Wednesday, February 21, 2007
The value of "qualificashuns"
I’ll copy here an editorial in February’s Construction Magazine about the new GCSE course being piloted in “Construction Management”.
Triffic Idea – but can we make a sugestion?
Wot a good idea the Construction GCSE is. As we report in our feature on pages 54-56, the qualificashun shood get kids intrested in our industry from a yunger age. At Ridgewood skool in Doncaster, one of 55 pilots, the department hed speaks of making construcshun “something to aspire to” for the top set rather “sending the idiots down to the craft department”. So it’s a shame that the exam board Edexcel doesn’t care if students are barely literate. Exams are mostly mutipul choice, but in a few instances when they have to rite anything, they’re allowed a hole range of spellings. Perhaps employers don’t mind, but we think it pays to know your “scaffolding” from your “skafoldin”…
Tongue in cheek as it may be, it says quite a lot about the way educationalists are on a different planet to the rest of us here in the real world.
Employers want young people they can employ. That means that when they leave school with their clutch full of qualifications that those pieces of paper mean that the holders are capable of a decent level of numeracy, literacy, and understanding based on a modicum of knowledge. What the editor of Construction Magazine parodies well in her editorial is the standards of written English of a good number of school leavers. Why should it be this way?
I am reading a book called “Class War” by Chris Woodhead, the former Chief Inspector of Schools. He describes what he calls “the Blob” of institutional vested interest drawn from educationalists, lecturers in teacher training institutions, government advisers, and think tanks who live in a parallel universe where children should not be given the gift of knowledge and where teachers teach, but where woolly “interchangeable competencies” are facilitated by “learning managers” and the fragile ego of the child should be preserved by not constricting their thinking by outmoded notions of rules and strictures such as grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Let me give you a couple of exemplar quotes. The first is from Professor Tim Brighouse:
“In the light of research into the brain and theories of learning, teachers questioning techniques will have moved (by 2050) beyond traditional methods. By then we will be exploiting the alter ego dimension of teaching whereby they create an alternative persona to “unlock the mind and open the shut chambers of the heart””.
I am reasonably well educated and fairly intelligent, yet I do not have the first clue what Professor Brighouse is talking about, and I suspect that neither does he.
David Hargreaves, former head of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority and former Professor of Education at Cambridge believes that “all sixteen-plus examinations must be abolished” so that the “comprehensive curriculum can be …reconstructed or revised from academic to social subjects and from the learning of information to the acquisition of skills”.
On the back of this thinking it is now “competencies” that matter in education and not knowledge. For example, from the proposed Competencies for Learning, students are expected to:
Understand how to learn, taking account of their preferred learning styles, and understand the need to, and how to, manage their own learning through life;
Have learned systematically to think;
Have explored and reached an understanding of their own creative talents, and how to make best use of them;
Have learned to enjoy and love learning for its own sake and as part of understanding themselves;
Have achieved high standards of literacy and numeracy and spatial understanding
I’m not sure I understand what “spaitial understanding” is all about but I can concur with the need for high levels (if ill defined at this point) of literacy and numeracy. As for the rest of it, and understanding my own creative talents I can’t say I know the answer to that now I’m 33, let alone when I was a child. Equally can I say I have learnt systematically to think? No, but I have learnt systematically to think in some contexts, such as politics or my field of professional competence where I can ponder the logic of an argument. Thinking depends on knowledge and is context specific, so these grand global objectives are all pretty meaningless, yet they guide the thinking of those who manage our children’s school curriculum towards some sort of egalitarian ideal where “setting” and streaming are treated with suspicion let alone the anathema of selection and where exams are dumbed down to the extent it is possible that all “must have prizes” (to quote Mr Woodhead). The real world however differentiates the “can dos” from the “can’t” and it is the latter category who suffer most from the ideologies of the competencies over knowledge protagonists.
Without knowledge we are powerless in the world. We don’t know who we are or where we come from when we teach history as a relative concern. That void of understanding where our society comes from is what fuels separatism and extremism in society. Gordon Brown talks of teaching “Britishness” in schools, but this somewhat misses the point. What schools ought to teach is knowledge. Knowledge of literature and the grammatical structures of language so that school leavers can read and write to an acceptable level. Knowledge of mathematical logic and the ability to do basic arithmetic without the need for a computer or a calculator. Knowledge of history with facts, figures, dates, and occurrences so that children understand the course of events that led to the formation of society as we have it today. Knowledge of places and economies as well as the physical processes of the geographical world. This knowledge is what employers wish for in school leavers as the building blocks to train and develop their staff. It is worrying when the government now expects business to do the job of schools and educate young adults to basic levels of literacy and numeracy when they begin work. Is 11 years in school not enough to be able to teach children to read, write, and add up?
Sadly the answer to that question is all too often no. I recently advertised for an administrative post where the basic requirements alongside managing a diary and a filing system were to draft correspondence in a coherent and structured way that I would be happy to sign off without fear of embarrassment. Of the graduates who applied for the job there was more than one applicant whose standard of written English was little or no better than the parody of the opening editorial.
If elected to Milton Keynes Council I will be keeping a close eye on the standards in schools and watching the LEA to ensure that there is discipline in the classroom and an emphasis on educating in the traditional sense of the word to push our schools towards helping every child reach their true potential and not be blighted by a culture of ignorance.
Triffic Idea – but can we make a sugestion?
Wot a good idea the Construction GCSE is. As we report in our feature on pages 54-56, the qualificashun shood get kids intrested in our industry from a yunger age. At Ridgewood skool in Doncaster, one of 55 pilots, the department hed speaks of making construcshun “something to aspire to” for the top set rather “sending the idiots down to the craft department”. So it’s a shame that the exam board Edexcel doesn’t care if students are barely literate. Exams are mostly mutipul choice, but in a few instances when they have to rite anything, they’re allowed a hole range of spellings. Perhaps employers don’t mind, but we think it pays to know your “scaffolding” from your “skafoldin”…
Tongue in cheek as it may be, it says quite a lot about the way educationalists are on a different planet to the rest of us here in the real world.
Employers want young people they can employ. That means that when they leave school with their clutch full of qualifications that those pieces of paper mean that the holders are capable of a decent level of numeracy, literacy, and understanding based on a modicum of knowledge. What the editor of Construction Magazine parodies well in her editorial is the standards of written English of a good number of school leavers. Why should it be this way?
I am reading a book called “Class War” by Chris Woodhead, the former Chief Inspector of Schools. He describes what he calls “the Blob” of institutional vested interest drawn from educationalists, lecturers in teacher training institutions, government advisers, and think tanks who live in a parallel universe where children should not be given the gift of knowledge and where teachers teach, but where woolly “interchangeable competencies” are facilitated by “learning managers” and the fragile ego of the child should be preserved by not constricting their thinking by outmoded notions of rules and strictures such as grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Let me give you a couple of exemplar quotes. The first is from Professor Tim Brighouse:
“In the light of research into the brain and theories of learning, teachers questioning techniques will have moved (by 2050) beyond traditional methods. By then we will be exploiting the alter ego dimension of teaching whereby they create an alternative persona to “unlock the mind and open the shut chambers of the heart””.
I am reasonably well educated and fairly intelligent, yet I do not have the first clue what Professor Brighouse is talking about, and I suspect that neither does he.
David Hargreaves, former head of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority and former Professor of Education at Cambridge believes that “all sixteen-plus examinations must be abolished” so that the “comprehensive curriculum can be …reconstructed or revised from academic to social subjects and from the learning of information to the acquisition of skills”.
On the back of this thinking it is now “competencies” that matter in education and not knowledge. For example, from the proposed Competencies for Learning, students are expected to:
Understand how to learn, taking account of their preferred learning styles, and understand the need to, and how to, manage their own learning through life;
Have learned systematically to think;
Have explored and reached an understanding of their own creative talents, and how to make best use of them;
Have learned to enjoy and love learning for its own sake and as part of understanding themselves;
Have achieved high standards of literacy and numeracy and spatial understanding
I’m not sure I understand what “spaitial understanding” is all about but I can concur with the need for high levels (if ill defined at this point) of literacy and numeracy. As for the rest of it, and understanding my own creative talents I can’t say I know the answer to that now I’m 33, let alone when I was a child. Equally can I say I have learnt systematically to think? No, but I have learnt systematically to think in some contexts, such as politics or my field of professional competence where I can ponder the logic of an argument. Thinking depends on knowledge and is context specific, so these grand global objectives are all pretty meaningless, yet they guide the thinking of those who manage our children’s school curriculum towards some sort of egalitarian ideal where “setting” and streaming are treated with suspicion let alone the anathema of selection and where exams are dumbed down to the extent it is possible that all “must have prizes” (to quote Mr Woodhead). The real world however differentiates the “can dos” from the “can’t” and it is the latter category who suffer most from the ideologies of the competencies over knowledge protagonists.
Without knowledge we are powerless in the world. We don’t know who we are or where we come from when we teach history as a relative concern. That void of understanding where our society comes from is what fuels separatism and extremism in society. Gordon Brown talks of teaching “Britishness” in schools, but this somewhat misses the point. What schools ought to teach is knowledge. Knowledge of literature and the grammatical structures of language so that school leavers can read and write to an acceptable level. Knowledge of mathematical logic and the ability to do basic arithmetic without the need for a computer or a calculator. Knowledge of history with facts, figures, dates, and occurrences so that children understand the course of events that led to the formation of society as we have it today. Knowledge of places and economies as well as the physical processes of the geographical world. This knowledge is what employers wish for in school leavers as the building blocks to train and develop their staff. It is worrying when the government now expects business to do the job of schools and educate young adults to basic levels of literacy and numeracy when they begin work. Is 11 years in school not enough to be able to teach children to read, write, and add up?
Sadly the answer to that question is all too often no. I recently advertised for an administrative post where the basic requirements alongside managing a diary and a filing system were to draft correspondence in a coherent and structured way that I would be happy to sign off without fear of embarrassment. Of the graduates who applied for the job there was more than one applicant whose standard of written English was little or no better than the parody of the opening editorial.
If elected to Milton Keynes Council I will be keeping a close eye on the standards in schools and watching the LEA to ensure that there is discipline in the classroom and an emphasis on educating in the traditional sense of the word to push our schools towards helping every child reach their true potential and not be blighted by a culture of ignorance.
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
EU Constitution by the back door
Daniel Hannan, writing in today's Telegraph, explains how the EU federacrats are trying to impose the unwanted EU constituion by the back door. It makes for unpleasant (if not unpredictable by the standards of the Euro-ruler elite) reading because if they get their way the federalists will attempt to bypass the sensible "no" votes of France and Holland.
Find the article here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml;jsessionid=Q0ARYMUZ2DRP5QFIQMFSFF4AVCBQ0IV0?xml=/opinion/2007/02/20/do2001.xml
Find the article here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml;jsessionid=Q0ARYMUZ2DRP5QFIQMFSFF4AVCBQ0IV0?xml=/opinion/2007/02/20/do2001.xml
Monday, February 19, 2007
It's priceless isn't it? Labour are planning to use this photograph of David Cameron and Boris Johnston to paint the Tories as "out of touch". Their reasoning? Well both Cameron and Johnston were members of the "Bullingdon Club", a university society that claims as its members the scions of wealthy families inherited of wealth. Oh, and they mostly went to the major public schools. Ergo, by virtue of the fact that they were fortunate enough to be born into wealthy families who could afford a decent standard of education means that they are "toffs" incapable of understanding modern lifestyles.
Well, let me suggest this. The internal handbook advising on a "Peace and Quiet" tax reviwe of the Council Tax system wants to penalise homeowners for having "good views", "nearby shops", and "peace and quiet". How many of us in the Ward of Sherington would be hammered unerasonably by this review of taxation do you wonder? The Lib Dems would love it, high taxation that isn't their fault!
This is the same government who:
- Banned hunting as an act of class warfare wasting huge amounts of parliamentary time and money to satisfy the political bloodlust of the back benchers
- Have hiked up taxes on the middle classes in spite of erassurances they wouldn't
- Raided your pensions to the tune of £5bn
- Raided your savings
- Increased the proportion of people paying inheritence tax
And it isn't just the supposed "toffs" and upper classes who suffer. They have stealthily penalised the middle classes by:
- Getting rid of the "Assisted Places Scheme" to enable children to attend independant schools who might not have otherwise afforded to go
- Dumbed down the education system that was the means of social mobility for many
- Piled tuition and top-up fees on the University system that unfairly penalises the middle classes
- Taxed fuel heavily, taxed air travel heavily, yet have failed to invest in alternative modes of transport
And yet they say we Tories are out of touch with the people we seek to elect us because a few of the parliamentary party went to public schools and Oxford. Just like Fettes educated Tony Blair for example. What sickening hypocrasy.
Friday, February 16, 2007
The expansion debate
During Tuesday night's expansion debate in full council I was given the opportunity to ask a question, which I posed to the leader of the Lib Dems. I asked:
To ask the leader of the council to determine exactly how many new houses her party believes should be built to the east of the M1?
The minutes of the meeting will reflect that she said (and quote) "I believe that no new houses should be built to the east of the motorway".
What may not be recorded is the follow up question asked which was:
"Given that her party nodded through in June's Cabinet the South East Regional Plan without giving either full council or the public the opportunity to scrutinise it in detail, does she not consider her party to be dulpicitous and hypocritical to be claiming to defend the nature and character of rural North Buckinghamshire when that same plan that her party nodded through approved the building of over 1600 new houses east of the M1, or to put that into perspective, 70 houses in Sherington, 30 in Emberton, 35 in Moulsoe, 10 in Lathbury, 35 in North Crawley, or in more general terms the creation of the equivalent of 3 extra villages on the green space between Newport Pagnell and Olney between 2012 and 2026?"
Her response was that it was in fact only 120 houses...long pause... per year... before going on to defend her party as the only one to resist English Partnerships etc.
The Mayor allowed me to briefly rebutt. I challended Cllr I McCall on her arithmatic. She emphatically stated 120 a year, but no matter how many ways you add that up it still comes to a total of 1620 houses over 14 years which is 10% of the growth recommended in the Buchanan report that her party clainms to oppose. She would not go into how her comments that her party would commit to no new development east of the M1 and yet pave the way for 1620 houses to be built.
I also find it difficult to understand the line the Lib Dems are taking that it is beter to roll over and accept the development that English Partnerships are forcing down our throats than fight it because they could bypass us directly and have them impose development where they want it. But surely that is what they are doing already? The level of growth that English Partnerships are forcing on us is not sustainable growth. Why not draw a line in the sand and fight? The fact is that we do not have to accept EP at all.
Look at it politically. The Labour party will have their majority (should they win one) to paper thin proportions at the next general election. Mark Lancaster is in a relatively safe seat that Labour won't be winning back in a hurry and "Failing Phylis" Starkey is exposed. The Government will be faced with a choice in the run up to the election: reign in EP or loose your MP. A council united in that fight could actually slow, if not halt, EP in their tracks. But the Lib Dems are again trying to be play all sides of the argument.
The Lib Dems don't want expansion but they will do what EP tell them because they are opposed to the government but they don't want to upset the government in case they loose funding while fighting for the rural community they have agreed to build 1620 houses on.
Are you confused? I am!
Where do I stand?
Well for a start I am happy to agree to organic growth not expansion. Let me explain. Where I live in Emberton I have to the rear of the house farmland owned by a local family. To the side of the house is a strip of land the same width as the plot I live on that is part of that land, but not farmed. I would see no objection to that strip being "infilled" between my house and my neighbours a hundred yards up the road. Given the narrow single cariage road that serves my end of the village the only sustainable option (as you can't incerase the size of the road, sitting paralel to the A509 as it does) is to build a small number of 3, 4, or 5 bedroom houses.
"Expansion" of the kind English Partnerships want to see is a large number of high density, multiple occupancy homes, some of which are designated "low cost" (i.e. £60k to build £210K to sell) without any investment in the road that serves the current houses on Newport road or Prospect Place, no extra parking or ameneties, or improving the means of traversing the busy A509 that seperates my side of the village from the other.
I am content with the former, I oppose strongly the latter. The Lib dems on the other hand will be pushing more for the latter to meet their 105/1620 houses/3 villages quota.
I also got the chance to speak following the adjournment for 3 minutes. I called for an urgent review of health services as we only receive 95% of the fundinh in MK that we are supposed to and with no extra NHS investment on the horizon I queried how these "1620 Lib Dem Homes" in the villages are going to be served. Already I had to wait 6 months to find an NHS dental practice. The fact I have to travel to Leighton Buzzard because there were no places available anywhere in Milton Keynes as it is demonstrates what effect the expansion under the now approved SE Regional Plan would have on the communities. We simply wouldn't cope.
What the Lib Dems have done in agreeing to the 1620 houses is place our roads, schools, post offices, and health and liesure provision under strain. Already we are funding large amounts of debt financing (i.e. paying the interest on loans made to the council) because of the Lib Dems following the previous Labour councils "spend now pay later" attitude. Economists would describe the relationship between the increase in council tax revenue from 1620 homes and the amount that would need to be spent to keep infrastructure up to the standard it is now as "inelastic", or in other words the council tax income would be well below the amount needed to be spent, and that expenditure would increase more than tax revenue ever would. It would, in effect, worsen the hole in the fniances that is already getting bigger.
But what of the villages? If Emberton had to absorb the number of houses proposed under the SE Regional plan they would have to spread out towards Sherington. The village can't go out towards Olney as it already straddles the country park, it has no space in the centre of the village (unless you want to build onthe allotments by West Pits), Honey Hill is already developed, so it only leaves the area between Emberton and Sherington. If the two villages then merged into a small town (as would happen) then what would happen to the character of the villages?
I have already set out the Conservative vision. A dissolution of EP. A halt to the expansion plan. A local consultation in conjunction with Aylesbury Vale and Buckinghamshire on what we feel is sustainable, followed by a binding local referrendum on the proposals.
To ask the leader of the council to determine exactly how many new houses her party believes should be built to the east of the M1?
The minutes of the meeting will reflect that she said (and quote) "I believe that no new houses should be built to the east of the motorway".
What may not be recorded is the follow up question asked which was:
"Given that her party nodded through in June's Cabinet the South East Regional Plan without giving either full council or the public the opportunity to scrutinise it in detail, does she not consider her party to be dulpicitous and hypocritical to be claiming to defend the nature and character of rural North Buckinghamshire when that same plan that her party nodded through approved the building of over 1600 new houses east of the M1, or to put that into perspective, 70 houses in Sherington, 30 in Emberton, 35 in Moulsoe, 10 in Lathbury, 35 in North Crawley, or in more general terms the creation of the equivalent of 3 extra villages on the green space between Newport Pagnell and Olney between 2012 and 2026?"
Her response was that it was in fact only 120 houses...long pause... per year... before going on to defend her party as the only one to resist English Partnerships etc.
The Mayor allowed me to briefly rebutt. I challended Cllr I McCall on her arithmatic. She emphatically stated 120 a year, but no matter how many ways you add that up it still comes to a total of 1620 houses over 14 years which is 10% of the growth recommended in the Buchanan report that her party clainms to oppose. She would not go into how her comments that her party would commit to no new development east of the M1 and yet pave the way for 1620 houses to be built.
I also find it difficult to understand the line the Lib Dems are taking that it is beter to roll over and accept the development that English Partnerships are forcing down our throats than fight it because they could bypass us directly and have them impose development where they want it. But surely that is what they are doing already? The level of growth that English Partnerships are forcing on us is not sustainable growth. Why not draw a line in the sand and fight? The fact is that we do not have to accept EP at all.
Look at it politically. The Labour party will have their majority (should they win one) to paper thin proportions at the next general election. Mark Lancaster is in a relatively safe seat that Labour won't be winning back in a hurry and "Failing Phylis" Starkey is exposed. The Government will be faced with a choice in the run up to the election: reign in EP or loose your MP. A council united in that fight could actually slow, if not halt, EP in their tracks. But the Lib Dems are again trying to be play all sides of the argument.
The Lib Dems don't want expansion but they will do what EP tell them because they are opposed to the government but they don't want to upset the government in case they loose funding while fighting for the rural community they have agreed to build 1620 houses on.
Are you confused? I am!
Where do I stand?
Well for a start I am happy to agree to organic growth not expansion. Let me explain. Where I live in Emberton I have to the rear of the house farmland owned by a local family. To the side of the house is a strip of land the same width as the plot I live on that is part of that land, but not farmed. I would see no objection to that strip being "infilled" between my house and my neighbours a hundred yards up the road. Given the narrow single cariage road that serves my end of the village the only sustainable option (as you can't incerase the size of the road, sitting paralel to the A509 as it does) is to build a small number of 3, 4, or 5 bedroom houses.
"Expansion" of the kind English Partnerships want to see is a large number of high density, multiple occupancy homes, some of which are designated "low cost" (i.e. £60k to build £210K to sell) without any investment in the road that serves the current houses on Newport road or Prospect Place, no extra parking or ameneties, or improving the means of traversing the busy A509 that seperates my side of the village from the other.
I am content with the former, I oppose strongly the latter. The Lib dems on the other hand will be pushing more for the latter to meet their 105/1620 houses/3 villages quota.
I also got the chance to speak following the adjournment for 3 minutes. I called for an urgent review of health services as we only receive 95% of the fundinh in MK that we are supposed to and with no extra NHS investment on the horizon I queried how these "1620 Lib Dem Homes" in the villages are going to be served. Already I had to wait 6 months to find an NHS dental practice. The fact I have to travel to Leighton Buzzard because there were no places available anywhere in Milton Keynes as it is demonstrates what effect the expansion under the now approved SE Regional Plan would have on the communities. We simply wouldn't cope.
What the Lib Dems have done in agreeing to the 1620 houses is place our roads, schools, post offices, and health and liesure provision under strain. Already we are funding large amounts of debt financing (i.e. paying the interest on loans made to the council) because of the Lib Dems following the previous Labour councils "spend now pay later" attitude. Economists would describe the relationship between the increase in council tax revenue from 1620 homes and the amount that would need to be spent to keep infrastructure up to the standard it is now as "inelastic", or in other words the council tax income would be well below the amount needed to be spent, and that expenditure would increase more than tax revenue ever would. It would, in effect, worsen the hole in the fniances that is already getting bigger.
But what of the villages? If Emberton had to absorb the number of houses proposed under the SE Regional plan they would have to spread out towards Sherington. The village can't go out towards Olney as it already straddles the country park, it has no space in the centre of the village (unless you want to build onthe allotments by West Pits), Honey Hill is already developed, so it only leaves the area between Emberton and Sherington. If the two villages then merged into a small town (as would happen) then what would happen to the character of the villages?
I have already set out the Conservative vision. A dissolution of EP. A halt to the expansion plan. A local consultation in conjunction with Aylesbury Vale and Buckinghamshire on what we feel is sustainable, followed by a binding local referrendum on the proposals.
Rosettes or Ribbons?
I'll still be wearing my rosette. It seems the press have little else to talk about other than how we Tory's market ourselves, still I found this photo from www.thespine.com quite amusing.
