Roche Limit

Relax - Latest Health Scare is Just a Scare

2011-11-20T10:51:00.001Z

The Sunday Telegraph reported this morning that:

"Stroke victims who are admitted to hospital are far more likely to die if they are treated outside central London, an investigation has found. The NHS statistics show survival rates for stroke victims sent to central London hospitals are 54 per cent higher than for those in some parts of the country."

Fortunately, the 'Health Correspondent' Laura Donnelly has got her statistical knickers in a twist. She goes on to write:

"The death rate within 30 days of admission for stroke is 14.6 per cent in the capital's central sites, according to analysis of the nine years' data ending 2009 - compared with rates of more than 22 per cent in industrial cities and manufacturing towns"

So, in the poor industrial towns the survival rate is 100% - 22% = 78%. If London is 54% better (154% as good) that makes the survival rate in London 0.78 times 1.54 = 123%. Wow! In London, for every 100 stroke victims taken to hospital, 123 of them survive!

It is the death rate of the industrial towns that is 22% divided by 14.6% = 154%, that is 54% worse. But the vast majority of stroke victims survive, so the survival rate difference is not the same number at all.

Actually, of course the survival rate in London is 100% - 14.6% = 85.4%. The difference in rates is then 85.4% divided by 78% = 109.4%. So London survival is better by a whopping 9.4%.

Not 54%, then.

Never mind, Laura Donnelly, there will be a real scandal along soon if you wish hard enough. Perhaps an introductory high-school statistics text could be put on your Christmas list this year?

The BMA's Attack on Smokers with Made-Up 'Evidence'

2011-11-17T21:30:00.001Z

The British Medical Association, the Physicians' trade union, has called for a ban on smoking in private cars, to add to the 2007 restriction on smoking in enclosed 'public' places.Their reason is that such a ban is a small price to pay to reduce the exposure of minors carried as passengers. Apparently, the level of toxins detectable in a smoker's car is 23 times that found in pre-2007 smoky pubs. The Evening Standard published a piece supporting the proposed ban, deciding that "Demanding that people stop driving in a self-generated cloud of poisonous gas doesn't seem a big ask."

But it does seem a 'big ask'.

For objections to this illiberal proposal, the first has to be the good word of the BMA itself, which campaigned heavily before the 2007 ban. It's representatives sent out to TV and radio stations laughed pompously at the objectors warnings of the slippery slope such a ban would put the UK on: it was only to protect innocent pub-goers, they said, who had no choice in what they breathed in when exerxising their alcohol imbibing rights. Don't they deserve to be protected?

That alcohol was by far the most hazardous part of a Friday night seemed to have been considered unimportant when smoking was coming to be seen as antisocial and presented an easy target of opportunity.

The law banning smoking in public places also overlooked that most of the affected locations were, in fact, privately owned, and no person was obliged to visit a smoking pub or restaurant.

For the Children

It turns out that the ridiculed 'slippery slope' argiment was spot on, and campaigners are now openly pushing towards an outdoor ban and wispering about the move into homes. Of course, it will be phrased as if a ban was 'for the children', but you can be sure it will be a blanket ban that is demanded, as is the case for the current BMA proposal, for ease of enforcement.

Or just because smoker-persocutors are the new witch-finders and are bolstered by the political momentum to go for the criminalisation of tobacco, openly and without embarrassment.

Although I am, a lifelong non-smoker who has benefitted from smoke-free pubs and offices, I have fundamental objections to the BMA's demand:

First is the liberty one. It is no business of doctors, in my mind, to stop me doing risky things if the risk to others is small. I am not prevented from climbing mountains, paragliding, skating on icy lakes, driving a car at high speeds (with passengers), and drinking alcohol. The BMA has not yet suggested banning these activities, but since they have a habit of sliding down the slippery slope, I am willing to draw the line at banning smoking.

Fake Figures

The second objection is the '23 times more toxic than the smoky pub' figure that is being quoted withoud attribution. The Today program speaker explained that this was the case even when no smoking was actually happening since the 'toxins' soaked the inside of the car. Is this serious? Just what was measured? And did it really equate to 23 times more hazardous than a pub atmosphere? It seems remarkably suspicious, and the BMA today withdrew its claim (See the Factcheck site for a debunking of this media myth, with sources.)

The argument for a wholesale ban on in-car smoking is a practical one: that it will be easier to enforce 'for the children' if everyone was banned. This will include people without children, and people who will never carry children in their cars. In a spirit of tolerance, only dangerous activities should be prohibited - anything else is just illiberal. Why ban people from smoking in their own car just to make enforcement easier? (Foreign laws against smoking in cars only forbid smoking with a child in the car.) It will clearly result in the bulk of prosecutions being of drivers of cars with no children, since they are the ones who will most disagree with such a law.

Slippery Slope

The final criticism is made with the slippery-slope argument. Usually a poor excuse for logic, the current debate has used the existing ban on smoking in work vehicles and public spaces as justification. One can easily imagine a future when the argument move on to be that the only place a child can breathe smoke is in the home, so that it is a dangerous loophole that should be closed.

Intolerance breeds intolerance by emboldening the nannys that build on victory after victory, incrementally moving us from the traditional character of the country, where a free person can partake of anything not specifically banned, to the continental tradition where you can only do what is specifically prescribed, with everything else forbidden.

The BMA took a fake fact about smoking with children in the car and made it into an attack on all smokers. Anyone who values the freedom to choose what risks to take for themselves will be wise to protest this move - if this moves onto the statute book, the nanny campaigners will not stop there in their programme to save us from ourselves.

Sharp Drop in Uni Applications

2011-10-25T21:00:00.008+01:00

UCAS, the body which handles applications for university places, has released 2011 figures. The headline, reported throughout the press, is that applications this year are down by over 12% on last year. The increase in fees, payable after graduation by a form of additional income tax, is being blamed for the drop.

Shadow Education Minister Angela Burns hay weighed in, saying that the preliminary data should act as a "harsh wake-up call".

Toni Pearce, of the National Union of Students, blames the government:
"The confusion caused by the government's botched reforms is causing young people to at the very least hesitate before applying to university."
The Guardian misrepresents the data to suggest class differences:

Monday's figures are just too stark to ignore. When the number of applicants from outside the UK is included, the fall is 9% — greater than it has been for at least six years. The figures show this decline in applicants comes from the pool of students most likely to be badly-off.

Everyone, it seems, thinks that university numbers should be on a one-way escalator to steadily greater proportions of our youngsters studying for degrees and that any drop is, by definition, a bad thing.

Everyone, it seems then, is wrong.

The figures, of course, do not indicate a collapse in student confidence. Although 12% seems a large drop, it should be understood in the context of dramatic rises in recent years, not least last year when many students put off a gap year to apply early. This artificially inflated 2010 figures by taking from what would have been this year's applicants. Even with the fall, we are still only just below the 2009 rate, with a smaller pool of applicantants. (There has been a 6% drop in 17-year-olds over the last four years of increasing applications and two more years of falls — expect the same stories next year!)

The Real Issue

What the headline writers have failed to address is whether a growing number of graduates is really a good idea. The advantages are supposed to be that the UK needs more graduates for all the new graduate jobs that are being produced in the economy, and that there will be fewer jobs for lower skilled people.
Does the economy need more highly skilled workers? Yes, naturally. Highly skilled people have always been in demand throughout history. But there is a sleight of hand going on here. The problem is that the term graduate is not now synonymous with skilled, and graduate jobs do not often require high levels of skills. Twenty years ago, if you were an employer looking for a reasonably bright, trainable youngster, you advertised for someone with A-levels or good O-levels. Now that anyone who can old a pen through sixth-form college is encouraged to start a degree, not having a degree is a serious hindrance.

Not because of the skills you did not pick up, but because employers will wonder why you weren't up to a degree when all and sundry can graduate now.

Reaching Their Limits

When we have students maxing out at GCSE grade C going on to be awarded A-levels and then degrees, you migh just wonder what it is they are learning at university. If the top three GCSE grades were beyond them, just what level was the intellectual challenge of the degree? Before you start to panic about the quality of our engineers, doctors and scientists, you can't get on one of the technical degrees without very good grades: C's won't cut the mustard. But having a degree, by itself, is no guarantee of superior skill levels, with many course instructors unable to lift the academic standard to a suitable level without having most of their students failing and dropping out.
For many people, GCSE or A-level is their academic limit. Unfortunately, many of these teenagers are being mislead into thinking that by investing in an expensive three-year course their careers will be appropriately enhanced.

The evidence is against them though, as some school-leavers are starting to realise.

The country does need more skilled workers, but not more low-skilled workers with degree certificates and unrealistic expectations. The solution is not more accessible (read 'easier') degrees, but investment in Primary and Secondary education, with higher technical graduate salaries to persuade those bright enough to tackle the harder subjects,
or else encourage talented people from overseas to boost our ailing manufacturing economy.

This brouhaha will blow over soon, regardless. The hugely increased fees charged by middling universities will not last long, as students will expect value for money. Fees will fall to match the desirability or career benefit of the course and student numbers will drop, returning hard working students to the productive economy where they are needed.

Blogging from Linux without a Client

2011-09-25T21:44:00.006+01:00

There is no usable blogging client that works across Linux distributions, leaving me to use the Vim editor and the GoogleCL command line interface.

I have been using the Blogger.com web interface to write posts for several years now and I have found it usable, but limiting. The interface works OK, and it has three different views showing the html code, the html as it might be seen on the web and a hybrid composing view. I switched between the html and web views and found it worked reasonably well as long as the internet connection remained.

But since most of free time I have available to write posts involved a note-book computer withou internet I started to look for an offline blogging client. All it had to do was let me edit the text and upload it to the Blogger web-site along with a title. I am not big on images or embedded videos, so I didn't think I was asking much.

Gnome-Blogger

First up was Gnome Blog. Presented as a bare bones client, it was just that. It functioned well though for simple blog entries, with the ability to format text and include images. But it was unable to access Blogger with the Atom 2.0 interface, so it dropped to Atom 1.0. This was a deal breaker, as Atom 1.0 does not seem to support post titles. So, out with Gnome Blog, and 'aptitude install drivel'.

Drivel

Drivel looks good and has more features than Gnome Blog, but was more buggy and less stable. And it, too, could not supply post titles to Blogger, or retrieve posts to edit. It seems to work well with other blog hosting sites, so it seems to be a problem with Blogger, but I am not keen on transferring this blog to another host just yet, so onwards.

Blogilo

Blogilo (previously called Bilbo, but it attracted legal problems) was the most promising, being rated highly in a Linux Format magazine review. It was the most feature complete and polished, with all the bells and whistles you could want.

But it turned out to be a heavily integrated with the KDE desktop. This meant that, since I wasn't running KDE, it pulled in a number of KDE dependencies. This is not normally a problem, since I had plenty of RAM and the extra libraries could be loaded without slowing the system. It required the use of KDEwallet, which is an encryption keyring. I had no need for another keyring, so I disabled that, but then I discovered that KDE had started taking over my system! The fonts, window decorations and icons, file browser and a bunch of defaults were all KDE'd.

I started to de-KDEify one problem at a time, but ended by removing the whole KDE Desktop invading hoard. All the problems went at once, along with Blogilo.

What's Left?

The most reliable way of uploading pre-written posts to Blogger turned out to be the command line GoogleCL. This is a set of tools for the Google Data API, which includes the Google run Blogger.com, so there is no Atom 1.0 / 2.0 shenanigans. I just type in a terminal:

google blogger post --tags "taglist" --title "title" blogpost.html

GoogleCL is aimed, really, at developers who want to integrate Google services with their software, but it is easy to use at the command line. And, seeing that none of the clients I tried correctly handled uploading or paragraph html tags or titles reliably, GoogleCL is a good stopgap until something better turns up. I am using Vim as an editor, so an added bonus, if you can call it that, is that I am forced to learn the simpler HTML tags.

One Thing Well

The Linux philosophy for software is for each program to do one thing well and to link them together to do more complex tasks. You would think that a dedicated blogging client would be able to do that one thing well, but you'd be wrong. But Vim will always be a good HTML editor and GoogleCL will always be able to upload to Blogger. Who needs a blogging client anyway?

DRM has Hijacked my DVD Player, Again

2011-09-09T19:21:00.002+01:00

The government should be brave and make breaking DRM legal, even if the distribution of copied media remains controlled.

Would YOU steal?

My movie viewing last weekend was interrupted by the antisocial behaviour of the DVD I was trying to watch. I arranged the sofa and TV, poured the wine and sorted some nibbles. The DVD started, but the film didn't.

I had to sit through a series of trailers for films I'd never watch. I pressed fast forward, I pressed skip-on and my player told me that the actions were forbidden. Forbidden! My own player, playing a DVD I had paid for! And the DVD would not let me control the playback. I tried the disk menu button, hoping to get straight to the play options, but the disk skipped back to the start, so I had to watch the trailers again.

Eventually, we got to the main feature. Or would have done if there wasn't a compulsory viewing of the copyright notice. And a jarring and jumpy clip showing a ne'er-do-well breaking into a car and stealing from it, ending with a statement equating copying a DVD to theft. You wouldn't steal, would you? So don't copy stuff it said.

Now, I could be pursuaded that Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a good thing that protects the income of poot artists, but after muttering my way through a long series of video clips in my own home that I didn't want to watch and could not avoid, I was rather less sympathetic. Bypassing DRM and copying media is illegal. But it has it's benefits. Say I buy a DVD, but don't want to watch the same trailers and warnings every time I watch the film. Let's say that I bypass the DRM and copy the film to my PC and strip everything except for the main feature, so that I can watch the film the way I want to watch it. That is illegal.

But can it be equated to stealing? Who on Earth has lost in the process? Stealing is a strictly zero-sum game: one person's gain is another's loss. In this case no-one has lost anything, but I gain plenty. DRM which prevents uncontrolled copying is arguably, maybe, a reasonable thing, but it will never work. Copying and free distribution is rampant, and DRM will never prevent that. It will never be more difficult to copy data bits which are being decoded in my player or PC CDROM drive. But DRM does stop me format shifting, cutting out adverts or making backup copies if I wish to comply with the law.

And when DRM is used to make watch adverts in my own home when I am watching a bought DVD on my own equipment, I has gone beyond a joke.

The government is considering making legal the copying of audio CDs for the purposes of format shifting, backing up and giving to relatives. CDs do not have DRM, so these tasks are technically very simple for end users. They should extend their plan to allow DRM breaking for these purposes. Hollywood shouldn't have special protections not available to recording artists.

Passive Smoking, Active Disinformation

2011-03-26T15:39:00.000Z

Much as I enjoy smoke free pubs and restaurants, I always took the view that I had a free choice of where to go of an evening if I wanted to avoid cigarette smoke. Admittedly, there were few locations that banned smoking, but that was a commercial decision of the proprietors.

Key for those who see the ban on smoking in enclosed public spaces as a small start towards banning smoking anywhere is any evidence that smoking in private homes and cars impinges on the rights of powerless third parties. So the news that passive smoking increases the risk of still-births by a whopping 13% and that of birth malformations by 23% was reported widely.

The BBC news site quoted the press release freely:

"Fathers-to-be should stop smoking to protect their unborn child from the risk of stillbirth or birth defects, scientists say. They looked at 19 previous studies from around the world.
A UK expert said it was 'vital' women knew the risks of second-hand smoke."

Vital that women knew the risks? So what are the risks? The paper (abstract) was not primary research, but combined data from multiple studies, which sounds good. But most of the studies were either of poor quality or did not address the desired health outcomes. In the end, it came down to 19 studies with four separate outcome measures. Two of them, the risk of miscarriage and the risk of perinatal or neonatal death, came out negative: no increased risk. The other two came out with the 13% (4 studies) and 23% (7 studies) increased risk.

So, the news reports could have started with headlines of "Passive Smoking Does Not Cause Miscarriage" or "New Study Produces Contradictory Results", or even "We're Trying Really Hard But We Still Can't Prove Passive Smoking is Particularly Dangerous". Although I can't imagine researchers from the UK Tobacco Control research Network policy advocacy group pushing that last one!

Statistical Significance

When researchers attribute risks to particular behaviours, they calculate not only the best estimate of the increased risk (eg an odds ratio of 1.13, or an increase of 13%), but also the high and low limits within which they are confident that the 'true' risk lies. Any measurement will have uncertainties, and to be confident that a risk is real it must be repeatable: that is, doing the whole study again will produce the same result.

Obviously, you can't wait until the next study before you publish, so you use the mathematics of chance to see the results might have been if thing had gone slightly differently during the study. The outcome, then, is not a 'best' figure, but a 'confidence interval' which the 'true' result would be within 95% of the time. (or outside the range 5% of the time).

Confidence Tricks

The study found that two of the outcomes had confidence intervals that started below an odds ratio of 1. That is, there is a real chance that there was no risk at all, even though the 'best' figure was higher. So the results are dismissed as not significant.

What of the other two? Stillbirth came out as 1.01 - 1.26 (middle value 1.13), with malformations as 1.09 - 1.38 (middle value 1.23). So, even without a further look, stillbirths could be increased by perhaps 1%, or as much as 26%. We can't tell which, but we can tell that presenting 13% as the figure is misleading.

But it is worse that that. The researchers looked at many outcomes and picked out to publicise the ones which had the wanted results, which makes it far more likely that you will find significance in your results. As an example, let's say that you roll four dice. The chance that any one of them will come up a six is 1/6 (or 17%), but the chance that at least one of the four will come up a six much greater at 48%.

For the researchers to be confident that their overall result of, say, 'passive smoking causes harm to unborm babies', an allowance must be made (eg the Bonferroni correction) for each of these multiple comparisons to get the overall confidence back up to 95%. For four tests as here, the intervals should be increased by the factor of around 1.27, so they become:

Still birth relative risk: 0.98 - 1.30
Congnital malformation relative risk: 0.91 - 1.40

Note that both now include the relative risk (ie no risk) in the range. On this test, none of the outcomes is significant.

Two Bites at the Cherry

The upshot is this. If you use statistical arguments to judge outcomes, you should know that the more measurements you make the more likely you are to come up with spurious results, so you should make allowances for it.

The headline should have been, at best, "Our Research Was Too Underpowered to be Sure of Anything, but it is Worth Asking for More Funding".

Unlikely to be reported in the papers, but honest.

The Double Standards of Professional Contrarians

2011-02-13T12:35:00.007Z

I normally avoid leaving comments on online newspaper articles as I don't enjoy the anonymous behaviour of participants: rudeness, ignorance and unwillingness to engage in proper debate. But I did get stuck in to one of James Delingpole's Telegraph Blog entries. (My spell-checker wants to replace 'Delingpole' with 'Delinquent'. I'm tempted.)

Delingpole seriously embarrassed himself in the BBC's Horizon programme Science Under Attack when he debated climate change with Nurse, a Nobel Prize winning scientist. Specifically, Delingpole described his climate change 'journalism' as interpreting interpretation: he didn't read scientific papers, not even the abstracts.

More specifically, he has found a few people who share his biases and then uses their writings as evidence for his own opinions, as they use his to buttress theirs. 'Science' is a word used often, but the scientific method seems to be unknown to them as they resort to rhetoric instead. It seems that winning an ill-natured argument is far more important to them than actually being right. (They fervently believe they are right, of course, though they make no effort to develop secure lines of reasoning, relying on the whole list of pseudo-science techniques described here.)

The comments on the blog entries are even less nuanced, as they don't even try to use rhetorical tricks and deceptions. If you have ever had so little going on in your life that you feel able to interact with the low-lifes that inhabit these sites, then you may skip to the end.

But this is the nature of argument from those that worship the self-important journalists such as Delingpole. Insults are the order of the day: anonymous posters are just rude. If you come up with a good argument, data that disproves a statement or even just try to act as a moderating influence, then expect to get flamed.

Ignore reasoned arguments

Tell the poster that their sort of person makes you sick and you can't believe how much they wriggle and squirm in a proper debate. Tell them how thin skinned they are. If you are lucky, they will be distracted by your bilge and not notice that you had no answer to their line of argument.

Consensus Plays No Part in Science

If anyone has the front to point out that the specialists in the field are virtually unanimous in their judgements, so you are likely to be mistaken, bang on about the 'fact' that consensus plays no part in science. This is a great move, since you can act as an expert in your own right at the same time as denying real experts know anything about the reality of the science. It is, of course, nonsense. Science does not have authorities that pass judgement on theories when there is disagreement. The only way for tentative theories to enter the canon of accepted principles is for them to be debated back and forth along with the data in journals and at conferences, until everyone has had their objections answered and consensus is reached. Far from 'consensus plays no part in science', a lack of consensus is fatal to the progression of a scientific theory. Consensus is the only way in science.

Apply Different Standards of Evidence to Opponents

Appear to carefully pick apart statistical inferences with which you disagree, then slip in a non-sequitur based on an absence of evidence. For instance, challenge the last fifty years of warming by selecting your data from one of the regularly occurring decades where the warming slows or stops for a few years, say that there is no statistically significant warming. If there is warming, pick a new start year that is especially warm and try again to fit a negative gradient. Ignore the fact that the correlation is very weak (r=0.1) and insignificant. Try the line that since warming is not proven, so cooling must be happening. And add an insult as a diversion so no-one notices the sleight of hand.

Libel the Experts

Repeatedly point out that some of the experts are actually computer modellers, chemists or physicists, not 'climate experts', and make claims that they are in the pay of large governmental and NGO conspiracies. Refer to your own sources as 'renowned climate experts', even if they are retired engineers or computer modellers. ('Renowned' is the give-away term, as no reputable scientists refer to anyone as renowned.)

Quote Your Own Consensus

Quote a big, long list of scientists who signed up to an online statement supporting your view, but don't worry if none of them are actually working in a related field of study. As long as they give academic titles and put PhD after their name, they are scientists, right? And don't call it a consensus, as you have already claimed that consensus is not part of science.

Hide Contrary Views

To force recent posts that challenged your statements off the bottom of the first page, find a contrarian web site and cut and paste large chunks of it into your posts. This has the bonus of not requiring any thought whatsoever on your part. When the offending posts have disappeared, you can repeat what you wrote before, secure in the knowledge that new readers will not see that there are good reasons not to trust what you say.

The Lesson

This was the first time I tried to sustain interest in a blog comments section for a couple of days, and there were over a thousand posts in that time (some commenters seemed to post continually day and night - didn't their mothers tell them to come up out of the basement and go to bed?)

I tried to direct arguments towards a discussion of evidence, towards an understanding of the statistical limits of certainty, towards the problematical bias of picking an opinion and searching out individuals who support that idea instead of dispassionately assessing opinions and evidence in the round. But it was for naught.

Delingpole told Paul Nurse in the Horizon programme that he didn't read proper research papers, because peer-to-peer review (clever, huh!) was an improvement on peer-review because it allowed journalists and anyone with an interest to get stuck in.

And he said it with a straight face!

Foul Claimed on New School League Tables

2011-01-22T12:37:00.010Z

Headteachers are demeaning themselves in their rush to criticise the new English Baccalaureat figures included for the first time in this year's league tables, and thereby excuse their own schools' poor rankings.

The English Bac, or EBac, is awarded if a student gains GCSE grade C or above in each of English, Maths, Double Science, a humanities subject and a language.

Complaints have grouped into three main lines:

1. No time to properly game the system.

The main complaint is that the figures are retrospective, with the rules of the game only published after the exam results were out. 'How can we be expected to do well without the time to change our curriculum policies?' chant the headteachers.

This exposes the key moral weakness of modern schools, which is that directly manipulating the key indicators to make the school look good is preferred to actually improving the pupils' education.

Gaming the system, then, is the main occupation of school managers.

2. The EBacc is a return to Academic Snobbery.

Why not allow vocational courses as well?

Schools has a choice to make. Enter children on to the course with the best educational aims (say, French or Science GCSEs) when many will achieve grades D to G passes and so not count in the laegue tables. Or, enter them for vocational courses such as the Btec, that guarantee the 'equivalent' of four GCSE grade Cs to any pupil still conscious at the end of the course.

The choice is really this stark, and sadly most schools go for option B with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Those under the cosh from Ofsted especially realise this is the only way out or 'special measures'. Look at the tables and you can spot such schools: they will have improved their 5 A to C figures at improbably fast rates, have high CVA (value added) scores from the additional 'equivalent' courses and LOW EBacc rates.

The 'most improved' school in the country, Perry Beaches in Birmingham, has moved its 5 A to C figures from 21% to 74% in four years. CVA is also high, but only 3% got the EBacc. Since it takes four or five years to progress through the school as a pupil, the changes must have been instantaneous to have fed through this quickly.

Certificates of GCSE equivalent passes shouldn't count if everyone passes them. It misleads prospective parents into thinking the school is academic and improving, when it is only the figures that are going up. The quality of the education may actually be declining in these schools as they move from GCSE to Btec and other similar courses.

3. Independent schools are unfairly penalised.

Independent schools are not restricted to only offer courses approved by the politically directed Qualification Curriculum Authority which only approved courses with sufficient levels of coursework in their assessment schemes.

Independent schools don't approve of coursework, so many offer alternative courses, such as Classical Civilisation, which don't count towards the EBacc, damaging their figures.

Now, this is a fair complaint. But Independent schools are not compelled to enter the League Tables manipulation game, or even publish figures at all. They are free to create their own tables if they wish so they can compete on their own manicured level playing fields with their own rules.

Unfair, perhaps, but they can take their ball and play elsewhere if they don't like it.

Less Gaming, Please.

The arrival of the EBacc has embarrassed lots of schools. They complain of the pressures of league tables and the focus on A to C grade passes which excludes the varying efforts of anyone not near the grade boundaries. But they should welcome anything that makes gaming harder and so less attractive. Less gaming should herald a move back towards professional judgements in schools instead of political ones, where the children come first.

I won't be holding my breath though. Heads have been manipulating their table positions for a long time, and will be looking for ways to continue the game. It is all many of them know.

Orwellian Threat to Political Freedom

2010-11-24T20:44:00.007Z

Gove's plan to remove BNP members from schools is an ominous restriction of political freedom.

Michael Gove, the Coalition Education Minister, has allowed his political instincts to take second place to following the vocal crowd, and has promised that schools will be allowed to sack BNP members from their staff. The rationale, if you can call it that, is that BNP membership is incompatible with the ethos of schools, and that clearing these outcasts from schools will be an unalloyed good.

But why stop at the BNP? Which other groups have politically incorrect views that the famously tolerant British should not tolerate?

How about UKIP with their dodgy views about foreigners? Or islamist affiliations who want a European caliphate? Sinn Fein or Plaid Cymru members who want to break up the Union? Tories? A teacher who doesn't want to sign up to the school's statement of 'shared values and beliefs'?

Don't laugh at this last one, though. This has already happened! I have been told during a 'training' session that anyone who voiced an opinion in the staff room that a Sixth Form College should focus more on A Levels, and less on vocational courses, would not be tolerated. The suggestion was that such a teacher should be 'encouraged' to leave unless they buttoned up and signed up.

If the aim of this new policy is to allow heads to sack teachers who use their position to proselytise their political views, then Gove would be pleased to know that this behaviour would already be in breach of contract. I am certain that most teachers with odious views are not actually members of a political party, and also that many members of the BNP are not as unlikeable as their simpleton leader. I am also pretty sure that an hour a week with a maths teacher who holds radical views is more likely to be educational than dangerous for children. They will benefit from seeing a range of political views from the staff instead of the current, uniform Guardianista viewpoints.

OK, I know slippery slope arguments are often spurious, but in this case the motivation behind the policy seems to be a response to pressure groups to keep 'keep them away from our children'. A success here will encourage an extension to teachers who openly support the BNP but have not joined as members, or have resigned. After that, then, which other 'opinions' would become adopted as thought crimes, punishable by summary dismissal?

While I would not mourn the departure of some staff, dismissal for supporting a legally established and state funded political party seems a bit too Orwellian for comfort.

If you don't speak up for others' political freedoms now, who will speak up for yours when they come for you?

The Sound of Science

2010-10-12T15:18:00.006+01:00

A great reworking of Paul Simon's 'The Sounds of Silence', now featuring Darwin and the scientific method …

The Sound of Science, courtesy of Youtube.

'Unfunded' Pensions for Teachers

2010-10-10T11:49:00.012+01:00

Lord Hutton has triggered a furious response from the unions in recommending the end of the final salary* pension schemes enjoyed by public sector workers. (* Also known as unfunded gold-plated pensions)

The pejorative term 'unfunded' when applied to public sector pensions suggests that the taxpayer picks up the entire bill, when in fact it just means that the pension contributions are spent by the government as a cheap loan, instead on being invested in a pension fund. Of course, when the employee eventually retires there is no pot of money, so the treasury must spend from government funds.

Teacher pensions were reformed some years ago, and do not need to be radically reworked in the current final salary pension witch-hunt. Teachers contribute 6.1% of salary, with employers putting in a further 14.4%, making a total of 20.5%. For a main scale teacher paying in for 40 years, this could produce a pension pot of £500 000 to £600 000, if it was invested and averaged returns of 3% above inflation, as the FTSE has managed routinely. A half million quid could easily buy an index linked annuity paying half the final salary - without needing a penny of taxpayer money to subsidise.

The problem comes from the higher earners - the senior management and others who get significant promotions near the ends of their careers. Since these people earn much more than their career average, each pound they pay in to a pension scheme pays out more that a pound from a classroom teacher whose salary is stable for the final 25 years of their career.

In the light of this, Lord Hutton's report, calling for pensions to be based on career average earnings and for the investment risk to be moved from taxpayers to the individuals, seems reasonable. The unions will make a great deal of fuss, but for most teachers, there is nothing to fear from a move away from an 'unfunded' or even 'final salary' pension model.

'My RSS reader is a Journalist'

2010-10-05T18:15:00.012+01:00

The BBC's reporting is going backwards. For years it was my go-to news site as it always sidebar links to all the websites of the source material for a news story. Even if the reporting was poor, I could always read the original papers or quotes. But a recent revamp of their site has dropped all the external links! Was it too hard for the journalists to a keep a track of where they got their material?

OK, I'm being a little unfair, since their main source has been press releases for some years - it is amazing the similarity of the wording when you can read the original press releases on AlphaGalileo. They have been republishing company and university press officer propaganda with barely a change for years.

Don't just take my word for it: if you want a pithy and knowledgeable statement of all that is wrong with science journalism, you can't do much better than read this, by The Lay Scientist blog at the Guardian.   

That post is a great parody of most of the British media's science output, fitting all research into a bland identikit structure that neither educates the masses nor informs those who already know something about the subject. The masses do not benefit from the patronisingly shallow overview that is so simplistic that even the basic principles are left out as potentially too confusing. The educated do not benefit as there is not even a useful link to the research abstract , the researcher's homepage or even the organisation involved.

  And all the “important” words are put in “scare” quotes, so the “journalist” does not even have to take responsibility for the words they have “written”.   The parody is great, and the writer has now followed that up with an inside, in-depth analysis of why the mainstream media, the BBC included, sadly, has allowed itself to abandon the honourable traditions of scientific journalism.

  Depressingly, a lack of money to do the job properly is not on the hit list, but the journalists themselves are. A picture is painted of aimless journos wandering around conferences being distracted by all the unpublished PhD poster work in foyer, and not understanding a word of what they are told.

A great comment from the piece repeats and comment from Ed Yong sums it up:

“If you are not actually providing any analysis, if you're not effectively 'taking a side', then you are just a messenger, a middleman, a megaphone with ears. If that's your idea of journalism, then my RSS reader is a journalist.”

Thanks to Toby Marshan for drawing my attention to this blog.

Edit 2010-10-10: The BBC has just updated its online linking policy to repair some of the damage mentioned above, described in this Guardian blog post.

Cable's Barmy Plan

2010-09-26T14:35:00.003+01:00

Much of the current focus in the education press is on the threat to funding for Universities, with the Telegraph reporting a plan to allow badly run universities to go bust and close, and the LibDem Minister Vince Cable announcing that his department will in the future only fund the highest quality university research.

Cable's plan is especially barmy, even if he does have a crystal ball to sort the research wheat from the chaff (who saw the value of lasers, developed solely to test a subtle prediction of Einstein's, or knew that the quantum physics of the 1920s would lead to the digital revolution?)

If only the top research centres survive, where will the career progression for freshly qualified post-docs be? Where will Ph.D. students find posts to cut their teeth on and develop their skills? Why would the most talented students in schools be attracted to research instead of banking?

Britain's research base is still world class, which is a near miracle given how much is done with so few resources. But the structure of our research base is lean already. If Vince Cable seems intent on reducing it back further, he will find that it is not the fat he is cutting away. Real and irreversible damage to the country will be done. It will not be easily reversed by cash injections in a few years time when the damage becomes apparent.

Gove's Cunning Plan to Recruit Better Teachers

2010-09-18T18:12:00.003+01:00

The ongoing crisis in school Physics teaching was not improved much by the last government, leaving most lessons taught by biologists or chemists. Most English teachers have first class degrees, but a quarter of new Physics teachers have third class degrees, more than any other subject. This is for two main reasons.

First, physicists are drawn to the abstract and the impersonal, and so not many are cut out for the intense social experience that is teaching. This leaves teacher training colleges accepting almost anyone who applies.

Second, few qualified physicists and engineers are willing to work for the kind of salary that is intended to be attractive to people with English or History degrees. Industry pays what is needed to attract those with shortage skills.

The Education Minister, though, has a cunning plan: bar those with a third class degree from funded teacher training places. This will, apparently, make teaching more attractive to the better educated and improve the quality and standing of teaching as a profession. And, to give Gove some credit, there is some logic in this.

Courses Desirable

Modern students deciding on their career choices do see the most difficult to enter professions as the most desirable, so the elite students gravitate to Medicine, with its history of insufficient training places to train all the physicians we need. The restricted entry leads to high levels of salary and a social standing out of all proportion to the skills actually needed to work as a GP.

So Gove's solution is to raise the entry bar for prospective teachers, without a corresponding pay rise for those with shortage skills. Pay has not risen above inflation for the last decade, and it is still impossible for many schools to fill their Maths and Physics posts with specialists as a result.

The problem Gove has, though, is that teaching is a profession accepts anyone with a non-honours pass degree from a university which may only ask for two grade E's at A Level. Rejecting third class honours wholesale says that a Third in Physics from Oxford or in Engineering from Imperial College is not as desirable as a Lower Second Class degree in Textiles:Knit from the University of Westminster.

Shortage Skills

An engineering company short of skills or experience would offer a rewards package to attract the best people to apply, and then employ the best amongst the applicants.

Teaching will not become a desirable career for the best qualified and most able people until the salaries reflect the level of ability needed for each post. It takes more money to employ a good mathematician or physicist than it does to get high quality English teachers.

Does Gove have the courage to introduce differential pay in the face of the unions? The current funding squeeze is the perfect cover with the unions weakened, and will be the only chance for a generation. I won't be holding my breath.

Related posts:
How to Recruit a Physics Teacher
Biologists Shouldn't Teach Physics
Modular Physics Courses harm Learning

Will Big Donation Cost Blair a Penny?

2010-08-20T08:35:00.001+01:00

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair, starter of four wars and one national debt crisis, has sought to ease his conscience and improve his reputation as home. He has rushed out his memoirs ahead of his successor as PM, Gordon Brown, and now promises the profits from its sale will go to armed forces charity The British Legion.
But such is his history of using a rather flexible interpretation of the truth, more is learned from what he hasn't said than from what he has.
Is he donating just the profits, that is, payments less expenses? Is it the royalties without the 4 million pound advance he has already received? Is he paying tax on the donations or is he Gift Aiding it so that much of the charity's gain will be at the expense of taxpayers?
And most importantly, will the donation be routed through one of his several companies and so be entirely written off against corporate tax?
Blair's donation may cost us more than him, but since at least one of his companies does not file accounts, we may never know if this is a genuine act of altruism.

Write to Your MP

2010-07-22T22:31:00.006+01:00

MPs have tabled an Early Day Motion to raise awareness of the importance of the shortage of Physics teachers. I've written before about the chronic and worsening shortage of Physics teachers (here, here and here), and the attempts by the TDA to hide the decline in which they claimed that all specialist teacher recruitment targets had been met, and it is worth while keeping the issue alive.

Although EDMs don't often get debated on the floor of the Commons, they do get picked up by the media, and perhaps ministers, if they are well supported, so use the link here to contact your MPs and ask them to sign this one.

The full text is below:

Physics Teachers (no. 467)

“That this House expresses its concern at the lack of specialist physics teachers and the consequent drastic drop in the number of entrants to physics A-level; recognises the threat this poses to UK physics and engineering and therefore to the UK economy; and calls for greater incentives to attract physics graduates into teaching in order to create access to high-quality physics teaching for every child.”

Flying the Flag, Costing the Earth?

2010-06-18T14:31:00.004+01:00

OK, so I object to anyone flying our national flag who feels the need for the word England to be printed across the middle. But is there a better reason for banning the flags flown from car doors?

Flags are not very aerodynamic, and cause drag, making the car burn more petrol than normal. One to two percent more than normal, so over the couple of months before and during the World Cup in South Africa, each car with a pair of small flags will use an extra five litres (or a gallon) of petrol.

If a million cars in England (almost typed the UK there — but no-one in Scotland will be flying the Cross of St George!) had two flags each, that amounts to five million litres of petrol spent dragging flags around the country's roads.

Banning these silly little flags would have the same environmental effect as shutting down a large power station for five days, and save British motorists over five million pounds of expense. It is enough petrol to fill two Olympic sized swimming pools,

So what is holding the government back in these days of austerity?

General Teaching Council 1998-2010 RIP

2010-06-03T14:52:00.010+01:00

Michael Gove, the new Education Secretary, has announced that the General Teaching Council for England (GTCE) is to be abolished in the autumn, and not a moment too soon.

It has cost a small fortune to run and was never going to be a rallying point for teacher professionalism, and has failed even to act as a guarantor of teacher quality by disciplining us.

When the GTCE was created in 1998, it had so few teachers paying their subscriptions, even under the threat of de-registration, that it had to arrange for salary deductions to cover its expenses. I, like many other teachers, saw no benefit in the extra layer of bureaucracy. All teachers were already registered with the government Department for Education (and its heirs and successors), many were also members of unions and teacher subject groupings (such as the ASE) and felt we were already quite well represented and regulated.

For my own part, I did not pay any subs until salary deductions started, I responded to no letters, and was pleased that when I moved to a Sixth Form college which didn't require my registration, the GTCE was unable to take any further money. I had a letter saying that I would be de-registered (struck off) if I didn't pay up, so I was surprised that two years later they wrote again to say I owed them two years' payments. They couldn't even get that right.

The GTCE is, and always has been, a complete irrelevance to teachers. When it finally goes, few will notice and none will care.

So what did the GTCE say on hearing the good news? Did they respond by apologising for wasting everyone's time and money? Promise to do better? No, they said that they were "seeking legal advice on (their) position".

Parliament will surely vote to abolish the GTCE later in the year, and it can be finally buried, unloved and unmissed, in the graveyard of the Quangos.

Lazy Teachers

2010-04-14T19:39:00.005+01:00

Teachers have to be wary if they want to contribute to education discussions, and they have to tread especially carefully in discussions about children taking holidays in term time. Exchanges have a habit of turning towards the long school holidays, and how teachers dare complain about families taking pupils out for term time holidays. Or about workload. Or pay. Or, indeed, about anything. But it always comes back to the holidays.

And since teachers get 11 weeks holiday (plus the bank holidays), it is difficult to challenge the view that it is a valuable perk.

So why does it bug me when we are attacked for our lazyness? Because of the belief that worth can be measured in hours and the explicit assumption that long holidays equates with less work than other workers. And, generally, this is not true.

Government workload research regularly finds teacher hours around 50 hours per week term-time, which amounts to around 2000 hours per year, not including work done during the holidays (and this is verified by independent studies, such as from PWC). This compares to the figure for 'all professionals' of 39 hours which, taking 44 weeks worked (6 weeks holiday plus public holidays), comes to 1700 hours. Or, to put it another way, the average prefessional would need to work for 50 weeks of 39 hours to match the 39 weeks of 50 hours for the average teacher.

So, as they say, do the math.

Edited 19 May 2010

MaST Programme Not Good Enough

2010-03-20T11:26:00.005Z

In 2006, only two hundred out of ten thousand trainee primary teachers had technical, numerate (STEM) degrees, and this number was half the figure from 2004. It is clear that teacher subject knowledge is a key factor in the success of pupils (e.g. here), but it is also plain that specialists are very rare: out over a hundred Initial Teacher Training courses, nearly half offer an emphasis on a modern foreign language, one offers mathematics and none science.

The Williams Review into primary school Maths teaching recommended in 2008 that much of the current malaise in maths education could be solved if every primary school had at least one teacher with a 'deep understanding' of mathematics, so we ought be pleased that the government has announced a program to provide maths 'specialists'.

But, as with many government solutions, the Maths Specialist Teachers Programme (MaST) is more about appearances than solving the shortage of expertise. In service teachers are to be given three autumn-term days of training at a university, two weekend residential and twelve half-days of in-school support over two years, after which they will be described as Maths Specialist teachers.

I don't know how long it would take to turn a primary school teacher, with perhaps a Fine Arts or English Literature degree, into an expert Maths teacher, but I'm sure it's more than the ten days offered in the MaST program.

A Law Professor, Research and Feminist Rhetoric

2010-03-03T20:30:00.010Z

I have spent some years arguing from a position of ignorance and opinion that feminism is founded less on a desire for equal opportunities than it is on seeking extra rights for women over men, whom they despise. Having just sat through an inaugural professorial lecture by an academic lawyer, who specialises in European law with a focus on feminism and the Strasbourg European Court of Human Rights, I am more convinced that is true.

I attended with an expectation that a legal academic with a taste for evidence and rational, unbiased judgement would present a much more attractive face of feminism than I see in the papers, with images in my head of CND campaigners and Harriet Harman foaming at the mouth at the unfairness of it all. But I was wrong.

The professor did not, to her credit, talk at all like Harriet Harman, nor look like a shapeless 'Nukes Out' Greenham Common camper. She was well spoken and lucid as she presented her research, but the research was not what I expected from academics at a good university. I had, in my naïveté, assumed that most research was similar to the physics papers I read, suffused as they are with original data, error margins, logical deductions, principles and proposals for falsification.

Research?

The reality was that the research was a survey and tabulation of just over a hundred cases heard by the European Court. Not the sample size of a thousand favoured by pollsters, despite figures reported to a tenth of a percent. There was no study of failed cases. No statistical analysis of the data to find significant differences. Just cases divided up into groups based on the sexual identity of the claimants and the type of right allegedly infringed.

Everything is a Feminist Issue

The main approach taken was to recast every rights claim as a sex discrimination case if a woman was involved. So, a woman as a single parent traveller, fighting a planning decision preventing her from setting up home in a green belt, should has claimed sex discrimination. (Why? Would a man have been treated differently?) A student at a Turkish university wanted to be able to express her religious identity by wearing an Islamic headscarf should have framed the claim 'as a female autonomy case' instead of a religious freedom one. Domestic and sexual violence, since they were 'female-specific harms', should require the state to intervene pro-actively to prevent breaches of the Act. This last point prompted a (male) member of the audience to query whether these were really female specific harms (and, by implication, whether framing all infringements affecting women should be twisted into gender issues). This drew sneering, eye-rolling and "for goodness sake" responses from others - how dare a MAN critique a feminist argument!

But the point was a good one. Equality for women under the law is a good thing, and pretty much achieved already. But to grant half the population additional rights, simply on the basis of their gender, is not equality. It is a single issue group advancing the political cause of those under the feminist umbrella at the expense of those outside. And that is not good.

Trying to be Right

Is this a case of lawyers trying to win an argument instead of trying to be right? The professorial lecture the following week was by a female science education researcher, who spent her time showing evidence (real research!) that girls' and boys' brains (minds?) are objectively different, and it is possible to teach them in such a way that far fewer girls will be put off studying physics and maths. No sneers here, just questions about the implications of the data. The lady was a self identified feminist, but instead of trying to bias the legal system, she had set to to find the causes of and solutions to the problems she has identified.

OK, so the social sciences have an unhealthy regard for weak correlations and use limited experimental procedures, but they seem to stand head and shoulders over the legal-eagles.

Ed Balls Shocked by My Question

2010-02-18T12:41:00.011Z

Since the Schools Secretary has failed to answer any questions I've addressed to him in posts, I submitted a question to Sarah Ebner's blog over at the Times. She had managed to get Balls to join a live Q&A session and had asked for questions to ask his. Needless to say, the slimy minister read all the questions and proceeded to answer the ones he had prepared earlier, in true Blue Peter style.

The full discussion is here , with my question down at times 14.02 to 14.05. The accompanying photo, captioned http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/live_debate/article7012253.ece is reproduced here — does he look shocked at the quality of the question?

The edited sequence goes like this:

14.02 Sarah Ebner:
This is another point which comes up often on the blog. Glen asks: why persist with judgements of schools based on raw percentages of students achieving 5 grade C GCSEs? It penalises schools serving deprived areas - schools which need a hand up, not a kicking. It also pressurises schools to focus on grade D students, and encourages entries into easier ICT online courses and such like.

14.05 Ed Balls:
Sarah, you are completely right and so is Glen, as parents we all have to look at the current league table and try to work out what they really mean on the basis of what we know about the school itself, the catchment area etc. And league tables can sometimes suggest schools are 'high achieving' when they actually do a poor job at raising standards and supporting progression. Our new Report Card is designed to give parents much more information - about raw results but also whether all children make progress, discipline, parent satisfaction etc. I think it will be much fairer and more informative - it will be in all schools over the next 2 years.

So, I had asked him about the huge pressure that the government and Ofsted puts, often unfairly, on schools in difficult circumstances, distorting their priorities, and he answers an imaginary question about league tables!

OK, he did that to all of the questions, but then why did he bother to travel to the Times offices, just to act as if he were in the House of Commons (not) answering questions put to him there?

Election Poll News: No Change Really

2010-02-07T20:37:00.008Z

Looking through last week's papers (our paper delivery boy made it through all the snow disruption last month, but seems to have forgotten today now the weather's fine and the sky is blue) I found a story I had missed.

The small front page story started with

“Gordon Brown has insisted Labour could still win the general election outright as another poll showed the Tory lead narrowing.

Research by ICM for the Sunday Telegraph put David Cameron's party down one point since last month on 39%.”

I know it might indicate something about my personality type, but the story irritated me. Down one point, with a sample size of a measly thousand?

Now, results of course vary from sample to sample in a predictably random way, which puts a limit on the reliability of any judgements made from the data from just one sample. But how much? Trust the data to within 0.1%? Or 10%?

Here's the maths bit — skip to the next paragraph if it's not your thing.

If the poll results over time can be represented approximated by a Poisson distribution (a reasonable assumption), then the variance of the number of people preferring one party is equal to the mean number of people choosing that category. For opinion polls, we don't know this mean, but it is close to the reported figure, i.e 39% of 1002 in the sample. With this variance, we can be about 95% sure that the true mean number of people in repeated samples choosing Tory would be 390 (40%) plus or minus twice the square root of the variance (about 40 votes, or 4%).

And the result is:

So the real result is "The Conservatives polled between 35% and 43%, which is consistent with no change at all." OK, not a good headline, but even newspapers have an obligation to at least try to be right. I'm sure papers used to put this sort of information at the foot or the article (where hardly anyone would see it), even if the article writer ignored such a basic check. But to have every outlet from newspaper to the TV news run a similar story is laziness.

Every newsroom must have someone with enough maths skill to do this right, haven't they?

Mass Produced Target Grades

2010-02-05T15:07:00.004Z

Sixth form students will by now have dragged themselves through the January exam series. They can relax until scores are released in March, when most will be judged according to their college 'target grades'. And it is likely to be a miserable experience for most.

I used to talk to my students and get to know their individual strengths and weaknesses. I would encourage those who I perceived were studying hard, and chide those who were just attending class without the necessary intellectual engagement. Reports to parents and managers were based on my professional opinion of each child. But not any more.

Teachers still get to know each of their charges, but their professional judgements are now routinely tempered by the knowledge that performance against their grade target trumps all other information.

Value Added

Target grades are now the ubiquitous tool of comparative assessment in schools: Key Stage 3 results are used to predict GCSE grades, while GCSE grade averages are used to compute the most likely grade a student might achieve at A Level. This is a very good process for working out if the school is doing a good job, since if a year group cohort gains a mean score above the mean predicted grade, then the group has learned more than could reasonable been expected. The school thus has recorded some value added, in the language of education.

Using the same data for individual teachers is only likely to be reliable over a period of several years, since the sample sizes from individual classes are much smaller, leading to more variation from year to year.

Blinded by Numbers

The big problem stems from applying these statistics to individual students. It is very easy to calculate an expected grade from a single child's previous achievement, but with a sample size of just one, the precision is poor. The reliability stemming from a cohort in the hundreds is lost, and the prediction is routinely in error by a whole grade or so. (See my post Physics Exams Too Easy, Says Ofqual

Now, this would not be a problem if these figures were just another piece of the puzzle to be understood by the teacher, but OFSTED, the government overlord of teaching standards, thinks students should know these rough predictions, and be challenged to achieve them. And leaned on if they don't come up to scratch.

Once upon a time, I got to know my own students, and made judgements as to their individual abilities and potentials, and assessed their effort accordingly. Not perfect, but at least both teacher and student were in the loop.

Forget the Child – Press the Button and Set That Target

Now, each student is given a grade to achieve by the end of a two year course, during which they will mature and develop. If they are very lucky, they will get several target grades which take into account the historical difficulties of each subject they are studying. If not, as is happening more commonly now, they will get a single grade to span the range from Photography and Media to Chemistry and Maths. And to make the target aspirational, a grade will be added to ensure that only a quarter of students will be able to meet their targets, with poor reports and disciplinary procedures for those souls unlucky enough to keep missing impossible targets.

Advantages

Simple and cheap to operate.
Keeps OFSTED happy.

Disadvantages

No educational merit.
Can turn keen students into serial target-missers.

An open and shut case for school managers. Shame about the children.

Government Buries 'Good' News

2010-01-16T13:05:00.008Z

Even though the new Academies have done so well in last summer's exam period, the government can still not bring themselves to publish usable comparative data to prove the case.

The recent publication of the GCSE and Equivalent Results in England was accompanied by a government press release which declared:

“Even more encouraging is the clear fact that children who have faced the most challenging circumstances over the past 12 years have not been cast adrift and left at the bottom, but thanks to the Academies, National Challenge and City Challenge programmes have actually seen a more rapid improvement in results than those in the least deprived areas.”

Concerns

The biggest concern with the steady and dramatic increases in the figures, after grade inflation, is the widespread tactic of entering weaker pupils for the laughably easy vocational courses that have 'GCSE equivalence'. For example, half of all schools enter almost everyone into the vocational ICT course instead of the more challenging GCSE ICT, as it can be completed in one year and can be worth anything up to four GCSEs at grade C or above. The Telegraph reports:

A report last year by Ofsted, the education watchdog, found that qualifications such as the one run by OCR were “less demanding” than other mainstream exams. It said pupils were able to pass “whether or not they had understood what they had done”.

It is true that the number of students nationally that gain 5 A*-C grades is only 3% less if you exclude the 'equivalent', vocational courses, but there are categories of schools which have a lot to lose if their pass rated don't improve sharply.

Schools Minister Vernon Coaker's press-release said that the new Academies A*-C grades had increased at double the national rate, so I looked at the accompanying data.

Sneaky Tricks

The data looks comprehensive, and even breaks down results for different types of school and with/without the vocational courses. The time series do indeed show Academies improving faster then any other major category of schools, but the figures for the Academies without the vocational courses are missing!

Vernon's minions emphasised the Academy raw percentage increases, but rolled their key data in with that for comprehensive schools, making it impossible to see what effect the dash for vocational courses has had.

Since it is just these schools that are most desperate to bump up their figures quickly to avoid the Wrath of Balls, it is very suspicious that the data, which was released with some fanfare, should have been airbrushed like this. What is the government afraid of? Given the obsession of the government with media manipulation, one can only assume that Academies have achieved their politically essential successes through a choice of courses that benefited the school more than their unfortunate pupils.

Rationalising Christmas and New Year

2009-12-31T19:50:00.009Z

What exactly are we all celebrating? We stay up later than normal, flipping between lots of TV channels with little to watch (Jools' Annual Hootananny is not my thing), and drink several times what our Nanny Government says is a sensible limit. But only because one of the numbers in our Gregorian church calendar system goes up by one.

Now, years are natural units, based on measurements of the seasons or the stars, but the start of the calendar year is arbitrary, and depends on political and scriptural judgements in Rome over the last couple of millennia.

I agree that midwinter festival is good to have, to mark the passing of the darkest days, but we in the north already have one in Christmas, and it is midsummer for our upside-down friends in the southern hemisphere. So what are we celebrating on New Year's Eve, if not an even more wanton and self-centred version of Christmas, but with the present giving replaced by excessive drinking?

And having Christmas and New Year so close together also takes a whole week (or two) out of the economy and causes office discord in the annual rush for the key leave dates.

Moving Christmas to the Spring Equinox would solve a lot. It would give an excuse for the non-Christians to join in, and could be argued on Biblical grounds even if it would interfere with the dates of Easter — shepherds watch their flocks all night during lambing season, don't they? But I don't see the major Christian denominations agreeing to such a big change, even if it would leave New Year as the single centre of the midwinter festivities.

If the Spring Equinox Christmas is out, how about the Winter Solstice? It was origin of the current date of Christmas since the pagan celebration of Yule-Tide was held on the 25th December, the date of the Solstice in the old Julian Calendar. Looking around at the fashion for lighting up the outsides of houses with glowing Santas and moving, lit-up reindeer, most of the celebrations around this time of year are strictly secular already, so reuniting Yule and Christmas on the same day on the Solstice would fit the multicultural, inclusive theme of the last decade of insipid politics.

What to do with New Year, now that we have sorted Christmas? I'd move it to the Spring Equinox, when the weather is warm enough for me to want to go out in it. But I go out for a drink on the Equinox anyway, so why would I need a calendar justification? Let's just leave the New Year booze up when it is, so all the young partying types can go out by themselves and get cold and drunk, without expecting me to join in.

So I'll be sitting at home in front of the TV, flicking channels while the fireworks go off all evening, drinking some wine, looking forward to the longer and warmer days to come.

Cheers!

Tories to Ease Physics Teacher Shortage, while TDA Says All is Rosy

2009-12-04T22:00:00.007Z

Shadow Schools Secretary Michael Gove has said that a Conservative government will exempt good physics (and science and maths) graduates from student loan repayments if they go into teaching. The Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA), meanwhile, has muddied the waters by claiming to have exceeded its targets to recruit and train teachers for all main shortage specialisms.

The teacher training quango has managed to massage the teacher recruitment figures to disguise the shortage of physics teachers in schools, by failing to set a target for their recruitment. The TDA reported that “for the first time ever” recruitment to all main specialisms has exceeded their targets and that “a healthy supply of well-trained teachers is entering our classrooms.”

The total number of mainstream registrations of Science teachers did indeed rise, by 1%, from 3655 last year to 3701, although to claim that the target of just 3405 was exceeded “by as much as 9%” seems to be over-egging the results a little.

The key omission, though, is that there is no target for physics teachers at all! Their numbers declined from 584 last year to an estimated 571. Bang goes the government target of having physicists making up a quarter of all science teachers by 2012. With a quarter of current physics teachers already over 50 and keen to retire, this target looks as far away as ever.

(See here and here for my previous comments on physics teacher shortages and the solutions, and on Gordon Brown's pontifications here.)

The Conservatives, though, look like they at least recognise the seriousness of the problem.

In a speech to the Sir John Cass Foundation, Michael Gove said

“We will make a new offer to people - similar to something President Obama wants to do. If after leaving school someone decides to do a maths or science degree at a designated university, achieves a 2:1 or First, and decides to go into teaching, the taxpayer will cover their student loan repayments for as long as they remain in teaching (until the loan is fully paid).”

This could be worth £40k to a teacher whose pay cannot otherwise be increased beyond that offered to other, less scarce, specialisms.

The Institute of Physics has welcomed the initiative, noting that that

“Children in approximately 500 secondary schools across the country have no teachers with experience of physics beyond school.

“This means too many students being taught physics by teachers who may not even have taken the subject at A-level. How can students be inspired by teachers who themselves have no solid grasp of the subject?

At Least I'm Not Bored!

2009-11-21T19:08:00.002Z

I am up to my neck in coursework, annual appraisals, parents' evenings and open days, in one of those months that make up for the long lazy holidays. So it is nice to know that teachers are the least bored workers in the country, according to a three year old survey I just found (note to the TDA - your press releases are not getting much attention!).

While researchers are in sixth place in the boredom stakes and engineers only marginally better in eighth, teachers report the lowest amounts of boredom of all graduate professions.

The full list from the Training & Development Agency for Schools' Boredom Index:

Administrative/secretarial (10 out of 10)
Manufacturing
Sales
Marketing/advertising
IT/telecommunications
Science research/development
Media
Law
Engineering
Banking/finance
Human resources
Accountancy
Hospitality/travel
Healthcare
Teaching (4 out of 10)

The press release adds:

When asked why they find their job interesting, 81 per cent of teachers questioned said it is the challenge of the role, 81 per cent because no two days are the same, and 86 per cent said they enjoy the interaction with people. Sixty-four per cent also rate the opportunity to use their creativity.

Employees surveyed say they are mainly bored because of the lack of challenge in their jobs (61 per cent), whilst not using their skills or their knowledge makes life tedious for 60 per cent. And boredom through doing the same things every day (50 per cent) is also to blame.

You might ask yourself how I found myself browsing through three year old press releases when I'm so busy …

Two Cultures in New Science Map

2009-11-11T21:13:00.009Z

Students can find it hard to know what areas of science are actively researched, especially since much of what is taught is so ancient and established (But Physics A Level now has a token Quantum Physics section, and that's less than a hundred years old!). A new study may help.

The PLoS ONE online journal has a paper presenting a map constructed from over a billion user interactions logged by journals' web portals (so-called clickstream data). The result is a beautiful whirlpool shaped image, showing the links between different research areas throughout the sciences, humanities and social sciences.

Click to go to the larger version.

There is a worryingly large gap between the sciences and the humanities; Snow's Two Cultures are alive and well worldwide, and not just in Britain, since the data used is global. The Royal Institution is holding a lecture this week entitled CP Snow's 'Two cultures': 50 years of debate. Bath psychologist Professor Helen Hast will “explore the paradoxes of "value freedom" within such a highly morally-charged perception of both the pursuit and purposes of science - and some resistances to it.”

The RI page for the talk says that the is good availability for tickets. Quite so.

Claims of HIV Vaccine Success are Premature

2009-10-21T17:46:00.007+01:00

The excitement is palpable — the vaccine that nobody thought would work “appeared to lower the rate of HIV infection by 31.2 percent compared to placebo ”, according to the press release, although printing all three significant figures sets my inner sceptic on edge.

The BBC story improved things marginally, reporting a rounded percentage:

“Scientists announced last month that a combination of vaccines gave a 31% level of protection in trials among 16,000 heterosexuals aged 18-30.
Doubts had been raised about whether the finding was significant.
But new data published at a conference in Paris indicates that, while small scale, the findings are robust and statistically significant.”

Exciting, but while statistically significant sounds very scientific and reliable (the results were published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) no less), the journalists should have read the report itself. The figures reveal a little sleight of hand.

The study randomised over 16 000 people to either the vaccine program or a placebo, with none of the participants knowing what they had (a double blind trial — the best sort). The randomisation here is key, as the study was rather underpowered and was only likely to produce a marginal result at best, and any deviation from this randomisation may have introduced biases that were hard to spot.

The researchers actually carried out three statistical tests on the data from the trial: intention to treat (ITT), per-protocol and modified intention to treat (mITT) analyses. The first two look at those participants who were enrolled (ITT) or completed the treatments (per-protocol), and so preserve the randomisation of patients. These both failed to show a statistically significant benefit from the vaccine.

The mITT process removed several people from the analysis, both breaking the randomisation and producing a statistically significant result. This might have been useful if the vaccine had a clear benefit, but the published benefit was not 31.2% exactly. Rather the confidence interval for the benefit (the range in which the researchers were confident that the true benefit figure lay) was 1%-52%, with the lower bound only staying positive because of the arbitrary choice of 95% confidence intervals chosen by statisticians over the years.

With the two tests that avoided the possibility of bias getting ignored by the press (since they didn't make the press release), and the remaining result showing that the vaccine could have had no actual benefit, the publicity seems a little unjustified.

Has Teacher Pay Really Improved Under Labour?

2009-10-08T20:32:00.010+01:00

With the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, signalling a public sector pay squeeze, and the ever more political and activist head of the Audit Commission quango, Steve Bundred, recommending a pay freeze as “a pain-free way of cutting public spending”, it is worth looking at the figures to see how much teachers have really benefited from government largess during the boom years.

The answer, in case you don't want to read to the bottom to see the graph, is not at all!

Bundred wrote in the Observer last Sunday:

“let's dismiss the notion that spending on health and education will be protected. There are good reasons why they won't and shouldn't. One is that, at a time when inflation is likely to be between 2% and 3%, a pain-free way of cutting public spending would be to freeze public sector pay, or at least impose severe pay restraint. This is especially true if real wages in the private sector are still falling.”

adding a political stance with:

“Health and education will not be immune from pay restraint, partly for reasons of fairness to others, … and also because ministers will correctly assume that as public sector workers have done well over the past decade, they will tolerate some modest real reduction in earnings.”

This is misleading in two ways.

Wages Are Not Falling

First, although pay growth has slowed, wages are not falling. As Ken Mulkearn of Incomes Data Services wrote in the Guardian, the reported negative private sector pay awards are skewed largely by the loss of bonuses in banking:

“The data for April 2009, using figures not seasonally adjusted and excluding bonuses, shows earnings growth of 2.5% in the private sector and 3.3% in the public sector, consistent with IDS research on pay settlements. In the private sector, the official figures show manufacturing (where most freezes are) at 1% and private services at 2.9%.”

Teachers Have Not Seen Pay Rise

Second, teachers have not done well out of the last decade, despite repeated claims from ministers and the uncritical acceptance of this factoid in the media. The graph shows an index of how (sixth form) teacher pay, which has been largely pegged to school teacher rates, has increased compared to the All Items Retail Prices Index. I start at 2001 as that is the earliest data I can find from the teacher union websites.Clearly, our pay moved ahead of inflation for the first couple of years, but since 2004 there has been steady slide. Not bad, but we've hardly “done well over the past decade”

What? Ministers are Being Deceitful?

Now, I don't mind joining in on a general belt-tightening, but at least I would like my pain to be recognised — I can't bear to have the millionaire ministers looking down their patrician noses at me, feeding me lies about my own pay and telling me that I should be grateful to have had it so good.

How to Choose a School

2009-09-27T20:42:00.003+01:00

Once upon a time, secondary schools had catchment areas and feeder primary and middle schools. The parents' role was simply to aid the transition and buy a new uniform and pencil set. Life was simple. But not now.

There is a bewildering range of information available about schools, from the percentage of GCSE A* to C to the school's Index of Multiple Deprivation and Free School Meals, as well as the Open Day visits. However, the complexity of the data masks the main truth that the story it tells is simple and not so hard to judge.

It boils down to this: will your child raise the tone of the school or be raised by it?

League Tables

First, the league table figures you see in the broadsheet newspapers are easy for schools to massage, and they rarely tell you anything you didn't know any way.

Everything from entering pupils into easy online IT course and vocational BTEC subjects, officially worth several grade C GCSEs each but with a much reduced challenge, through to picking out a couple of dozen lazy grade D boys and squeezing them until the pips squeak and they get a clutch of grade Cs. Coursework regulations, intended to ensure that only a pupil's own work is submitted, are routinely ignored, with substandard work repeatedly marked and returned until it is good enough. Schools will even switch exam boards to chase those examiners that 'grade high', often following the appointment of a new head teacher looking to quickly make their mark.

These dodgy practices are sometimes apparent in the figures as a series of sudden jumps in the A* to C rates, as each new trick comes online, when even brilliant changes should take some time to feed through as new pupils move up the school with a new system.

A Social Measure

The league tables do, however, tell you much about the economic background of the families whose children make up a school's population. If you compare the league table with the ranking according to the government's Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD), you find they measure substantially the same thing. A school high in one list will be low in the other. (For those interested, the rank correlation is around -0.75, at least in my county). The IMD accounts for around half of all the differences between schools in the tables, which makes it a more important measure than any other single factor.

So league table position, GCSE A* to Cs, and all that complex data tell you little more than you could find out from parking near the school and watching the children as they pile out at the end of the day. Posh or rough? And if you are applying to local schools, then you already know their social make-up.

Ignore the Flashy Talk

Ignore the head teachers' Powerpoint presentations, where they tell you that the school is more than just a few numbers but here they are anyway, and go on a tour around the school. (However, a really poor presentation can tell you something about their attention to details.) Talk to the tour guide and talk to pupils you find in the corridor. Peer into any classroom with the door closed, and see what the children are doing when they think they're not being watched. Talk to the teachers, but not about the school, since they will be on their best behaviour and supporting their employer — ask them about themselves and their job. Teachers spend their days talking, so get them talking about their days and experiences and be interested in them. Are they at home and comfortable in their jobs, do they travel for to be here, and do their own children attend the same school?

Culture

The league table position tells you how the school did with the mix of children they had, but it tells you little about how your child will do. So the real question is: can you see your own child fitting in with the children you have seen there?

It is not the prefects who showed you round you should be watching, who really ought to be smart, but the surly ones who've found their way to the corner on the back row of the class. There will always be some, but if there is more that a few in each room the teachers' jobs become much harder and the easy children get less of the teachers' attention.

The task of choosing a secondary school has become very complex if all the school gate discussions are to be believed. But, in reality, the judgement to be be made can be made without reference to all that conflicting and compromised data $mdash; just try to picture your child in amongst those who you see in the classrooms and corridors.

Will your child raise the tone of the school or be raised by it?

On Keeping Gimmicks Out of the Classroom

2009-09-06T13:20:00.013+01:00

Having resisted all manner of education gimmicks and fashions that have been thrust at me by well meaning college managers, it was refreshing to read the latest piece written by renowned undergraduate textbook writer and educator, David Griffiths. Published in the IoP magazine Physics World, Griffiths reminds us that Physics sells itself to students if presented honestly:

“Physics teachers are fortunate (I am among friends, so I can speak frankly): ours is a subject the relevance and importance of which are beyond question, and which is intrinsically fascinating to anyone whose mind has not been corrupted by bad teaching or poisoned by dogma and superstition. I have never felt the need to "sell" physics, and efforts to do so under the banner "physics is fun" seem to me demeaning. Lay out our wares attractively in the marketplace of ideas and eager buyers will flock to us.

“What we have on offer is nothing less than an explanation of how matter behaves on the most fundamental level. It is a story that is magnificent (by good fortune or divine benevolence), coherent (at least that is the goal), plausible (though far from obvious) and true (that is the most remarkable thing about it). It is imperfect and unfinished (of course), but always improving. It is, moreover, amazingly powerful and extraordinarily useful. Our job is to tell this story – even, if we are lucky, to add a sentence or a paragraph to it. And why not tell it with style and grace?”

He goes on to criticise the gimmickry that is supposed to gain better attention from students. He has this to say about the advent of flash cards and electronic clickers:

“They can be powerfully effective in the hands of an inspired expert like Mazur, but I have seen them reduced to distracting gimmicks by less-capable instructors. What concerns me, however, is the unspoken message reliance on such devices may convey: (1) this stuff is boring; and (2) I cannot rely on you to pay attention. Now, point (2) may be valid, but point (1) is so utterly and perniciously false that one should, in my view, avoid anything that is even remotely open to such an interpretation.”

The point is made that any new approach to teaching will produce measurable improvements, but only because of the enthusiasm of the practitioner. Infectious enthusiasm is most likely the key, and not all teachers have that, so maybe the gadgets help these classes. But I'm not convinced.

Griffiths was known as a great lecturer and scorned such fashions. You can hear one of his lectures here, audio only, though, without the luxury of visuals.

Boys' Results Improve Now Maths Coursework is Scrapped

2009-08-28T22:40:00.007+01:00

When GCSEs were introduced two decades ago, one of the aims was to help girls catch up with boys in exams. The plan was a classic case of unintended consequences: the requirement for GCSEs to be graded with at least a quarter of the points from coursework has resulted in girls being awarded higher grades across the board.

Although boys and their lack of conformity in the classroom attracted the blame for their deteriorating grades by the feminised teaching profession, the truth is out: boys can doing better than girls. In Mathematics boys are now outperforming girls in all the higher grades.

So what has driven up their scores? Extra relevance of lessons? Better teacher training and school discipline structures? Lessons moved to inner city football clubs or fishing trips for malcontents?

The solution has been obvious for ten years, but has only been implemented because it has become obviouse that work completed at home was open to widespread plagiarism. It has worked for Mathematics GCSE as well as all the International Baccalaureat courses. What is holding the government up from rolling this great innovation to all subjects?

Or the QCA could allow schools to offer the IB and let market forces choose.

A Level Results will bring Clearing Heartache

2009-08-18T12:23:00.012+01:00

Results day is nearly on us, but those unfortunate students who miss their offer grades will have fewer options than usual this year. There is more competition, and even the standard fallback, clearing, will not have many course places to offer.

For a quick assessment of the regular effects of this silliest part of the silly season on teachers check last year's post on the matter (the newspapers will just roll out the same stories anyway). This post will focus instead on the students.

This Year is Different

This year is different for anyone biting their nails waiting for Thursday's results, because of the combined effects of three government policies:

One is the often discussed grade inflation, which leads ever larger proportions of the school population to feel they have what it takes to succeed at university, and allows the government to claim standards are improving.
The second is the lack of funding to cover the extra costs to institutions of teaching the increasing numbers of undergraduates.
And the third is that, for the first time in fifteen years, universities will be financially penalised if they over-recruit.

Traditionally, students' applications to universities are based on the school predicted grades, which are inflated to improve the chance of an offer. It is not as risky as it sounds, since universities routinely allow students who only miss their offer by one grade to still keep their place. And everyone does it, making it fair, at least. And if they missed out, then last year 44 000 applied for course during Clearing, filling up the remaining university places.

Fewer Places

But now, with 40 000 extra applications and only 3 000 extra places, Clearing will only have around 16 000 places on offer, leaving 65 000 hopeful students without a place. And with a demographic peak reaching college in the next year or two, taking a year out and applying again next year is now looking to be a silly strategy.

One could hope that the main effect of all this is that only those students with poor grades applying to weaker institutions will suffer, but many students are unrealistic when it comes to selecting competitive courses at prestigious universities.

Rejections

Admissions officers are saying they will not allow any 'softening' of offers, so missing one A level subject by one grade will lead to a rejection. Even our local ex-teacher-training college-now-university will not soften requirements or offer places for clearing on any but the two most frivolous courses.

The next couple of weeks look likely to deliver heartache on a large scale.

NASA's LRO Spots Apollo Landing Sites

2009-07-18T15:54:00.002+01:00

Wow, what a set of images! Come on Moon Hoax types, put this in your pipe and smoke it. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has taken some great images of the Moon's surface during its commissioning phase. Resolution will improve in the near future as the orbit is lowered to its mapping altitude and the Sun rises higher to improve the signal, but even so you can see the landers, instruments left behind and tracks in the dust.

It won't persuade the dyed-in-the-wool deniers, but will be useful in turning students away from the dark side, having been left hanging by a naïve treatment in history lessons.

Pay Offer to be Staged

2009-07-08T21:35:00.005+01:00

I've just seen the new pay deal offered by sixth form colleges, and it wasn't what I expected. The pattern for the last few years is to match school teachers, who have been offered a 2.3% rise in September. The deal for college teachers is 1% in September rising to 2.3% in April.

This will be tricky for the unions in the current climate. With many in the private sector having pay cuts or job cuts and the government briefing the press that the public sector has done well in recent years, few teachers will have the stomach for a fight. But teacher pay has risen below inflation for a while now and has fallen 10% compared with other service sector employees in the last five years.

College funding is rising this year faster than student numbers, and there is money in the coffers to pay the award in full, so expect the unions to make plenty of noise over the next few weeks. Last year's increase was delayed until the new year due to wrangles between the staff side and the employers — looks like we'll be waiting a long time for a resolution again.

Why Are Lying Parents Socially Acceptable?

2009-07-05T12:56:00.006+01:00

Listening to Any Questions on BBC Radio 4 this week, I was surprised by the panellists' response to a question from the audience about parents who lie on school application forms. It followed the case of Mrinal Patel, who was accused by her council of fraudulently filling in an application for an over-subscribed primary school.

The panel, comic Will Self, columnist Rod Liddle and a couple of historians, all seemed to approve of parents who are economical with the truth because any good parent will do anything for the kids. Since when has the responsibility to push your offspring further and higher trumped any objection to being a deceitful two-faced liar?

Desirable school places are a limited resource - it is a zero sum game. What one parents gains from underhand behaviour, another will lose from following the rules, and this is an objectionable and immoral position to take. Claiming to be doing it for your child is a cop out - next we'll hear the great and the good on the wireless smugly claiming that they jump the queues at Tesco and Disneyland rides for the kids.

AQA GCSE: Physics Without Physics

2009-06-20T09:56:00.003+01:00

Last week England's largest exam board issued a Physics GCSE paper, aimed at our brightest youngsters, that required no mathematical calculations. Last year's GCSE Physics papers prompted the Qualifications and Curricculum Authority (QCA) to rule that Physics papers were not sufficiently challenging, but AQA has sunk to a new low.

The paper was the P3 Higher Tier one, so a series of conceptual deductions, calculations, simple algebra and graph interpretation would have been expected, but thousands of pupils were surprised by the disappearance from the exam of the bulk of what they had struggled to learn.

The anonymous quote about the three levels of Physics has finally become complete, officially:

There are three levels of Physics courses: Physics with calculus, Physics without calculus and Physics without Physics.

A paper made up from simplistic sequencing and qualitative statement questions is not suitable for bright or even average students, who were disappointed that they were not to be properly tested after all their rigorous preparation.

We need a new generation of scientists and engineers, but they will not be challenged or tempted by the new and 'accessable' Physics Without Physics GCSE courses on offer.

Who are these courses now aimed at? The maths-phobic or the future core of a technological society?

NUS Now Favours a Graduate Tax

2009-06-13T09:58:00.005+01:00

The National Union of Students (NUS) has long campaigned for a university education completely funded by the state and for a return of the system of grants to cover living expenses, so the announcement of their future funding proposals comes as a bit of a shock.

Wes Streeting, the NUS president, had been under pressure to suggest an alternative to the current system of loans to pay for the fees, which start to be paid back when a graduate passes an earning threshold. He describes the proposals an 'not a simple graduate tax', and he is right - it is not simple.

Instead of a flat rate, the NUS plan has a sliding scale of tax, ranging from 0.3% to 3% depending on earnings. Wes says that this is needed to ensure that those who benefit most from their education pay back most.
There is also a system to encourage companies to pay some of the debt for employees.

I think that he has missed the meaning of 'percent', in that a single flat rate ensures that those earning more pay more. The sliding scale is a nakedly redistributive tax measure. In the NUS's words, though, it is 'progressive'.

The main motivation for the NUS funding suggestions is the pressure from the top research universities to raise the maximum fees charge from 3000 to at least 5000 pounds per year. These universities offer more of the expensive laboratory based courses than the newer institutions and are struggling to fund them. One solution is to recruit even more foreign students, who pay a much larger market rate for their studies, but local students are missing out on places.

Wes Streeting does not want an education market, but with more demand for top courses than places, something has to be done. But why should someone with two Es at A Level, studying an endemanding course at a undistinguished local college pay the same as someone studying Engineering at Cambridge?

A well educated and motivated graduate will benefit from their education, although it is their character and abilities as much as their qualifications that determines their level of career success. With the existing income tax system the Treasure already shares in the success of the best and most employable graduates. If you earn more then you pay more tax.

What is the reason for a punitive graduate tax that seeks to milk those deemed to have a privileged education, who will already be paying a higher rate of tax than others?

Coming from student political hacks, one might suggest it is just the standard class envy of the jealous young socialist. A detail from the NUS proposals that supports this guess is the limit on paying for the cost of your education if you can afford it. Wealthy families who would be happy to completely fund a course will be prevented from paying more than a small percentage, since it is these graduates who will be paying way over the odds for twenty years and funding those on lightweight courses who will never be taxed enough to cover the cost of their education.

It is nice to see the NUS abandoning one of its cherished policies, but this proposal offers more light on the proposers than on future university funding structures.

Ofsted to Control Home Educators

2009-06-13T09:39:00.002+01:00

The government intends to extend its close control of day-to-day activities of schools to include inspecting the education provided by home educating parents.

As wth much of government policy, the pretext given is reasonable - to make sure that children not going to school are given the same protection due from the Every Child Matters agenda. Some ministers seem to suspect that home education can be a cover for child abuse or forced marriage, even there is little evidence this is the case, and the main abuse story right now is the conviction of a worker at an Ofsted inspected nursery school.

But does this fear require an Ofsted inspection, with all the political encumberances and demands? School inspections long ago changed from a supportive overview from education experts to a dogma ridden tool of control.

Parents are entitled to educate their children however they wish, without state interference. They even have the right to make a complete hash of it, as many do from my experience of trying to teach their offspring when they have outgrown their home studies.

Ofsted will pressurise and threaten parents as they do with schools, and the role will inevitable evolve to demand specific activities and curricula. Several European countries have already banned home schooling, and inspections would be the first step to declaring that the rights of children to a decent education are being violated.

Councils are already responsible for ensuring that children taken out of schools are receiving an education - the switch to using Ofsted will be the beginning of the end of the right for parents to educate their children as they see fit.

College Building Programme Saga Continues

2009-06-03T15:45:00.008+01:00

The LSC, the government funding body for Sixth Form Colleges, has written to college principles this week to admit that they have messed up again.

In April this year, they wrote to say that the few successful projects from the mishandled multi-billion pound college rebuilding programme would be selected and announced on June 3rd (today). The main criterion they had hoped to use was a readiness to start building within weeks, assuming that most projects would fail to jump this hurdle. Now the LSC admits that they had seriously underestimated the numbers that would succeed, and will not be able to make a decision this month:

“Many more colleges have put forward a case for their projects to be considered as 'shovel ready' than expected, and so unfortunately we are not in a position to ask the Council on 3 June to approve individual projects.”

Most of these project have started to build already or could do so by September, so this is already cutting it a bit fine for instructing the contractors.

So, to further cull projects, the suggestion is now to pressurise colleges to cut corners on their plans:

“The challenge for colleges will therefore be to radically reduce the cost and the scope and sourcing of the funding of their projects. Revisions to the scope of projects could include rethinking or deferring whole projects, or components of projects, in favour of a contribution to costs incurred to date and/or funds for refurbishment. We will only consider funding complete re-builds where they are absolutely necessary, which should be in only a few cases.”

And although not wanting to rush anyone into any rash changes:

“We will expect all colleges on the short list to come back with revised bids and plans by the end of the month …”

The other selection criteria suggested will favour urban regeneration and poor inner-city areas, so there seems little chance for my college's project to get the nod. It is a complete rebuild in a provincial Sussex town, and although we currently squeeze 1500 students into what was, half a century ago, built as a 600 pupil boys' high school, I don't see us getting very far up the list.

Who Gets Education in the Cabinet Reshuffle?

2009-06-02T20:06:00.005+01:00

With the Labour Party likely to get massacred in Thursday's European and county elections, the Prime Minister is expected to radically overhaul his cabinet.

The good news seems to be that the Ministry for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) will be rid of Ed Balls, who as Secretary of State has presided over the college funding debacle and its 2.5 billion pound black hole. The bad news is that it sounds like this financial genius is heading for the Treasury as Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Another worry is that we will get our seventh Labour minister in charge of education in twelve years (test yourself, can you name them all?) It could be argued that Balls, and the others failed to get to grips with such a large department's activities, not just because he was only ever interested in promotion, but because no-one stays in post for long enough to understand the job.

And looking around at the Parliamentary Labour Party, it is hard to see who could do the job, hasn't done it already before moving quickly on and has avoided making injudicious expenses claims.

Diplomas: Heading for the Vocational Course Graveyard

2009-05-21T20:57:00.007+01:00

Vocational education in this country has always been rather undervalued, but this is not due to a lack of public interest. Less academic pupils have flocked initially to each new course, encouraged by schools who find them hard to manage in the more traditional subjects. But each has failed in its turn due to political interference and the support of left leaning staff in university education departments.

The new Diplomas will go the same way unless the lessons of history are learned by the government very soon.

First Up — the GCSE

The first big attempt at gaining the parity of esteem for those who were directed towards the less challenging CSEs was abolishing them along with the respected O Level courses and replacing them with the GCSE. These courses removed the stigma of CSEs, which had less emphasis on knowledge, but introduced the worthless F and G pass grades. The last twenty years has seen some improvements in teaching standards, but there has been much sliding in examination standards to produce an endless increase in the average grades awarded to allow weaker and weaker pupils to be gifted the prize of 'good' C grades.

But of course, the big failure of GCSEs was to abandon the skills base of CSEs. The academic content of O Levels was extended to all pupils, regardless of ability, in a vain attempt to prove that all could match what had been restricted to the brightest children. The weakness of this socialist fallacy, that differences between people are imposed from without and weak pupils are weak due to schools' low expectations of poor working class children, is that there is no one course that is suitable for all children.

This has always been accepted in the fields of sports and music, where talented children are taken and trained separately, but has been rejected for History and Mathematics. I'm not suggesting that maths whizzes are given one-to-one lessons away from their peers, just that it is not outrageous to suggest that schooling should recognise differing levels of talent by offering more tailored courses.

Next — GNVQs

More recently, the General National Vocational Qualification (GNVQ) was introduced to allow an option for pupils to follow a skills based course that was (another bugbear!) more focussed on life and job skills. All well and good, the English education sector had been calling out for such an approach for those teenagers who did not benefit awfully well from the academic O-Levels and GCSEs.

However, the politicians got to them first, requiring the exam boards to design into them a knowledge component comparable to existing courses, to avoid the press frenzy of "dumbing down" headlines. And with the facts and theories to learn there came the inevitable formal assessment of that knowledge in exams.

The poor children never stood a chance, since those that schools directed onto these courses had always failed exams. The only solution for the exam boards was to water down the rigor of the exams - dumbing down happened anyway, but the courses became less and less popular with students. Schools loved them, because GNVQs were so easy to pass those schools who enrolled most onto the courses did best in the exam 'league tables'.

Now Diplomas

Now we have the latest incarnation of the vocational option. Will it fare any better that the earlier attempts?

If they are to succeed they must be properly designed, with time allowed to review and redesign them. But the timetable has political significance, and the full roll-out must follow immediately from the trials, with final materials in teachers hands before they are actually completed. Government ministers should allow the course designers to make the detailed content design decisions without anyone looking over their shoulders.

And critically, must not try to reach too diverse a group of pupils, although the Advanced Science Diploma already seems to be aimed at all from future laboratory assistants to future Nobel Prize winners. There is a very good argument for having a separate course for those anticipating going on to science-based degrees. Having one course with multiple routes through will cause confusion and damage the qualification's credibility.

The introductory version of the Science Diploma does not have a clear target group either — is it aimed at beigh a taster for those who might like to enter science based industries, or should it be a first step up the ladder for those who are capable of higher level study? It can't do both.

Parity of Esteem Cannot be Mandated

The government has already delayed the introduction of the Advanced Science Diploma by a year, citing development difficulties, but the problems are likely to be intractable if they insist on one science course for all. If they don't pay heed to the science community the Diplomas will follow the CSE, GCSE and GNVQ to a long drawn out death.

Parity of esteem can only be gained for academic and vocational routes through having high quality courses. Mandating parity by blurring the distinctions is bound to fail.

Budget Helps Ease College Funding Crisis

2009-04-23T09:07:00.004+01:00

Ed Balls has had the Treasury go over his head and reallocate money to ease the Sixth Form funding disaster.

In two separate incidents, the quango LSC which funds Colleges managed to press the wrong button on its calculator (see College Building Program Halted and College Funding Balls Up pt 2.), but while the responsible minister, Balls, was unable to plug the gap, the Chancellor announced in yesterday's Budget that £650 million extra was going towards funding student places. A small amount of money is also to be found to allow a few of the most urgent college rebuilding programs to go ahead.

This cash is to come from £650 million of efficiency savings in the 2010/11 DCSF budget, apparently, despite the government's lamentable record on reducing budgets during previous bouts of saving.

NUT SATs Ballot

2009-04-16T19:44:00.005+01:00

The National Union of Teachers (NUT) has voted to scupper the SAT exams for eleven-year-olds this year, but it won't produce the renaissance in teaching they expect.

It is the teaching union silly season, and time for their AGMs. There is normally a flurry of embarrassing quotes from representatives that are quickly ignored, but this week a substantial motion has been passed by the largest union, the NUT. They have decided to ballot members for industrial action to disrupt the national assessment of seven- and eleven-year-olds (Key Stage 1 and 2 SATs), taking advantage of the recent collapse of the Key Stage 3 assessments and the dithering of the government minister Ed Balls.

Teachers generally dislike these assessments as they are unreliable and used for annual teacher appraisals, and now seems like the best chance in years to force a weak government to abandon them.

The massive expansion of national exams over the last decade or so, fed by the movement to modular exams that can be retaken an unlimited number of times at GCSE and A Level, along with the SATs (the National Curriculum Tests at ages 7, 11 and 14), has overloaded the exam boards' marking systems. There are simply not enough markers in the country to process all the papers. This caused the collapse of the Key Stage 3 exams last year, and has caused this year's results to be posted later than ever before, and appeals are expected to flood in shortly afterwards due to quality control problems, especially for the English assessments.

I have posted before that these tests have become too ‘high stakes’ to be useful and national standards should be assessed in other ways, but the NUT is not keen on developing a decent assessment system. They just want to be rid of the SATs.

Pressures

Their real problem, so they say, is that the pressure placed on pupils in the run-up to the tests is too great. Primary school children spend much of Year 6 preparing, practising the tests and taking test questions away to do for homework. Every child is given targets couched in the assessment language ('I'm now at level 3B for Writing, and I am aiming for a level 4C' the pupils will repeat) and the school inspectors check that pupils are aware of them.

True, the pressures are ridiculously high, and teaching to the test is so endemic that to suggest anything different to any teacher younger than 40 will get you a confused look. It is also true that the government has set up the system to be like this, despite their protestations of innocence, but the Union is picking on the wrong target deliberately, hoping that no-one will question their members' complicity in the whole affair.

Act Professionally

The teachers have a great deal of freedom in how they manage their classrooms day-to-day. If they do not want to pressure their charges then they should stop talking up the exams all the time. They should stop teaching to the tests and setting questions from previous years' papers, and they should certainly stop running the government funded 'Booster Sessions' - additional revision work for those poor souls deemed to be close enough to the pass level that they can be artificially pushed over the line with some special attention and pressure.

Instead of declaring the tests 'harmful' to pupils, the NUT ought to just tell their members to stop squeezing the last drop of exam performance from their classes simply to gain better pass figures for their annual appraisals and a higher league table position for their school. If the teaching unions want teaching to be treated as a profession, then professional behaviour must be encouraged. All the while teachers put ratings ahead of education their motives will be suspect.

Teaching Renaissance,

If teaching to the test stopped, whether by scrapping the tests or by teachers taking control of their classrooms, then, the unions say, the curriculum will become broader and children will have a better experience. But they are mistaken. Even if the test went, the skills of teachers to plan their own programmes of study have so withered that most teachers would not know what to do with the extra term of teaching. What would they do with no exam to prepare for? How would they know what skills to develop and knowledge to learn if it is not written down in great detail by the government?

'It's not in the test!'

When the SATs were first introduced, teachers had some idea of what schooling was for, some philosophy of education. But over the years those teachers have retired and the younger ones have only known teaching for national assessments. Those few who dare to go beyond the minimum entitlement laid down in the National Curriculum, following their pupil interest or their own enthusiasms, have been slapped down by managers with the immortal lines:

'What are you teaching that for - it's not in the test!'

The English teaching 'profession' has become so de-skilled that if the tests disappeared nothing would really change. If the prison doors were flung open tomorrow, most teachers would be too frightened of the freedom to go out into the daylight, doomed to pace around the same familiar cell.

College Funding Balls Up, part 2

2009-04-09T20:45:00.012+01:00

The college building programme, a desperately needed 2.7 billion pound project to replace crumbling and cramped buildings country-wide, has actually only got 110 million pounds to spend, according to the Prime Minister when questioned by a Member of Parliament. The whole national programme, then, could just afford to pay for the two Worthing rebuilds when there are 136 projects around the country on hold.

The Learning Support Council (LSC) funding story has descended into farce since I posted about the first problem a few weeks ago.

Many colleges have already spent up to 2 million pounds on the detailed planning provisions and face going bust if the projects cannot go ahead in the autumn as planned.

And then the LSC writes to every college in the country to confirm next year's budgets, allowing the recruitment to increase student numbers, only to decide later that they meant to say that these were provisional budgets, which will have to be reduced by 100 million pounds. With some colleges losing up to 250 thousand pounds from next year's accounts, redundancies look likely. Having built up expectations for college buildings that are fit to learn in (my college has 1600 students in what used to be a 600 boy middle-school), and emphasising the need for an expansion of education in a recession, the minister Ed Balls has messed up again. The head of the LSC has resigned, but Balls remains Teflon coated.

Physics Exams Too Easy, Says Ofqual

2009-03-28T14:19:00.004Z

Ofqual, the newly formed watchdog for exam standards, has assessed a variety of GCSE and A Level course assessments, and Physics has been found wanting. The grades awarded have been too high for the understanding demonstrated in the exams and there are now students on A Level courses who have an inflated expectation of grades in the summer. Some are in reality so poor they are unlikely to pass.

Despite repeated ministerial assurances that standard have not slipped, it seem that there is less demand in the 2007 Physics GCSE papers than in 2002. Even the head of Ofqual, Ms Tattersall, said in the autumn that she was confident that there had been no dumbing down, but she did what politicians never seem to do — she commissioned research to check. And the first research was published on Friday.

The Findings

It turns out that at the key grades of A and B candidates do not need to perform as well now as they did in the past. The level of challenge is less because the questions require lower order thinking skills, and in many cases can be answered without any Physics knowledge. There is also a greater reliance on objective type (multiple choice) questions.

Of course, this is no surprise to anyone who has been following the constant flow of independent research on the issue, especially from Prof Smithers and co at Buckingham University. Jim Knight, who has consistently ignored this research, claiming that inflating grades were solely due to the fact that the nations students and teachers were the best we've ever had, will find it harder to ignore the Ofqual findings. He had a letter on Thursday warning him what had been found, and he has kept his head down since.

Solutions and Problems

The exam boards have been instructed to change the exams to make them more challenging for this summer, stop awarding marks to incorrect answers and retrain their exam writers, but it is quite short notice.

In any case, they can't change much because there can't be allowed a sudden change in pass rates. So the easy questions get made more challenging, but the pass marks get lowered to compensate. Ofqual gets a rosy glow of self congratulation. The government takes the credit for a system well managed. And the more things change the more they stay the same.

Especially for the students.

Unrealistic Targets

A Level Physics has been largely consistent in its challenge, so the problem moves onto the Sixth Forms. The difficulty is that entry onto A Levels depends on GCSE grades, for Physics that means GCSE Physics and Maths. If the requirement is a grade C in Physics (or Science, which uses the same Physics papers that were assessed in the report) then we are allowing weaker students onto the course than in the past if those grades are less of a challenge.

And those students are given target grades based on what previous students with the same grades achieved in the past, and if standards are not consistent then those targets will become progressively less achievable. Targets must be reasonable if they are to serve any proper purpose, such as for motivating the students into some action after exams, or for assessing the performance of the teachers.

Already the system is being subverted in colleges. If a student meets the minimum GCSE requirements for a course (in the case of Physics at my college, it is five grade Cs or better, including a B in Maths and C in Science or Physics) then they are enrolled. A grade prediction is generated based on the mean GCSE grade, and a bit is added for encouragement. However, some students would get a prediction of a grade U (a fail), so these are changed to grade E+. It wouldn't do to let the student know that 90% of students entering with the same GCSE grade failed the course, would it?

The students of course, ignorant of the amount of effort needed just to pass, carry on in the time honoured way of just attending the lessons and doing no study. Until the day the first exam results arrive, they blunder on hoping that the class tests were wrong. When the 'fail' slip arrives, there is disbelief. They were let on the course, so they must be clever —how could they fail?

The Doomed War on Fatties

2009-03-18T15:59:00.006Z

The government's War on Fatties is doomed to failure because it is focused on the wrong issues.

People have poor diets for all sorts of psychological, social and financial reasons, but I have yet to meet anyone who thinks that inactivity and a diet of chocolate bars, crisps and chips is actually good for your health. Yet the government insists that re-education is the solution, and all would be thin if only the fatties would listen to them.

Especially the children — if only the government could get to them before their parents taught them bad habits.

So it becomes another job for schools.

Schools — The Universal Solution

So now children come home from primary school full of the official dogma, pointing out bad foods on their dinner plates, and waving a letter offering detail of the next fitness challenge. Sports days have lost any element of fun and competition, to be replaced by anodyne keep fit activities. Teachers even police lunch boxes to confiscate contraband. Everything in their young lives revolves, now, around their body image and health.

When our TV screens are full of anorexic presenters, and chubby politicians admit to being bulimic, shouldn't we be trying to steer youngsters away from an obsession with healthy living, and towards living their lives?

It Won't Work

Apart from the fitness freaks, people will do what they enjoy and eat what they like. If they enjoy eating good food and can cook it, then a better diet will be the likely outcome. If boys learn to enjoy competetive sports, and are allowed to win and lose, then the will develop character and fitness. And girls should be encouraged to dance, sing, ride if they don't like school team sports. Not for the shallow health benefit and being seen to meet a policy activity target, but because it is good to develop interests beyond the National Curriculum.

Teach children cookery instead of menu planning in Food Technology lessons. Make sports days competetive, teach children how to win and lose gracefully, show them the value of delayed gratification and the value of persistance and extended effort and teamwork.

We are sacrificing all those childhood opportunities, for building resilient and confident characters, on the altar of healthy living.

Problems Communicating With: Students

2009-03-13T15:44:00.004Z

Students and I very often have different conceptions of what Sixth Form study is about.

In my mind it is about getting to grips with a subject at a conceptual level, understanding the links and implications, and learning enough facts and skills to be able to be able to demonstrate that understanding.

The bulk of my students naturally see the lessons and exams as tasks to complete with as little effort as possible. I say naturally, because that is how they have been trained for years to see their education: bite-sized chunks to reproduce in modularised exams since primary school, ideas that are so simple that a bright pupil can learn without any effort and a less bright one by rote memorisation. These students who have made it onto my Physics course have been successful in that environment, and it is often hard for them to adapt to the holistic demands of A level that are more suited to their abilities as clever sixteen-year-olds.

The Paradox of Hard Work

The biggest problem I find with students is not that, under pressure for the first time, they don't work, but that they don't make the effort to learn. I get asked by parents why their child is not getting the grade As in A level that they got at GCSE the year or two before. Their child, they tell me, is spending hours working at home to improve their performance, downloading past papers from the exam board and doing more and more exam practice.

The reason, perhaps, is that they have been spoiled. All their teachers for the previous three years were working under the Damocles Sword of national exams, the results of which are naively used to rank schools, and to judge whether teachers deserve their annual pay rise. Many (but by no means all — a topic for a future post) know that teaching the subject is the best way to produce deep learning. But everyone ends up teaching to the test, with weeks to months every year taken up with exam practice and mock exams. There are exam papers for homework and past exam questions for revision exercises and class tests.

Eat, drink and breathe the exams. Technique is everything.

So of course, in my classes, the first time a topic gets difficult, students resort to one of three actions: conscientious study; blinkers or extreme hope.

Conscientious Study

The recommended route to success. It involves a full commitment to learning what is taught and thinking about it in a structured way, supported by a revision schedule and a small amount of exam preparation work. Rarely attempted.

Blinkers

The second action is worrying, since this represents a large group of rather well motivated students who expect to be successful. Mathematically strong students, finding grades slipping as the course progresses, decide that what is needed, and what worked last year, is to practise answering exam questions. Again and again and again. After an initial boost to test scores, improvements stall and further efforts produce diminishing returns and the pressure to `work harder'. Problem solving skills (really, just learning a few standard techniques) are shallow and can not remove the need for deep conceptual understanding.

Extreme Hope

The most common action by far is to do nothing and hope that everything will sink in eventually. Students are discomfited by the nagging feeling that they ought to be doing something, but prefer to do something else out of class. This has ever been so with students, and there is little to be done short of compulsion. My own College is caught between an official policy, of encouraging students to be responsible for their own learning, and the need to hold teachers accountable for every student's under-performance. We tell them to take responsibility, then deny them their just deserts and their chance to learn a life lesson.

The more they fail, the harder they hope.

But we can't let them fail, can we?

College Building Programme Halted

2009-03-04T21:05:00.005Z

The LSC, the government funding body for Sixth Form Colleges, has announced that they will continue to fund just eight of the pending College building project to completion. This leaves 79 Colleges, including my own, that have previously been approved, with a further 65 advanced proposals in limbo, as almost the entire national rebuilding project is put on the back burner. The press release ends with:

We will consult urgently, and as quickly as possible, with the AoC (Association of Colleges) and other key sector organisations on proposals and a strategy for prioritisation for future projects. These proposals and the future management of the programme will also reflect the conclusion of Sir Andrew Foster’s current review.

The government's response to a funding shortfall, then, is order a second inquiry before the first one is fully over, simply to sort a possible future strategy and, I expect, to keep it all going until everyone forgets what the worry was about.

The Association of Colleges has issued a brief initial response, here, but they are unlikely to be able to influence government delays. Many of the plans involved the colleges raising millions of pounds each from bank loans and selling off land for house-building — both sources that have dried up considerably in the recession.

For Those Who Can't Find Anything Better - Teach

2009-02-27T22:13:00.008Z

The Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has declared that the UK

… will educate the next generation of world class scientists; and that to do so we will work towards all pupils having access to single subject science teaching - with a guarantee that 90 per cent of all state schools will offer this within the next five years.

But, isn't there a national shortage of Physics teachers? I know it is hard to tell since the government stopped recording Physics teacher shortages a few years ago (they do report a 0.9% vacancy rate in science posts, since schools top up with Biology specialists), but the Centre for Education and Employment Research says in this report that a quarter of secondary schools don't have even one Physics teacher.

But, Gordy has a plan! As our industrial base implodes in the recession, all those engineers will be approached, "guaranteed", to train them as Physics and Maths teachers. "Come here my lovelies, teaching is better than the dole!"

After a decade of promising that all the education problems will be solved (remember "education, education, education"?), nearly all school physics departments, where they exist, are still hugely understaffed, more Physics teachers are still leaving than joining schools each year and perhaps 30% are due to retire in the next decade.

Recruiting a few down at heel industrial workers will not even work as a short term fix for the existing problems. There are better ways to tempt Physics qualified people into teaching than simply waiting for companies to go bust (see How to Recruit a Physics Teacher), but the government and unions will never take the necessary step of letting schools compete freely in the jobs market and offer attractive packages for people with shortage skills.

Problems Communicating With: Maths Teachers

2009-02-22T22:14:00.003Z

Now, you might think that there is nothing closer in colleges than Maths and Physics teachers, especially since at A Level they often both teach Mechanics to the same students at the same time. I support the Institute of Physics's suggestion that the shortage of Physics teachers could be eased if trainee teachers could train as joint Physics/Maths teachers, since many physicists are put off teaching by the requirement that they teach Biology as a general science teacher in schools. However, there are problems of incompatible approaches to be overcome, as I have discovered myself, since the Physics department in my college is part of the Maths department (moved from Science to even up team sizes).

Culture Difference

There is a problem of culture that has grown over the years and is transmitted to each new generation of teachers in the training colleges. Physics and Maths teaching have become isolated from each other, with no cross-fertilisation. New styles have been habituated in each subject specialism and they have now become radically different breeds. "Oh, we don't have time for applications!" said one Maths teacher, when questioned.

How can they be so different?

Physics teachers are trained and employed in a science context, with a focus on conceptual understanding, measurement, modelling and context. Mathematics teachers have become divorced from applications and have turned inwards. This is not necessarily undesirable, but many of their students (most, if you look at the Maths-Mechanics classes) study Physics and intend to enter Physics related degree courses. The Maths Departments' focus on narrowly defined problems leading to routine processing for a solution encourages students to rely on learnt techniques. This works fine for standard problems, but it is a distraction when dealing with unfamiliar problem types, which require a grasp of fundamental principles.

Student Coping Mechanism

Many students cope well with the differences, but a few always respond to difficulties badly: home study consists of learning the problem solving technique recipes and cramming for tests. When the unlearned concepts become a cause for declining scores, the response is to do more of the same. The next step is to request extra past papers to hone their technique, but this can lead to frustration as scores fail to improve and hour after hour are consumed chasing the wrong target. It is regular chore telling parents during meetings that their offspring are working terribly hard, but at the wrong things.

Now this is by no means the sole fault of Maths teachers, since this style of learning works well for GCSE Physics, but it is unfortunate that it also works well for A Level Maths. Many have never needed to get to grips with Physics concepts.

Incoherent Mathematics

The strangest difference I have come upon is that algebra is carried out using a bastardised version of quantity calculus. Quantity calculus, or quantity algebra, is the coherent system for dealing with physical quantities mathematically, as specified in the SI. Unit symbols are treated as mathematical entities, and the inclusion of units in workings is invaluable for helping students appreciate the physical basis of calculation, as well as helping them to spot errors when unexpected units appear with the solution.

My Maths teacher colleagues follow the exam board guidance, and claim to use SI units, but the units are all they use. A maths problem will specify, for example, that 'v = velocity in m/s', so the formula presented is unit specific, while in Physics the equations are valid for any coherent set of units, i.e. 'v = velocity'. The weight of a 300 kg mass is labelled as '300g' in a Maths problem, but with g defined as an acceleration, this makes the weight a simple multiple of an acceleration, not a force.

In Physics lessons, I expect my students to write '300 kg x g' to preserve the unit dimension. My colleagues told me that units were omitted because they caused confusion, with grams mixed up with the gravitational g, etc. Of course, there is no actual indication that such mix-ups actually happen. An additional inconsistency, Maths teachers are happy to write '1 mi = 1.6 km', without accepting that this means 'mi/km = 1.6', as this would give the units meaning outside the narrow unit specifications of variables.

Separated By A Shared Language

Maths and Physics teachers, although ostensibly sharing a love of the quantitative, speak different languages. Physics requires an understanding of principles and the importance of physical quantities, while mathematics allows the flourishing of technique over understanding, and introduces a hodge-podge of half-correct ideas that do not even give lip service to the needs of future scientists and engineers to use standard, coherent notation and techniques.

School Does Anything for Cash

2009-02-16T14:34:00.002Z

Our local primary school has taken a big loan to fund a new staffroom without knowing where the money was going to come from, and it is now struggling to make ends meet.

As a Voluntary Aided school the governors are responsible for paying ten percent of any capital expense, but decided to apply for a grant from the local authority first. The loan to cover the remainder needs servicing, and parents are being squeezed.

Prospective parents are invited to fill in direct debit forms along with the applications. Existing parents are charged for lessons for which, at most, voluntary contributions could be asked. Entry to see the Christmas plays was by bought ticket only. Children were even told, illegally, that they would be withdrawn from swimming lessons if parents didn't ante up.

As the headteacher told me in a private communication, the shool was concerned that if parents knew that payments were entirely voluntary, many wouldn't pay up.

Most tastelessly, though, the poorest families have had five pound vouchers dangled in front of them, theirs if they apply for free school meals. The free meals don't have to be eaten, the newsletter goes on, just claimed. The school can then claim an extra 70 pounds from the government's 'School Standards Grant (Personalisation)', which normally pays just five pounds per child at the school.

So the school knows there are some families on social security who haven't registered for whatever reason. But to try to bribe such people, with just five pounds when they have been asked to pay for a free state eduuation, is crass.

The school must think parents can be bought cheaply. I know running a school is costly, but the schools are there as a service to parents and children. Families should not be seen simply as funding units.

New Tory Education Policies

2009-02-07T18:02:00.008Z

Michael Gove, Conservative Party education policy wonk, has an alternative to the government's feeble response to the specialist teacher shortage.

Over the last decade, Labour has solved the Physics teacher shortage by making Biology teachers teach Physics, then declaring that there isn't a science teacher recruitment problem. (see Biologists Shouldn't Teach Physics) The acute shortage of maths trained teachers in primary schools is magically reversed by paying the more numerate teachers to attend a two or three week course in their summer break, returning to their schools as 'maths qualified'. Brilliant, but at the same time pathetic.

The long term answer, or course, is to allow some freedom in the market, and pay more for the teacher who has the shortage skills. Gove suggests that head teachers should be allowed to do just that, although the unions have a strong interest in preventing any local pay agreements - national pay bargaining is their most valued power. Opening more schools that can independently set pay rates could work, and Gove seems to be suggesting that, but the new City Academies have been free of council control for years, and I don't see evidence that pay is varied to ease recruitment difficulties.

It will be hard encouraging Heads to make use of such a power though, as many don't see specialisms as important. Why would a primary head teacher, of a school with respectable maths test results, want to spend more to recruit a maths specialist? Specialists have never been part of the primary scene, and it would be seen as an insult to the existing generalist teachers, especially if paid differently.

Independent schools, however, do take specialist skills seriously, and many vary pay rates — if government really wants to close the education gap between independent and state schools, then they must bite the pay bullet.

Vorderman to Lead Inquiry into Maths Teaching

2009-02-06T15:39:00.006Z

Carol Vorderman has been appointed by Conservative Party leader David Cameron to lead an inquiry into the state of Mathematics teaching. Yup, that's right, the TV presenter with a knack for mental arithmetic is going to be passing judgment on how children do maths in school and on examination standards in England.

Why does Dave think Vorderman is qualified for the job? She famously only managed a third class degree in engineering, she has shown her disdain for independent research by publicly joining the anti-MMR lobby and is a fully paid-up snake oil salesman flogging worthless detox diets and and dodgy financial products.

She said:

Maths is critically important to the future of this country but Britain is falling behind the best performing countries.

But the TIMMS study has England high up the international league table and climbing. Given her history, though, we can expect Vorderman to have a disdain for the normal rules for evidence.

Quite what influence her report will have when it is finally published, who can tell. But, if Jamie Oliver's foray into education is anything to go by, one can only hope it will be quietly put on the back burner.

Government "to bust myth of 'elitist' science"

2009-01-28T19:32:00.006Z

The Government's science awareness campaign is a pointless waste of money for everyone, except for the government itself, which will claim it is doing something to secure our technological future. The UK's Science Minister, Lord Drayson, has decided that too few students are taking up science or engineering careers because they think that science is too hard and elitist:

"Continued success in science is vital to our future - and yet there is still the perception among many of our people that science is too clever for them or elitist in some way.

"We must challenge myths like these if we are to build a prosperous, science-literate society, able to tackle the difficult issues that modern science presents and work them through to create the jobs and growth of the future.

So, his solution is to tell young people that science isn't hard or elitist! So there, job done.

Strangely, the press release announcing the Science [So What? So Everything] campaign links to the 2008 Public Attitudes to Science survey, which showed that awareness of, and attitudes, to science was high and increasing. So why the expensive awareness campaign?

The real issue of course, is that, in spite of the fact that young people are aware of the importance of science in their lives, fewer are choosing is as a career.

Let me suggest what the government ought to be doing to encourage the uptake of science careers:

Keep science lessons difficult (for politicians, read 'challenging'.) Talented students are attracted by elite, high status careers, such as medicine. They will not be tempted by science if it is made too accessible. I want scientists and engineers to be clever — they should be seen as an elite.
The government should properly fund blue sky science, rather than focus on research with short term medical or environmental benefits. The stingy approach to astronomy and particle physics funding over recent months was very off-putting.
OFSTED should be reigned in and retrained: the education watchdog's penchant for fashionable trends, such as interactive whiteboards, computers and 'learning styles' has diverted attention from the skills teacher should be developing, i.e the one research has shown to work.
Encourage talented, able scientists to become teachers by making teaching high status (and, yes, elitist). The UK's science education is already one of the best in the world, as I posted on before, but most Physics teachers will retire in the next decade.

An awareness campaign just allows the government to claim it is doing something, without having to actually tackle the serious problems that are stopping the country from attracting the best student into science and engineering careers.

Chief Scientific Officer Criticised by Committee

2009-01-24T12:23:00.005Z

With Barak Obama championing the role of science in government in his inaugural speech, it is disappointing to see our very own Chief Scientific Advisor falling short of expectations.

Prof. John Beddington, has been criticised by the House of Commons Committee responsible for Science, the Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committee. As the government's most visible scientific expert, Beddington has a responsibility to champion science- and evidence-based decision making.

The committee, which oversees DIUS, found Beddington to be more equivocal than his predecessor, Prof. David King regarding the public funding of homeopathy, the reclassification of cannabis, and the role of evidence in government:

We are concerned that on homeopathy Professor Beddington did not take the opportunity to restate the importance of the scientific process and to state that what was important was the balance of scientific evidence, [and that he] has not chosen to challenge departments where no evidence was produced.
…
[he] is the Government Chief Scientific Adviser and we are surprised that rather than champion evidence-based science within government he appears to see his role as defending government policy or, in the case of homeopathy, explaining why there is no clear government policy.

King was known for dismissing silly ideas, so it is worrying that Beddington does not feel the need to put scientific truths ahead of political ones.

Modular Physics Courses Harm Deep Learning

2009-01-11T17:08:00.007Z

The change of A Level assessment from terminal exams to modules, examined every term or so, has increased exam success for students, but at the expense of a deep understanding of Physics.

The Curriculum 2000 program introduced Advanced Supplementary (AS) courses in the UK at teh beginning of the decade, to help give breadth to the A Level choices that students made at the end of compulsory schooling. Since they were only committing themselves to nine months, many people who had an interest in Physics, but were uncertain about its reputation for difficulty, felt they could take a chance. The effect on enrollment on to college Physics courses was immediate, with class sizes swelling considerably.

So why is it that Physics and Engineering degree courses have continued their decline in popularity?

Unintended Consequences

Class Size

Larger class sizes affect the time teachers can spend supporting individual students in the first year of the course, and the amount of preparation they can do, due to the increased quantity marking and reporting needed. Many students drop out after one year, but since large class sizes have become the norm, classes are cut to keep the student-staff ratio up. With the old two year courses, the classes shrank for the more challenging second year, allowing students to get one-to-one support more often and teachers to get a better understanding of each student's learning.

Dropping Courses

Weaker students, facing the prospect of failure after two years on a course, could find the motivation within themselves to work harder as the final exams drew nearer.

Being able to drop one of their three AS courses at the end of the first year encourages students to stick with the easiest courses in the attempt to maximise their haul of grades. This is no bad thing, and has contributed to the higher grades awarded in recent years, but there are serious side-effects.
For example, soon after their introduction I had a potential Oxbridge student, close to the end of the first year, excuse his recent lack of completed homework by saying he was thinking of dropping Physics (expecting grade A or B). Instead, he was considering continuing with Religious Studies (guaranteed, apparently, a grade A) as he wanted the status of a complete sweep of grade As, awarded to 26,000 students in 2008.

Schools are also tempted to encourage students to enroll onto easier subject, limiting science course uptake, but maximising the school's league table position.

Modules

The modular structure itself, though, is the biggest problem. Instead of a two year coherent course, designed to build concepts and skills progressively, students work towards six, largely independent, work units, called modules. Although the change was supposed to motivate students by keeping up the flow of high stakes examination, most of the effects have been negative and dangerous:

Most importantly, modules, with their regular schedule of bite-sized exams, encourage cramming and surface learning from the students and teaching to the test by teachers.
Mock exams, as a safe opportunity to test your progress, have lost their power to motivate.
The module structure of the exams discourages exam boards from using broad synoptic style questions in the module exams, with deep questioning left until the last summer paper. But of course, the patterns of thought have been set by then, and students often fail to grasp the interconnectedness of the subject.

Drop the Modules

Modular courses act as a disincentive for students to thoroughly learn and understand their chosen subjects. The January exams, at least, should be abandoned by colleges, and the time gained put to goo use teaching the students to understand and love their subjects.

No Leap Second for the UK

2008-12-30T14:15:00.005Z

The Guardian, the Times, the Mail and all the others have got it wrong: when most of the world experiences a leap second on the stroke of the New Year, and all their clocks need adjusting, the UK's clocks can carry on regardless.

Zapperz over in the US at the Physics and Physicists blog has the same story.

A Leap Second At The End of 2008
Don't celebrate too soon for 2009. 2008 is going to be 1 second longer than you expected due to a leap second.
"On New Year’s Eve, the international authorities charged with keeping precise time will add a single second to our lives. It will be the 24th “leap second” since 1972, and the first since 2005." (NY Times)
Or you can kiss someone one second longer at midnight. :)

Zz.

To give Zapperz some dues, the USA bases its time standard on Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), so our friends over the pond will benefit from the extra second.

Sadly, in the UK our kisses must be of the usual length. :(

The leap second applies to UTC (Coordinated Universal Time, based on the atomic clock standard), and it is needed to bring UTC into line with Universal Time (specifically UT1), which is based on observed mean solar time at the Greenwich meridian (Greenwich Mean Time) and so the Earth's rotation.

Unfortunately, the UK's time standard is defined in law as GMT (a.k.a. UT1). Similarly, anyone else whose time standard is UT1, such as Ireland, Canada and Belgium - so no leap second for us.

However, even though GMT is the UKs legal time standard, the National Physical Laboratory has one of the world's most accurate clocks and contributes to the International Atomic Time standard. The long wave time signal, broadcast from Anthorn Radio Station in Cumbria, is a UTC signal, while the internet and GPS clocks all depend on the same atomic time standard.

GMT, then, (as an Earth based time) is not used in reality anymore, despite its official designation as the source of British time.

Jim Knight wants more 'Flash and Bang'

2008-12-17T20:49:00.004Z

The just released 2007 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) has seen England rise to fifth position after the four yearly study looked again at the quality of the science education of fourteen-year-olds around the world (BBC report: England's Pupils in Global Top 10).

English students are beaten only by those from Singapore, Taiwan, Japan and Korea, with all of Europe trailing in their wake. Jim Knight is clearly pleased at this validation of Labour policies on the world stage, but he can't bring himself to ease the political pressure off over-burdened schools, even if they have done all he asked of them.

Party Pooper

Knight has looked and looked, and he managed to find some bad news in the report. That's right — science teachers up and down the country can stop partying, under the impression that all was well in their subject and a pat on the back was due.

Children are enjoying science less than they used to! There has been a 21% drop in 'positive attitudes' reported by the pupils, and Jim is not happy.

Teachers, go and sit on the naughty step.

Must Do Better

Being the best in Europe and the industrialised West is not good enough if a few far-eastern nations with fantastically well drilled children are better.

Knight says in the press release:

This shows we are on the way to being world class but as we move towards this goal we need to make sure every child has fun in the classroom as well as achieving good results.
…
I am determined to make maths and science more exciting subjects to teach and learn, and I want every school to have access to the most innovative and effective teaching methods. I want more action in the classroom and more problem solving and ‘flash and bang’ to enthuse our pupils.

A new OFSTED target, perhaps? Inspectors could report:Your lesson on nuclear power was well taught and the children learned well, but there wasn't enough 'flash and bang' for the lesson to be rated any good.'

Squeezing the Pips

Other countries to suffer from reduced student positivity included Singapore and Hong Kong — both in the top ten alongside England. Jim Knight seems to think that league table rankings and pupil enjoyment are independent of each other, but teachers have complained for years about the curriculum and targets straitjacket that they have to operate in, and the effect on the enjoyment that classes are able to have.

The government has squeezed children hard so that they achieve their potential, but the pips are squeaking now. If he was serious about restoring awe and wonder to school science lessons, then Knight and Balls would be cutting the testing and accountability burden.

Freeing teachers to impart some of their love for their subjects, though, would risk a slip in the rankings. And that would never do, would it?

Colleges Actively Diminish the Responsibility of Students

2008-11-29T20:06:00.017Z

In their never-ending quest for OFSTED pacifing statistics, colleges and schools infantilise those who should be preparing to move into adulthood.

The independent and responsible students, that everyone in education claims to want to produce, are self-motivated, either by the learning they gain from hard work or by the promise of qualifications at the end of their courses. They have learnt from failures in the past that hard work pays off. But, with external examinations two or three times a year and the introduction of rewards, for meeting minimum standards instead of genuinely good acts, we make them more dependent on short term and external sources of motivation.

Declining Responsibility

OFSTED, the UK government watchdog for education, despairs that even the oldest students show little independence and responsibility for their learning, while at the same time congratulating schools on their rewards schemes and the efforts they make to stop disaffected students from failing despite themselves. Chocolates, certificates and extra trips are used in the attempt to buy responsible behaviour, in the mistaken attempt that unearned compliments are somehow a more clever way to manipulate children than the old fashioned idea of just deserts. But of course, withholding a promised reward is itself a punishment that worryingly displaces more desirable motivations.

The Withering of Internal Motivations

Even sixth formers seem to require external motivations to get up in the morning, now that reward systems are being extended to the over-sixteens. Is it really necessary to give certificates to everyone who is not misbehaving, just to try and encourage a few young people who would be better off out of education?

The governments now plans to force all under-eighteens to stay in education or formal training. This will, naturally, make things worse. Volunteers will value the education they get more than they would as conscripts, even if they would have volunteered anyway, nibbling away

At the moment, the once fearsome mock exams, used for decades to motivate students mid-course, are now a waste of time. More than ever, the refrain "is it important?" is heard, meaning "do these marks go towards my final grade?". The proliferation of externally set exams means that class tests are seen as unimportant even by bright students, so they lose their power to motivate. Low scores are seen as par for the course, since no preparation was done.

The Result

The govenrment's focus on reducing the embarrasingly large number of NEETs (youths not in employment, education or training) will work against the policy of producing ever more motivated and independent young people. The pressure on schools and colleges to stop teenagers from learning their own lessons from their choices and behaviour, since it risks the school's league table position, is counterproductive.

The best lessons will never come from a government initiative delivered in a classroom.

Engineering Diplomas Only Partially Accepted by Universities

2008-11-21T20:31:00.004Z

With both Oxford and Cambridge reporting that they will accept Advanced Engineering Diplomas for students entering their Engineering degree programmes, the top Russell Group Universities now have a unified response to the Government's flagship education policy. But it is not accepted without reservations, as

… it is essential that the diploma sufficiently equips candidates with the skills and knowledge they need to flourish on our courses and we want to be fully assured that they are sufficiently robust and challenging academically. Our member universities are in the process of assessing the academic rigour and general suitability of the diploma as a route to higher education.

In fact, although the Advanced Diploma will be considered worth three A Levels, anyone applying for Engineering degrees at a decent university will need to take A Levels alongside it.

Cambridge University says that "Students wishing to apply with this qualification must also have an A-level in physics", and Bristol University, for example, is equally blunt: while some Faculties will accept Diplomas as full qualification for entry, "Mechanical Engineering [will need an] Engineering Diploma grade A, plus A grades in A level Maths & Physics."

Ed Balls,the UK Schools Secretary, has said the the Diplomas will become "the qualification of choice", and Schools Minister Jim Knight believes that this

&hellip statement recognises that the diploma is a demanding qualification and that students who work hard and achieve highly in their diploma will be able to study at any university they choose.

I don't think A Level Physics will be replaced by the Diploma any time soon.

'Coasting Schools' Attacked in the Latest Ministerial Balls-Up

2008-11-14T21:40:00.005Z

The Government is tilting at windmills again with a ministerial attack on imagined weak schools. Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, has decided it is time to tackle good schools for not being good enough. The press release says

Ministers are taking action after analysis shows that one in seven pupils do not progress a whole attainment level in English between the ages of 11 and 14. Until now ‘coasting’ schools have often missed out on focused attention and have been hard for parents to identify because of apparently satisfactory results.

This is appallingly wrong-headed for two reasons.

The Limits of Testing

First, it is in the nature of the tests that some pupils are awarded the wrong level. If everyone advanced by a whole level in their understanding, then the limited reliability of the tests would mean that a third will get the wrong level (or, about one in six would appear to have stood still for three years.)

A year ago The Primary Review, an independent two-year long enquiry into primary education in England, reported in its research survey Assessment Alternatives for Primary Education that

Regardless of the consistency of individual test items, the fact that a test has to be limited to a small sample of possible items means that the test as a whole is a rather poor measure for any individual pupil. This is because a different selection of items would produce a different result. Wiliam (2001) estimated the difference that this would make for the end of Key Stage tests in England. With a test of overall reliability of 0.80, this source of error would result in 32 per cent of pupils being given the wrong level.

This made a big splash at the time, for example here in the Guardian.

'Value Added' Scores

Second, the coasting schools will be identified if they meet any of a list of criteria given in the same press release, including if

The school’s Contextual Value Added (CVA) score is significantly below average;

There has been little or no improvement in the school’s progression rates over several years;

So a school that is consistently doing well needs a kicking if pass rates don't go up year on year, or if that school's particular challenges don't feature in the CVA ranking model. OFSTED, England's schools inspectorate, themselves say that categorising schools on the basis of CVA scores is "meaningless", as described by the BBC news item last August:

… in an example OFSTED gives it may appear that a school with a CVA of 1,009 is doing better than another with a CVA of 992.

"However, that would be incorrect," [OFSTED] says in new guidance to schools about the use of data. "In both cases, the range between the upper and lower confidence limits includes 1,000, so both schools are achieving average outcomes; their performance is about as expected."

The guidance adds: "No meaning can be attached to an absolute CVA value, and any ranking of schools by their CVA values is meaningless."

Homework for Ed Balls

Ed Balls needs to visit schools, not to "target" them (a rather aggressive term for what should be a supportive programme), but to study some maths. It is a shame that Mr Balls learned enough arithmetic at school to manipulate figures, but did not make a sufficient study of how to handle anything but the simplest data.

How to Recruit a Physics Teacher

2008-11-07T21:18:00.010Z

Plenty could be done to relieve the Physics teacher shortage, but no-one in power really wants to solve the problem.

The Problem

A recent open evening at my college produced plenty of potential students to start Physics A Level next year, but there was a distinctive pattern in their origin: very many of them were currently at two schools on the other side of town and these talked enthusiastically about their current Physics teacher. However, there were hardly any from the very large comprehensive just a few hundred metres up the road (or indeed from several other close schools.)

Without being able to talk to those non-attenders, I cannot be sure, but one likely reason stands out. There is no Physics teacher at the school, and there hasn't been one for years.

Now, this is by no means uncommon. A major report on the supply and retention of Physics teachers published in the summer by The Centre for Education and Employment Research said

it was possible to predict with 84% accuracy whether a school would have any physics specialists, essentially from whether it had a sixth form, its region, whether it had specialist status in science, engineering or technology, and the ability of its pupils as indicated by GCSE results.
…
Few schools with high ability children, low eligibility for free school meals and low special needs were without a physics specialist, but this was true of over half those with poor GCSE results and a high intake with special needs. Of the school types, grammars, voluntary controlled and faith schools tended to come off best, and small schools worst.

My area has secondary schools up to age 16, with a sixth form college for the 16-18 age group. One school with a sixth form in a town close by has a full complement of Physics teachers, as does my sixth form college, though I think that each of the local 11-16 schools has few or none. I say 'I think', because it is difficult to find out without contacts in the schools: they don't exactly advertise the fact on their websites, especially now most of them offer 'separate sciences', including GCSE Physics. It would be embarrassing. What they do claim, however, is that they have no science teacher vacancies. I am suspicious of this practice, though, since the secondaries with sixth forms elsewhere in the county are content to publish a staff list complete with their specialisms (Biology, Chemistry or Physics) instead of the generic Science Teacher label. See my previous post on this problem: Biologists Shouldn't Teach Physics.

Complications

Physics teachers, naturally, can make good use or their rarity. As most schools in the country are in want of a Physics teacher, they can pick and choose their school. A large proportion of Physics teachers want the intellectual stimulus of some A Level teaching and a good working environment, leaving 11-16 schools, especially in large urban areas where behaviour can be a problem, in a difficult position. The same report adds that

…turnover and moves to other schools were somewhat higher for physics specialists than for teachers in the other core subjects. The main driver of wastage in physics is retirement, which contributes a quarter of the total turnover and half the wastage. Nearly three times as many physics leavers as biology leavers were aged over 50. Some of the retirements were normal age, but most were premature, often stemming from a sense of dissatisfaction. About half the physics teachers were resigning to go to other state schools. The main reasons were promotion, re-location and wanting to get away from their present school.

This picking and choosing means that school are in a stiff competition for these people. But they often do not compete, so their pupils lose out.

Solutions

In many other industries the shortage would be eased but matching the rewards to the importance and difficulty of recruitment, but as national pay bargaining with the unions rules out differential pay, schools must be imaginative:

Create 'Physics and Maths' posts and the associated training courses, to allow teachers to avoid having to teach the other sciences. Biology teaching is not very popular with Physics graduates - a quarter of Physics qualified trainees abandon physics to teach Maths.

Offer posts with responsibility. These come with extra money, and can be tailored to keep the burden low.

Make more use of the discretionary payments that are already allowed for recruitment and retention purposes, but which are rarely used.

Bite the bullet, and advertise higher salaries for Physics teachers willing to teach in schools that cannot otherwise attract applicants. This should encourage the small number of teachers spread out more evenly and according to demand.

Lastly, encourage more Physics graduates into teaching by moving to a fully differential pay structure.

Why are the first three points not used more often to ease shortages?

I suspect head teachers are keen to believe that all science teachers should be able to teach all the sciences. This is obviously untrue, but is a popular conceit (I have only come across one non-Physics colleague who could understand Newton's First Law of Motion, for example, despite that topic being an integral part of the balanced science curriculum taught by non-specialists to all 11-year-olds).

The final two points provide the only reliable medium to long term solution for the the crisis. However, the educational establishment, such as it is, has followed the tradition of being politically rather left of centre, and there is a strong feeling that all teachers should be treated equally. The leftist teaching unions, which have a strong interest in solving the problem of chronic specialist teacher shortages, reject the dilution of their power in national pay bargaining negotiations, are the main stumbling block on the way to ending the crisis in state schools, even the new City Academies which have flexibility in their pay awards.

Independent schools can already compete financially for teachers - how many of these schools are short of a Physics master - so extending the market in teachers to state comprehensive could reverse the long decline in specialist Physics teacher recruitment.

Metric Tomatoes, Luddites and Lord Kelvin.

2008-10-27T20:56:00.009Z

Modern students, even those who have chosen to study advanced physics, cannot understand the full imperial system, and certainly are not able to calculate using them. This is occasionally demonstrated in class when a student complains that they can't relate to the metric SI units, and goes on to immediately demonstrate that they have no idea of how many ounces there are to the pound, or stones to the ton, or inches to the yard, or yards to the mile. They are certainly unaware of the coherent imperial unit of mass, the slug or the meaning of the fathom, acre or gallon, the chain, troy-ounce or nautical mile.

I strongly suspect that this is also the case with metric martyr Janet Devers, in the papers again for heroicly refusing to display metric units alongside the imperial ones, and bravely weighing out vegetables with pound only scales. Janet is launching an appeal against her conviction, which resulted in a £5000 fine and a conditional discharge. The Magistrate said

"We note that you said you were doing this in the interests of your customers, although you ought to have known you were breaking the law in doing so."

Indeed. Janet complained that a criminal record meant she would not be able to travel to the United States to see family. Poor thing.

Everyone under the age of 45 years has studied metric units exclusively in school, since the UK went metric in 1972, sixty-eight years after Lord Kelvin collected eight million signatures calling for the adoption of metric measures. That was a fifth of the population at that time.

Hansard records Lord Belhaven and Stenton, moving the second reading of the Weights and Measures (Metric System) Bill in 1904 as saying:

The metric system has been taught in the elementary schools under the Educational Code of 1900, but it is to be regretted that though the teachers give much time and trouble to teaching this new subject, in many cases the examiners have not asked any questions in that section of arithmetic. Therefore school teachers are very much disheartened when they find that inspectors seem to look upon it in a half-hearted way and they get no credit for the time they devote to the teaching of it. If this Bill passes it will be the means of infusing a great deal more energy into this particular subject.

and continues with

The second objection to our present system is the waste of time in teaching it to children. It is not alone the teaching of the tables which I have just referred to—it is the whole system of compound addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, and the system of computation called "Practice."

It is estimated, on high educational authority, that every child wastes one year of its arithmetical school time in learning these subjects and that in many cases the time lost is much greater. Last year inquiries were made of headmasters of schools on this subject, and 197 sent replies, of which 161 said that saving of time in teaching the metric system would be one year, thirty said it would be two years, and six that it would be three years. This gives a French or German child a great advantage over an English child, as the time saved can be applied to some more useful subject.

I should like to quote from one of the many letters received. The senior mathematical master of Edinburgh High School wrote— An average scholar would save at least a year and a half, probably two. This saving is great in itself, but if it be considered how much he saves by not being subjected to a wearisome process of acquiring the knowledge, say, to convert ordinary yards to poles and vice versâ, or square yards to perches and give a rational remainder, and the wearing out of his nervous system—not to speak of the teachers'—I conceive it to be not only a saving of time but an economy of mental effort which is incalculable. The objection does not lie only in the time which is wasted. The child is wearied and disheartened by the difficulties of the subject; and, in the case of boys at our public schools, many get such a distaste for arithmetic that they lose all desire to study mathematics afterwards, and I think this has much to do with the low standard of mathematical knowledge in this country.

Modern students, even those who have chosen to study advanced physics, cannot understand the full imperial system, and certainly are not able to calculate using them.

The Physicist, Mathematician and Engineer Lord Kelvin supported the Bill in 1904, noting in passing that the Metric system was a English invention:

While we are grateful to France for having given us the metric system, while we see France, Germany, Italy, and Austria rejoicing in the use of it, and benefiting every day by the use of it, it is somewhat interesting to know that, after all, the decimal system, worked out by the French philosophers, originated in England In a letter dated 14th November, 1783, James Watt laid down a plan which was in all respects the system adopted by the French philosophers seven years later, which the French Government suggested to the King of England as a system that might be adopted by international agreement. James Watt's objects were to secure uniformity and to establish a mode of division which should be convenient as long as decimal arithmetic lasted.

A hundred years ago, elementary schools in England started to teach metric units, while the Germans changed over completely in two weeks without obvious difficulty.

A century later, the Luddites seem to be winning.

SATs for 14-Year-Olds Scrapped

2008-10-15T09:31:00.005+01:00

Ed Balls has finally bowed to the inevitable, accepting that the English examination system is far too bloated and there are not enough markers to process national exams for all 7, 11, 14, 15, 16-year-olds in the country. The disastrous management of last year's Key Stage 3 National Curriculum Tests (the age 14 SATs) has forced Balls to cancel them permanently. It is a shame that he did not do this for educational reasons (for example, see this previous post), but the move will still be welcomed by parents and teachers.

The main problem, though, of these national tests has always been their narrowness. They only test a predictable subset of the National Curriculum, with a question style that does not vary, making them susceptible to coaching, or teaching to the test.

However, the huge pressure on teachers to teach to the test, bleated about routinely by the unions and criticised in report after report, could be eased by two simple measures:

First, the General Teaching Councils could declare that teaching to the test was unprofessional. Teachers will then be free to do the right thing and stop pressurising the pupils.
Secondly, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority should both take control of the copyright of the past test questions, banning their unauthorised reproduction and use in classrooms, and change the style of questions each year.

Without an obvious test to teach to, and no reliable past questions, the pressure will be on to teach the whole curriculum - exactly what was originally intended when the National Curriculum was introduced.

Biologists Shouldn't Teach Physics

2008-10-13T20:54:00.004+01:00

Essential, foundational ideas of physics are being presented to children by teachers who know nothing about them themselves. Able children are being undermined by the belief that there is nothing in the compulsory science curriculum that cannot be taught by any science teacher and that physics teachers, bringing only enthusiasm to an inherently dull subject, are therefore not required for physics lessons.

Having just finished a unit on forces and motion with 16- and 17-year-olds, we started on work and energy. After some introductory discussions and activities, the students were given a task to research and describe how wind turbines worked, in preparation for a study of the work done by the wind. Prompted to describe how the wind makes the generator turn, each student wrote that the wind's energy did it. When pressed, one offered that the wind's kinetic energy spun the blades and the blades' kinetic energy was turned into electricity. How does kinetic energy do that then? Well, the generator turns kinetic into electricity, they said, something to do with magnets.

Well, that's just dandy, as it is really no more than a plausible sounding 'just so' story. Without the technical terms the explanation is empty. "The wind turbine has something about it that makes electricity from wind" has nothing of substance and only a patina of education. The answers are routinely consistent with the idea that energy is a sort of fluid with some physical reality, akin to the caloric whose existence was disproved when Joule showed that heat was a method of energy transfer.

So how do bright pupils routinely get through secondary school physics lessons without a working understanding of the relationship between work and energy?

The short answer is: biology teachers.

Well, not their existence per se, but their willingness to teach physics topics about which they know nothing. That, and the connivance of school managers and government ministers who pretend that every biologist, chemist, environmental scientist, biochemist, physicist, engineer, geologist, metallurgist and zoologist can be treated as a generic science teacher, and should be able to teach any science specialism to any class up to age sixteen.

Of course, that is a self-serving cynical delusion. Cynical, because having that belief allows a head teacher to claim that their school has no vacancies, even when, as is the case with at least one school that feeds to my sixth form, they have had no physics teacher for several years. That school even takes the brightest pupils and teaches them more than the minimalist physics in the 'double science' GCSE, dragging them through separate biology, chemistry and physics courses without even bothering to employ a specialist physics teacher.

But does it matter? Can't a graduate scientist teach any of the simple topics that appear in the secondary curriculum, as long as they refrain from teaching A levels?

The response must be a clear 'no'. It should be shouted from the rooftops and at all education ministers, head teachers and science department heads. Specialist science teachers are not interchangeable. Biologists, especially, do not understand physics. They are often required to teach Newton’s Laws of Motion and Energy to the younger secondary pupils, but I have yet to meet a biology teacher who understands them even in the shallowest terms.

Asked about his willingness to teach from a position of ignorance, a biologist Head of Science shrugged it off with a “Well, that’s physics”, while more recently qualified teachers say they think that they teach physics better than the specialists as their difficulties with it themselves puts them closer to the children’s’ experiences. Honestly! I have heard both comments several times.

Secondary schools in inner-city areas, schools without sixth-forms and those whose managers insist on making physics teachers teach biology and the biology teachers physics, will continue to lose physics teachers, and pupils will fail to see the wonder and coherence of physics.

Patten versus Denham

2008-10-04T20:54:00.006+01:00

Universities Minister John Denham has heaped criticism on Chris Patten after his speech at the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference last week, for suggesting that universities could not “make up for the deficiencies of secondary education”:

It is my belief that there is now widespread acceptance across our universities that the current system does not yet capture all the talent that exists in young people across the country, which is why it is all the more disappointing to hear the comments of critics like Chris Patten who have an outmoded view of the central issues in widening participation.

For Denham, "widening participation" seems to be the sole function of elite institutions. He cannot, being a good Marxist, bear the idea that Oxford will not admit the badly educated. Chris Patten, one-time Education Minister and current Chancellor of Oxford and Newcastle Universities, had complained that:

However hard we try to widen participation at Oxbridge, and I am sure you could say the same at many other universities, there is no chance whatsoever of meeting the socio-economic targets set by agents of government so long as the proportion of students getting A grades in traditional academic A-level subjects at private and maintained schools stays the same. It is as simple as that.

It is as simple as that.

As I wrote in a previous post, poorly qualified students do not do well at university. Trying to identify some degree of intrinsic worth or talent in a student at school and then transplanting them to a Russel Group university will not work: an undeveloped talent is not a sufficient preparation for advanced study. A clutch of grade As at A level is not a guarantee either, but like it or not, if a student cannot get high grades at school, for whatever reason, they will start university a long way behind their classmates.

Can universities be expected to make up in three or four years the educational scars left by thirteen years in an inner-city sink school? Denham thinks so, saying that "Education is the most powerful tool we have in achieving social justice." If he means that accepting weak candidates onto challenging courses is an indicator that social justice has been achieved, then he is seriously deluded. It is not just to set up these poor people for such a fall, as fall they will.

Social justice should not be treated as simply another high-stakes key target that can be improved by crudely manipulating the indicator variable (percentage of sink estate kids at Oxford) directly by coercing universities. The indicator is only useful if it improves indirectly, as a result of better schooling, and that will need a whole slew of 'indicators' to be manipulated: financial poverty of families; poverty of ambition in much of the working-class culture; the flight of good teachers to 'good' schools; the lack of specialist teachers; and many others.

Of course, this is a difficult task. So difficult that no country has ever solved the problem. Bashing 'posh' universities in the press is much easier.

To give the government some credit, though, Denham was making his comments about Lord Patten at a conference for the AimHigher project, which is a major scheme to tackle poverty of ambition by supporting and encouraging children who come from families with no history of Higher Education to consider university and professional careers. My own college has received money to pay for such a scheme from this project and is currently identifying and briefing suitable students and their parents.

I know this, not because of the high quality of internal staff communication, but because several students disappeared from my classroom suddenly, missing two hours of their physics lesson. Apparently, they had been instructed to skip their lessons to attend the compulsory AimHigher meeting.

Hasn't anyone learned?

Science Exams Don't Test Science

2008-09-28T12:39:00.004+01:00

SATs exams are routinely used by many schools as standardised questions for class use and homework. After setting the school mandated homeworks for 13-year-olds, containing nothing but past exam questions, for their science homework, I have often been disappointed with the supplied marking schemes. The questions themselves are intended as summative test items to sample pupils' knowledge based on the 3-year long curriculum. What I needed for proper teaching was formative tasks based on what I had intended them to learn.

But issue the homeworks I did. And then the marking became a problem, not because is was onerous (there are few tasks that need less thought than marking test questions to a detailed mark scheme) but because the required answers were often incorrect or incomplete. Questions are written to correspond to specific curriculum learning targets, not in itself a problem, but when those targets are simplistic or read naively by the exam authors then science can go out of the window. Weak pupils gain credit for wrong answers because the question was not specific enough, and bright pupils lose marks because their perceptive answers went beyond the curriculum statements. The examiners often mistake a list of examples in the statements as being the limit of possible answers: for example, contributions to global warming may include the carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning (obviously), but not the energy released from the same processes (a smaller, but real, contribution).

Similar problems have been caused by the current fashion for schools to purchase the exam boards' authorised textbooks, even though they are written to the test and encourage surface learning without depth. The worst problem by far for these texts, though, is the large number of errors in them and subsequent teacher responses. The errors are understandable given the short timescale for major changes imposed on the boards by the controlling authority, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA). However, most colleagues I have discussed this with are unconcerned, with the majority seemingly happy to go with the flow. I have even been told by one head of department that we ought to teach what was in the book even if it was wrong. The reasons? Whatever was in the book will be marked as correct in any exam since the book was authorised by the exam board, and it is better to avoid causing confusion in the pupils!

The whole rationale for education has been subverted by the focus on exam marks. Exam marks are more important to students than knowledge. Subjects and exam boards are chosen on the basis of how lax their marking is to improve the students' chances and any attempt at rigour is seen as undermining the school's purpose.

The Sunday Telegraph has obtained documents from the QCA under the Freedom of Information Act:

Internal documents show that concerns raised by experts about accepting wrong answers in the test, taken by thousands of 14-year-olds in May, were overruled by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority.
In a question which asked what organs a riding hat protects, the answer "skull" was accepted as correct - even though the skull is not an organ. Examiners were also told to award a mark to "ears" despite a graphic which accompanied the question clearly showing the riders ears outside the hat.
In another question, which asks pupils to describe how chalk changes when shaken in a container with granite, the word "weathered" was accepted as correct, against the advice of experts who told QCA that is was "completely incorrect".

QCA has known of the problems, but thought that correcting its exams would reduce the grade statistics for that year. Instead, teachers can continue to teach to the test , safe in the knowledge that a real examination of their charges' understanding will not be made until they get to university.

Ofsted: Maths Exam Progress Is Not Evidence for Better Education

2008-09-20T19:07:00.007+01:00

In their report, Mathematics: Understanding the score, Ofsted bemoans the amount of teaching to the test that goes on. It seems that, after many years of squeezing ever increasing exam grades out of children, they have finally seen some of the damage they have caused.

Their press release says that many schools...

...are not teaching mathematics well enough because they place too much emphasis on routine exercises and on ‘teaching to the test’. While this style of teaching prepares pupils to pass examinations, and gain necessary qualifications, it is less effective in promoting the required understanding to apply mathematics to new situations, solve problems and communicate solutions.

So, after years of forcing school results to climb improbably, under the threat that the satisfactory is not good enough mantra will blight their reports, are Ofsted going to back off from damning teachers who are devoted enough to their charges to ignore the unprofessional pressure from managers and HM Inspectors?

Like hell they will!

Managers will still be sweating over a tenth of a percentage point drop in the A* to C figure and Heads of Department will still be coercing teachers to keep marking and returning the coursework until it is right. Pupils revealed as just below the threshold grade D or level 5 from the relentless practising past-paper will still be enrolled on Ofsted endorsed Booster Sessions whether they need this additional support or not while needy students in lower grade bands are left to flounder.

Leopards don't so easily change their spots. This report will be, however, another excuse for inspectors and politicians to lean on teachers all the more.

Open Oxford to Low Achievers, Says NUS

2008-09-04T15:52:00.006+01:00

Wes Streeting, the National Union of Students President, says in The Guardian education blog of universities that:

There is still a demographic gulf between the richest and poorest institutions; until access to Britain's "top" institutions becomes a reality, a market can only act as a counter to the pursuit of social justice. A sector that should be an engine room for greater equality instead acts to reinforce inequality of opportunity and outcome.

but he has missed one of the main social effects of mass education.
Educated populations reduce inequality by being able to hold governments and bureaucracies to account, as despots around the world know well. Inequality is not served by coercing universities to recruit poorly educated students who have been let down by their families, communities or schools, or by their own unwillingness to take the opportunities on offer to them.
Students who have been unsuccessful at school are likely to be unsuccessful in university degree courses. The most liberal university entry requirements produce institutions with the highest drop-out rates, wasting a year or two of a young person's critical career-forming years: the best of intentions can not easily overcome the lack of academic preparation.
Inequality in the country as a whole will be helped by having a critical mass of the population having a sufficient level of education to challenge the status quo. The most disadvantaged will themselves benefit from the best students being educated to the greatest level. We all need an elite in this country: who wants everything important run by the mediocre?

Assessing Teachers Needs Research

2008-08-24T21:58:00.008+01:00

Now the summer exam results circus is over &mdash and the usual suspects have made their usual criticisms of the examination system &mdash I would like to suggest to OFSTED (and school managers) what they should be looking at when they assess teaching.

Currently, most schools operate formal lesson observations where a manager sits in on a lesson and fills in a proforma. This sheet has key observations to make and a four level grading system, based on OFSTED's procedures so that the school can defend it when inspectors arrive. (The grades range from 1 = very good to 4 = poor, with 3 = satisfactory, the new poor). Teachers are, of course, carefully trained in the system, so that formally observed lessons fill one tick-box after another.

Particularly important to the watched are those lesson features deemed good practice. They can be set as hurdles, limiting the grades otherwise good lessons if the box is not ticked. For example, 'are the lesson aims written on the board?' Not 'do the students understand what they are learning?' or 'were the students swept along?'. Another example: 'was ICT used in the lesson?', even if that use was no better that the non-computer alternative, since there is a government target on ICT use in the classroom.

So what would be better? I suggest that there is plenty of research evidence as to what techniques work in classrooms. Rather than writing off a teacher on their annual observation because they did not use ICT that lesson and the class exam average was below the 'benchmark', or because the teacher was idiosyncratic, the observers should be checking to see if the teacher was doing what objectively works.

Most educational interventions have some positive effect on students achievements, so what is needed is a list of the most effective interventions, since we all have only limited time and energy. There are several literature reviews summarising the evidence for interventions. For example here, and here.

Effect sizes can show quickly which interventions are worth expending time and effort on and which can safely be given lower priority. A list from the first link shows these effect sizes:

Feedback / 1.13
Prior Ability / 1.04
Instructional Quality / 1.00
Direct instruction / 0.82
Remediation feedback / 0.65
Student disposition / 0.61
Class environment (culture) / 0.56
Challenge/goals / 0.52
Peer tutoring / 0.50
Mastery learning / 0.50
Team teaching / 0.06
Behavioural objectives / 0.12
Finances/money / 0.12
Individualisation / 0.14
Audio visual aids / 0.16
Ability grouping / 0.18

Effect sizes do not tell you what is good, but they do indicate what actually improves student outcomes. An effect size of 1.0 is well worth achieving, and is approx. equivalent to one year of advancement. 0.5 is well worth a try. Requiring your teachers to include interventions with lower effect sizes may be counter-productive, indeed some of your better teachers may start to quietly rebel.

Lesson observations have the power to force teachers to do what the Principle or Head Teacher wants them to do. It is essential that these demands are informed by the best educational research, and not by political or bureaucratic considerations.

And Another Thing...

2008-08-15T19:26:00.004+01:00

Why do the top A Level stories in the newspapers, especially front page photo ones, always exclude successful boys. Or, for that matter, any but the most pretty girls? Or black students?

Yes, I do know the answer, but it hardly matches the equality rhetoric of their editorials.

Defensive Statistics

2008-08-15T16:03:00.003+01:00

The results are in, so now is the time for all conscientious Physics teachers to analyse their A Level results.

The newspapers are always first off the mark with ranked tables of gross percentages, showing what proportion of each grammar or independent school gained A or B grades. The tables are then dissected and the top schools pronounced. That they are always selective, either academically or socially, will not be dwelt upon.

Within schools, the Physics teachers will have a couple of weeks to analyse the results of their own students. There are two pressing reasons: to properly assess you own performance, and to have a ready defence against naive assessments by managers.

There will be decisions made using unjustified or unreliable comparisons between very different subjects and with small sample problems. (Why on Earth do class stats get reported to three significant figures?) There will be a need to explain that Johnny did not necessarily underperform in Physics just because he got higher grades in Computing and English.

I have had a cross Head of Sixth Form who presented data showing that half the Physics class had Physics as their worst grade at AS Level. Was I really suggesting that Physics was harder than other subjects? - he asked me. Well, er, yes.

It would be funny if important decisions weren't being made based on these amateur stats and analysis.

A Level Results Up, Again

2008-08-14T14:26:00.003+01:00

It's time for the annual hoo-ha over the remorseless rise in A Level passes. Hooray! Students starting the first year of their courses next month will be the first to have the chance of A* grades if they get a grade A in the first year and 90%+ in the second year units. This is the best that can be done with the erosion of grade As as the identifiers of top flight students, now awarded at a rate of nearly 30%.

And how long before grade inflation renders the A* insufficiently discriminating, requiring A**? With a one fifth increase in A grades in the last five years, it won't be long.

None of this affects this years' students, though, but surely stabilising standards in the long run will be essential.

Unless the government is happy to see A Levels wither away.

Sats Results - Not a Good Test

2008-08-13T10:03:00.009+01:00

The Press Association manages to make much of a one percent change in Key Stage 3 figures:

TESTS ATTACKED AS STANDARDS PLUMMET
Teachers' leaders have warned that too much importance is placed on national school tests as figures revealed a drop in reading standards.

Almost one in three 14-year-olds are failing to reach the reading level expected of their age group, according to Government figures.
...
Dr Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL), said: "The Key Stage 3 tests are an irrelevance. No-one will be interested in the results when young people apply for a job."

Plummet? Physics teachers train their students to assess the level of uncertainty in presenting data, but the government press release makes much of a 1% drop in one measure. The sample size is huge, for sure, but the tests are different and there is an element of judgment in deciding the grade boundaries. Is Ed Balls really saying that these tests are so precise, year on year? Is he aware of the reliability of the tests? Can he tell us what they actually measure for that matter?

At least the ATL has called it right. An irrelevence, except that their side effects are not. This, from the Guardian puts the issue well:

For all age cohorts, the system of assessment is now the major inhibitor of much-needed curriculum innovation.
But Sats are also suffering from a more general public policy problem. Even if they were ever a reliable indicator of performance, over time they've tended to become merely a guide to schools' willingness and ability to teach to the test.

This is a classic example of Goodhart's law - that a measure of performance is no longer a reliable indicator once it becomes a target.

Why does everyone but ministers and managers know this?

Are Fewer Pupil Bunking Off, Really?

2008-08-09T18:27:00.009+01:00

The DCSF has released school pupil absence data "presented as emerging findings (based on provisional data)" that seem to show slightly reduced unauthorised absence rates during the recent Spring Term, down to 1.00% from 1.06%. The reasons given for publishing emerging findings are "to help planning, to study trends and to monitor outcomes of initiatives and interventions on pupil attendance."

The data as presented, naturally, do not even remotely meet this worthy aim as they are collected together under a few broad headings. There is no attempt to report on any controlled tests of any of these initiatives, so no judgements can be made for them. But, surely, a drop in the gross absence figures should be welcomed?

No. Since the data is reported publicly on a school by school basis and included in the league tables, the collection of this data is contaminated. The data collectors, the schools themselves, benefit from improvements in the data, so small reported drops are just that. Reported. In a previous position I have myself been instructed by the headteacher to change absences marked in my form's register from unauthorised (i.e. skiving) to authorised, to make the school figures look better.

It is high time that government stopped measuring the education by measuring every student all the time. Any sensible industry would be making random samples for overall judgements: cheaper, reliable and immune to fiddling by schools.

An Oil Bubble?

2008-07-31T20:34:00.005+01:00

Politicians and commentators have been putting the rapid oil price rise of recent months down to supply limitation and increased demand from China, producing this from the Guardian two months ago:

Number 10 rejected the view that the huge oil price rise was due to speculation, saying that on the contrary the speculation was a function of signals by Opec, and the lack of balance between supply and demand.

and from the Telegraph :

Crude prices were pushed lower as the dollar strengthened and signs emerged that US fuel consumption is dropping. The debate on whether oil prices are likely to stay high permanently has heated up in recent weeks after the crude price broke the $135-a-barrel level for the first time.

Analysts at Goldman Sachs have forecast that the price could rise to $200 in coming years.

It's nice to know, then, that physicsists (especially econophysicists) have got a handle on the situation. Sornett et al reveal something different in an academic research paper lodged with the arXiv e-print archive a few days later, and discussed in the physics arXiv blog:

We present an analysis of oil prices in US$ and in other major currencies that diagnoses unsustainable faster-than-exponential behavior. This supports the hypothesis that the recent oil price run-up has been amplified by speculative behavior of the type found during a bubble-like expansion.

A rather striking graph is given which neatly predicts the recent sharp drop in oil prices. Not predicted by our own prime-ministerial economics expert, Gordan Brown.

"A-level exams should start at Easter"

2008-07-29T10:20:00.009+01:00

The Independent newspaper reported yesterday:

Bringing exams forward to Easter would restore the credibility of A-levels by allowing the brightest pupils to be selected for university places, according to Cambridge University's head of admissions.

Geoff Parks said A-levels should be completed by the end of the Easter term to allow all youngsters to get their results before they apply to university, rather than force admissions officers to rely on predicted grades.

Parks goes on to say that Universities cannot move their own term date back to make time for the post-results admission process, so schools must make the time for the marking and applications process.

The ATL has chipped in on the BBC with:

Four years ago an official report found that it would be fairer for pupils to have their A-level and other results before making university applications.

"Predicted exam grades are notoriously unreliable," said the ATL education union general secretary, Mary Bousted.

I can see the value of applying on the basis of final grades, but how will shortening A-Level courses in schools help students prepare for university? With much of January already lost to Unit exams and their associated preparation, the second year of A-Levels would have to be taught in little over half a year. This may not be a problem for independent schools that already have short terms and more resources, but state Sixth Forms will struggle.
One solution would be to increase the number of markers to speed up the whole process. Scrapping the Key Stage 3 SATs at age 14, or reducing them to smaller scale random sampling, will release lots of secondary school teachers to mark the time critical A-Level papers.

On the ATL comments, predicted grades, notoriously, do not correspond exactly to the final grades, but the exam grades are not very precise themselves, with a typical error margin of plus or minus a full grade. I see little evidence that grade predictions in themselves are less reliable as a measure of ability. Certainly, the fact that the two grades are not identical proves little about their relative merits.

Introduction

2008-07-27T23:08:00.006+01:00

This weblog will explore my thoughts about the English education system, including curriculum, political and pedagogical issues, particularly around sixth-form teaching and especially Physics.

2007-09-08T21:37:00.000+01:00