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The fourth professional dimension
Once upon a time my colleagues and I enjoyed the pleasure of the company of a team of Her Majesty’s Inspectors for a very extended visit. They began their task half way through one university academic year and did not finish until most of the way through the next one. It sometimes felt that if you opened a cupboard there would be an HMI with notebook and pencil waiting to ask seemingly innocuous questions that, if miss fielded, could have led straight to the professional dole queue.
download this article Gone to the doggerel (15th version)
ConDemNation:
A Garland of Scurrilous Rhymes, Parodies and Rants
To Greet our New Political Masters
Composed “In the Nation’s Interest”
O for a Jonathon Swift to prick our P.R. Politicians with his pen. Maybe those Lib Dems chosen to make a deal with the Tories thought they were discussing proportional representation. They weren’t: the letters P.R. only ever stood for public relations.
Here we humbly present some scribbling thoughts that you may in consequence be enlightened and relieved that you are not alone; whilst also being inspired by knowing that a standard of versifying has been set, below which you, esteemed reader, could not possibly fall.
Some of what follows is best sung with gusto, particularly the two parodies of The Red Flag. Can you detect the quotation from Fats Waller or the shameless theft from Milton?
Please join in.
Contributions from Anon are also welcome.
Just remember the motto of ConDemNation: ‘Bad politics begets bad poetry’. ... ...
From Reforming to Deforming and the Consequences of Eating Gerbils
We hear the word 'reform' a lot from politicians these days. It reminds me of the time when Kenneth Baker stopped what had mostly been professionally led curriculum development and forced us instead to swallow his centrally prescribed Great Education Reform Bill, known in the trade as the Gerbil and later to become the 1988 Act. From that point most professional learning was about digesting policy.
Educational chaos theory comes to England
We heard recently from Nick Boles MP, an influential supporter of the government and former flatmate of Michael Gove, that planning is a waste of time and that what we need is chaos. Now I am beginning to perceive a political theory underpinning what has been happening in our World. It goes something like this. I think.
Silly Policies for the Silly Season: Dressing too quickly in the dark
At the start of the 2010 summer holiday a friend sent me a doctoral assignment to look at. It traces and makes sense of the many changes of policy over the last thirteen years for the education and assessment of young people 14-19. The last section describing the current state of affairs uses the word ‘chaos’. Well, what word would you choose to describe the succession of mistakes and changes we have witnessed recently?
The privatisation of the railways was an astonishing leap for Margaret Thatcher’s government. Her adoption of the so-called free market ideology propounded by the Chicago school of economists had already led to the privatisation of British public utilities; but many of us thought at the time that surely no-one would be foolish enough to impose this religion upon our railways. We were wrong: she was; and we have had to go on living with the consequences.
Memories of this are prompting me to wonder where we might be heading with our universities... ...
The near future for the professional learning of educators: Who will capture it?
I want to proceed to address the question of who will capture the professional learning of educators. Here is the outline of the article:
1. Might it be the political parties?
2. Might it be the Select Committee of the House of Commons?
3. Might it be faith groups?
4. Might it be big corporations?
5. Might it be universities?
6. Might it be parents?
7. Might it be management buy-outs?
8. Might it be local government?
9. What group have I left out?
Open Letter to the Secretary of State for Education
Dear Secretary of State,
You called for early debate on what we should expect of young people at sixteen.
I want you to put research before debate. Well-founded expectations help us to understand progression but debating them over a short time-scale will create more noise than wisdom.