this power – but you dramatize it.

Fair point, many people who have recieved coercive education do indeed manage to retain or regain free thought and a love of learning thought many don’t and I think that compelling learning turns people off learning when in fact it is a natural joyous thing with no need for compulsion.

Moreover, I think there are much bigger obstacles to overcome when it comes to motivating children not merely to learn but to actively demand the right to learn and the right to have a say in what they learn. Poverty is the major one; you don’t find grammar school kids saying in lessons “I don’t care” or “I don’t like reading”.

I know a surprising amount of intelligent, “well educated” people who only read the odd book for fun or for professional development. I agree with what you say about poverty but I think that people who have experienced conventional educational priviledge don’t always retain a joy of learning either. So often the point of learning is simply to achieve in the working world.

I have to say I have heard a fair number of prep school kids say “I don’t like reading”

@4

All this targets bollox is just total shite!
The education system needs teachers who are passionate about their subjects – that will rub off onto the pupils.

agreed!!

“If you can get the parents and kids engaged in their learning then all the better”

All the better??? you can’t teach at all unless the kids are engaged!! Education is infact the responsibility of the parents and the kids, teachers help they don’t actually do the education bit it’s the children who do the learning.

David Semple: “normally for powers such as this there are obvious reasons – and right now, there are none that I can see.”

Possibly in order to challenge claims of dumbing down? If the Secretary of State has the power, if not ability, to choose which books are used in classrooms, it provides that person with leverage and ammunition. To be used in defence (against the Daily Mail) or in attack (against the Daily Mail).

“@ 1, Richard…I agree, it would be better if governments didn’t determine what was in a textbook – but who should, do you think?”

Doesn’t the current system provide enough checks and balances? I acknowledge that the system does not examine text books in use per se, but schools examiners inspect teaching generally. Examining bodies review (in theory) the assessment by teachers of course work. And exam papers are judged independently. Examination bodies assess one another, and are assessed again by universities with regard to “post 18 year qualification equivalence” and admission value.

If the distributed and cascading system of quality assessment is failing, then sort it out within the current system.

I agree with Dave, there should be very limited political control over the curriculum. Leave it to teachers, for goodness sake.

Related, but slightly off topic: can anyone explain to me the benefits of having three examination boards? Surely it just creates a market where there shouldn’t be one? If one board is notably easier for pupils to pass than the other (and this is quite often the case), how long will it be before schools switch to the easy one? Exam boards don’t want to lose customers so there’s an incentive to lower standards – which is not cool.

Whilst I’m with the consensus here in condemning this kind of control, I don’t think it’s the first time. I noticed on one of the recent programs about Thatcher’s rise to power a snippet about Keith Joseph, and I’m sure they said that while he was preparing for the introduction of GCSEs he insisted on personally approving each subject’s curriculum.

I do disagree with you on the exam boards issue personally. I’m old (!) enough to have done GCE O Levels and A Levels and we had I think 8, yes, eight, exam boards to choose from and I believe that actually kept standards up.

Contrary to what you suggest, precisely because schools and universities held different boards in different esteem, my school at least, and we cannot have been alone, usually chose the toughest, and most “prestigious”, one in particular subjects and their competitors dare not slip too much, either in curriculum content or in quality of marking.

I even did one O Level – English Language – where the Oxford Local Board validated schools’ own papers. No, I have to say that as in much else in life, the competition was a good thing and if there has been grade inflation over the past two decades or so, it is probably partly because that competition has been whittled down.

What I want to know is this: for what reason does Ed Balls really want this power?

I suppose he imagines he can preserve standards. I don’t know about the English system but in Scotland my colleagues who teach English complain about the standard of texts that are used both for course work and also for this internally assessed folio thingy the kids do for Standard Grade here. Shakespeare is rarely done, not a lot of poetry and shitty books are picked by the students and approved by heads of department. Ironically, what’s driving it is centralisation: obsession with targets has led to schools picking the easier options across the board so they can keep their results up rather than risking fails due to students tackling more difficult texts. Typical of this government to assume the answer to a problem caused by centralisation is more centralisation.

I’d rather eat my own liver than teach a course on the Suffragettes

You not like? We do that – it’s good. Maybe you need new methods. What I do to bring the lessons alive is strap them to chairs and then force-feed them stuff from the school canteen.

*chuckles* An interesting tactic. I assume that’s a joke, right?