theepochtimes--2019-08-20--Poll Public Support Grows for School Choice Vouchers

Poll: Public Support Grows for School Choice, Vouchers

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos listens during an Interagency Working Group on Youth Programs meeting at the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington on March 18, 2019. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)  A new nationwide opinion poll on education policy released by Education Next shows growing support for a number of initiatives, namely school choice, and vouchers.  The findings of the 13th annual Education Next survey are based on a nationally representative sample of 3,046 adults. The pollsters identified 10 major findings.  The first key discovery highlighted how support for vouchers that help low-income students afford private-school tuition rose to 49 percent; in 2016, support for these vouchers was 37 percent. At the same time, support for tax credits for donations to organizations that give scholarships to low-income students grew to 58 percent, from 53 percent previously.  Public support for charter schools also increased to 48 percent from a low of 39 percent in 2017. For Republicans, 61 percent currently support charter schools, while among Democrats, 40 percent do.  Pollsters noted that the respondents of the survey include “an oversampling of teachers, African Americans, and those who identify themselves as Hispanic.”  Support for increasing wages for teachers also reached the highest point since 2008. For those that were provided information on state salary levels, 56 percent said teachers’ salaries should be higher. The percentage represents a 20 point jump over the approval level two years ago. For those who weren’t provided any salary information, 72 percent said salaries should increase, 5 points higher than the results in 2018.  In an Aug. 20 statement reacting to the poll, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos called the findings “no surprise to those of us who believe in students and trust parents and teachers.”  “American families want more control and more options when it comes to education, which is why every poll conducted shows the growing, bipartisan support for education freedom. This research is just the latest indication that voices of America’s parents are growing louder in demanding something other than a government-assigned, union-controlled school for their children,” she said.  “Behind each percentage point in the column for education freedom is the face of another forgotten voter who has been taken for granted for far too long. I hear it from students who want to learn more and learn differently, but are constrained by their assigned school building.”  DeVos has asked Congress for a “$5 billion annual federal tax credit for voluntary donations to state-based scholarship programs.” The initiative is called “Education Freedom Scholarships.”  According to its official website, the proposal “would empower students and families to choose the best educational setting for them—regardless of where they live, how much they make, and how they learn,” according to a fact sheet.  In her statement, DeVos references that proposal and described it as a rational solution. She added that Congress would be “wise to heed the call of America’s families.”  “Clearly, our Education Freedom Scholarships proposal is the solution American families want. This common-sense approach puts students and parents in control, without taking a single cent from public schools or teachers,” she said.  “It’s time opponents of education freedom tamped down their overheated political rhetoric and instead focused on improving student outcomes. They should take note that this poll shows students rank the quality of their own schools lower than anyone else does.”


theguardianuk--2019-01-13--Britains private school problem its time to talk

Britain’s private school problem: it’s time to talk

The existence in Britain of a flourishing private-school sector not only limits the life chances of those who attend state schools but also damages society at large, and it should be possible to have a sustained and fully inclusive national conversation about the subject. Whether one has been privately educated, or has sent or is sending one’s children to private schools, or even if one teaches at a private school, there should be no barriers to taking part in that conversation. Everyone has to live – and make their choices – in the world as it is, not as one might wish it to be. That seems an obvious enough proposition. Yet in a name-calling culture, ever ready with the charge of hypocrisy, this reality is all too often ignored.  For the sake of avoiding misunderstanding, we should state briefly our own backgrounds and choices. One of our fathers was a solicitor in Brighton, the other was an army officer rising to the rank of lieutenant-colonel; we were both privately educated; we both went to Oxford University; our children have all been educated at state grammar schools; in neither case did we move to the areas (Kent and south-west London) because of the existence of those schools; and in recent years we have become increasingly preoccupied with the private-school issue, partly as citizens concerned with Britain’s social and democratic wellbeing, partly as an aspect of our professional work (one as an economist, the other as a historian).  In Britain, private schools – including their fundamental unfairness – remain the elephant in the room. It would be an almost immeasurable benefit if this were no longer the case. Education is different. Its effects are deep, long-term and run from one generation to the next. Those with enough money are free to purchase and enjoy expensive holidays, cars, houses and meals. But education is not just another material asset: it is fundamental to creating who we are.  What particularly defines British private education is its extreme social exclusivity. Only about 6% of the UK’s school population attend such schools, and the families accessing private education are highly concentrated among the affluent. At every rung of the income ladder there are a small number of private-school attenders; but it is only at the very top, above the 95th rung of the ladder – where families have an income of at least £120,000 – that there are appreciable numbers of private-school children. At the 99th rung – families with incomes upwards of £300,000 – six out of every 10 children are at private school. A glance at the annual fees is relevant here. The press focus tends to be on the great and historic boarding schools – such as Eton (basic fee £40,668 in 2018–19), Harrow (£40,050) and Winchester (£39,912) – but it is important to see the private sector in the less glamorous round, and stripped of the extra cost of boarding. In 2018 the average day fees at prep schools were, at £13,026, around half the income of a family on the middle rung of the income ladder. For secondary school, and even more so sixth forms, the fees are appreciably higher. In short, access to private schooling is, for the most part, available only to wealthy households. Indeed, the small number of income-poor families going private can only do so through other sources: typically, grandparents’ assets and/or endowment-supported bursaries from some of the richest schools. Overwhelmingly, pupils at private schools are rubbing shoulders with those from similarly well-off backgrounds.  They arrange things somewhat differently elsewhere: among affluent countries, Britain’s private‑school participation is especially exclusive to the rich. In Germany, for instance, it is also low, but unlike in Britain is generously state-funded, more strongly regulated and comes with modest fees. In France, private schools are mainly Catholic schools permitted to teach religion: the state pays the teachers and the fees are very low. In the US there is a very small sector of non-sectarian private schools with high fees, but most private schools are, again, religious, with much lower fees than here. Britain’s private-school configuration is, in short, distinctive.  And so what, accordingly, does Britain look like in the 21st century? A brief but expensive history, 1997–2018, offers some guide. As the millennium approaches, New Labour under Tony Blair (Fettes) sweeps to power. The Bank of England under Eddie George (Dulwich) gets independence. The chronicles of Hogwarts school begin. A nation grieves for Diana (West Heath); Charles (Gordonstoun) retrieves her body; her brother (Eton) tells it as it is. Martha Lane Fox (Oxford High) blows a dotcom bubble. Charlie Falconer (Glenalmond) masterminds the Millennium Dome. Will Young (Wellington) becomes the first Pop Idol. The Wire’s Jimmy McNulty (Eton) sorts out Baltimore. James Blunt (Harrow) releases the bestselling album of the decade. Northern Rock collapses under the chairmanship of Matt Ridley (Eton). Boris Johnson (Eton) enters City Hall in London. The Cameron-Osborne (Eton-St Paul’s) axis takes over the country; Nick Clegg (Westminster) runs errands. Life staggers on in austerity Britain mark two. Jeremy Clarkson (Repton) can’t stop revving up; Jeremy Paxman (Malvern) still has an attitude problem; Alexandra Shulman (St Paul’s Girls) dictates fashion; Paul Dacre (University College School) makes middle England ever more Mail-centric; Alan Rusbridger (Cranleigh) makes non-middle England ever more Guardian-centric; judge Brian Leveson (Liverpool College) fails to nail the press barons; Justin Welby (Eton) becomes top mitre man; Frank Lampard (Brentwood) becomes a Chelsea legend; Joe Root (Worksop) takes guard; Henry Blofeld (Eton) spots a passing bus. The Cameron-Osborne axis sees off Labour, but not Boris Johnson+Nigel Farage (Dulwich)+Arron Banks (Crookham Court). Ed Balls (Nottingham High) takes to the dance floor. Theresa May (St Juliana’s) and Jeremy Corbyn (Castle House prep school) face off. Prince George (Thomas’s Battersea) and Princess Charlotte (Willcocks) start school.  The statistics also tell a story. The proportion of prominent people in every area who have been educated privately is striking, in some cases grotesque. From judges (74% privately educated) through to MPs (32%), the numbers tell us of a society where bought educational privilege also buys lifetime privilege and influence. “The dogged persistence of the British ‘old boy”’ is how a 2017 study describes the traditional dominance of private-school alumni in British society. This reveals the fruits of exploring well over a century of biographical data in Who’s Who, that indispensable annual guide to the composition of the British elite. For those born between the 1830s and 1920s, roughly 50-60% went to private schools; for those born between the 1930s and 1960s, the proportion was roughly 45-50%. Among the new entrants to Who’s Who in the 21st century, the proportion of the privately educated has remained constant at around 45%. Going to one of the schools in the prestigious Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference (HMC) still gives a 35 times better chance of entering Who’s Who than if one has not attended an HMC school; while those attending the historic crème de la crème, the so-called Clarendon Schools (Charterhouse, Eton, Harrow, Merchant Taylors’, Rugby, St Paul’s, Shrewsbury, Westminster, Winchester), are 94 times more likely to join the elite than any ordinary British-educated person.  Even if one’s child never achieves celebrity, sending him or her to a private school is usually a shrewd investment – indeed, increasingly so, to judge by the relevant longitudinal studies of two different generations. Take first the cohort born in 1958: in terms of those with comparable social backgrounds, demographic characteristics and early tested skills, and different only in what type of school they attended when they were 11, by the time they were in their early 30s (around 1990) the privately educated were earning 7% more than the state-educated. Compare that with those born in 1970: by the same stage (the early 2000s), the gap between the two categories – again, similar in all other respects – had risen to 21% in favour of the privately educated.  The only realistic starting point for an analysis lies with the assertion that, in the modern era, most of these schools are of high quality, offering a good educational environment. They deploy very substantial resources; respect the need for a disciplined environment for learning; and give copious attention to generating a positive and therefore motivating experience. This argument – the resources point aside – is not an altogether easy one for the left to accept, against a background of it having historically been undecided whether (in the words of one Labour education minister’s senior civil servant in the 1960s) “these schools are so bloody they ought to be abolished, or so marvellous they ought to be made available to everyone”. We do not necessarily accept that all private schools are “marvellous”; but by and large we recognise that, in their own terms of fulfilling what their customers demand, they deliver the goods.  Above all, private schools succeed when it comes to preparing their pupils for public exams – the gateways to universities. In 2018 the proportion of private-school students achieving A*s and As at A-level was 48%, compared with a national average of 26%; while for GCSEs, in terms of achieving an A or grade seven or above, the respective figures were 63% and 23%. At both stages, GCSE and A-level, the gap is invariably huge.  There are, of course, some very real contextual factors to these bald and striking figures. Any study must take account of where the children are coming from. Nevertheless, the picture presented by several studies is one of relatively small but still significant effects at every stage of education; and over the course of a school career, the cumulative effects build up to a notable gain in academic achievements.  Yet academic learning and exam results are not all there is to a quality education, and indeed there is more on offer from private schools. At Harrow, for example, its vision is that the school “prepares boys… for a life of learning, leadership, service and personal fulfilment”. It offers “a wide range of high-level extracurricular activities, through which boys discover latent talent, develop individual character and gain skills in leadership and teamwork”. Lesser-known schools trumpet something similar. Cumbria’s Austin Friars, for example, highlights a well-rounded education, proclaiming that its alumni will be “creative problem-solvers… effective communicators… and confident, modest and articulate members of society who embody the Augustinian values of unity, truth and love...”  If, on the whole, Britain’s private schools provide a quality education in both academic and broader terms, how do they deliver that? Four areas stand out.  First, especially small class sizes are a major boon for pupils and teachers alike. Second, the range of extracurricular activities and the intensive cultivation of “character” and “confidence” are important. Third, the high – and therefore exclusive – price tag sustains a peer group of children mainly drawn from supportive and affluent families. And fourth, to achieve the best possible exam results and the highest rate of admission to the top universities, “working the system” comes into play. Far greater resources are available for diagnosing special needs, challenging exam results and guiding university applications. Underpinning all these areas of advantage are the high revenues from fees: Britain’s private schools can deploy resources whose order of magnitude for each child is approximately three times what is available at the average state school.  The relevant figures for university admissions are thus almost entirely predictable. Perhaps inevitably, by far the highest-profile stats concern Oxbridge, where between 2010 and 2015 an average of 43% of offers from Oxford and 37% from Cambridge were made to privately educated students, and there has been no sign since of any significant opening up. Top schools, top universities: the pattern of privilege is systemic, and not just confined to the dreaming spires. Going to a top university, it hardly needs adding, signals a material difference, especially in Britain where universities are quite severely ranked in a hierarchy.  Ultimately, does any of this matter? Why can one not simply accept that these are high-quality schools that provide our future leaders with a high-quality education? Given the thorniness – and often invidiousness – of the issue, it is a tempting proposition. Yet for a mixture of reasons – political and economic, as well as social – we believe that the issue represents in contemporary Britain an unignorable problem that urgently needs to be addressed and, if possible, resolved. The words of Alan Bennett reverberate still. Private education is not fair, he famously declared in June 2014 during a sermon at King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. “Those who provide it know it. Those who pay for it know it. Those who have to sacrifice in order to purchase it know it. And those who receive it know it, or should.”  Consider these three fundamental facts: one in every 16 pupils goes to a private school; one in every seven teachers works at a private school; one pound in every six of all school expenditure in England is for the benefit of private-school pupils.  The crucial point to make here is that although extra resources for each school (whether private or state) are always valuable, that value is at a diminishing rate the wealthier the school is. Each extra teacher or assistant helps, but if you already have two assistants in a class, a third one adds less value than the second. Given the very unequal distribution of academic resources entailed by the British private school system, it is unarguable that a more egalitarian distribution of the same resources would enhance the total educational achievement. There is, moreover, the sheer extravagance. Multiple theatres, large swimming pools and beautiful surroundings with expensive upkeep are, of course, nice to have and look suitably seductive on sales brochures – but add relatively little educational value.  Further inefficiency arises from education’s “positional” aspect. The resources lift up children in areas where their rank position on the ladder of success matters, such as access to scarce places at top universities. To the considerable extent this happens, the privately educated child benefits but the state-educated child loses out. This lethal combination of private benefit and public waste is nowhere more apparent than in the time and effort that private schools devote to working the system, to ease access to those scarce places.  What about the implications for our polity? The way the privately educated have sustained semi-monopolistic positions of prominence and influence in the modern era has created a serious democratic deficit. The unavoidable truth is that, by and large, the increasingly privileged and entitled products of an elite private education have – almost inevitably – only a limited and partial understanding of, and empathy with, the realities of everyday life as lived by most people. One of those realities is, of course, state education. It marked some kind of apotheosis when in July 2014 the appointment of Nicky Morgan (Surbiton High) as education secretary meant that every minister in her department at that time was privately educated.  On social mobility, there has been in recent years an abundance of apparently sincere, well-meaning rhetoric, not least from our leading politicians. “Britain has the lowest social mobility in the developed world,” laments David Cameron in 2015. “Here, the salary you earn is more linked to what your father got paid than in any other major country. We cannot accept that.” In 2016 Jeremy Corbyn declares his movement will “ensure every young person has the opportunities to maximise their talents”, while Theresa May follows on: “I want Britain to be a place where advantage is based on merit not privilege; where it’s your talent and hard work that matter, not where you were born, who your parents are or what your accent sounds like.” Rather like corporate social responsibility in the business world, social mobility has become one of those motherhood-and-apple-pie causes that it is almost rude not to utter warm words about.  Yet the mismatch between such sentiments and policymakers’ practical intentions is palpable. The Social Mobility Commission, with cross-party representation, reported regularly on what government should do, but in December 2017 all sitting members resigned in frustration at the lack of policy action in response to their recommendations.  The underlying reality of our private-school problem is stark. Through a highly resourced combination of social exclusiveness and academic excellence, the private-school system has in our lifetimes powered an enduring cycle of privilege. It is hard to imagine a notable improvement in our social mobility while private schooling continues to play such an important role. Allowing, as Britain still does, an unfettered expenditure on high-quality education for only a small minority of the population condemns our society in seeming perpetuity to a damaging degree of social segregation and inequality. This hands-off approach to private schools has come to matter ever more, given over the past half-century the vastly increased importance in our society of educational credentials. Perhaps once it might have been conceivable to argue that private education was a symptom rather than a cause of how privilege in Britain was transferred from one generation to the next, but that day is long gone: the centrality of schooling in both social and economic life – and the Noah’s flood of resources channelled into private schools for the few – are seemingly permanent features of the modern era. The reproduction of privilege is now tied in inextricably with the way we organise our formal education.  Ineluctably, as we look ahead, the question of fairness returns. If private schooling in Britain remains fundamentally unreconstructed, it will remain predominantly intended and destined for the advantage of the already privileged children who attend.  We need to talk openly about this problem, and it is time to find some answers. Some call for the “abolition” of private schools – whatever that might mean. We do not call for that, because we think it is better – and feasible – to harness for all the good qualities of private schools. Feasible reforms are available; these do not require excessive commitments from the Treasury, but do require a political commitment.  We are, however, under no illusions about the task of reform. The schools’ links with powerful vested interests are close and continuous. London’s main clubs (dominated by privately educated men) would be one example; the Church of England (closely connected with many private schools, from Westminster downwards) would be another. Or take the City of London, where in that historic and massively wealthy square mile not only do individual livery companies have an intimate involvement with a range of private schools, but the City corporation itself supports an elite trio in Surrey and London (City of London, City of London school for girls, City of London Freemen’s school). While as for the many hundreds of individual links between “top people” and private schools, often in the form of sitting on governing bodies, it only needs a glance at Who’s Who to get the gist. The term “the establishment” can be a tiresome one, too often loosely and inaccurately used, but in the sense of complementary networks of people at or close to the centres of power and wealth, it actually does mean something.  All of which leaves the private schools almost uniquely well placed to make their case and protect their corner. They have ready access to prominent public voices speaking on their behalf, especially in the House of Lords; they enjoy the passive support of the Church of England, which is distinctly reluctant to draw attention to the moral gulf between the aims of ancient founders and the socioeconomic realities of the present; and of course, they have no qualms about utilising all possible firepower, human as well as media and institutional, to block anything they find threatening.  The great historian EP Thompson wrote more than half a century ago about The Peculiarities of the English. Historically, those peculiarities have been various, but the most important – and pervasive in its consequences – has been social class. Of course, things to a degree have changed since Thompson’s time. The visible distinctions of dress and speech have been somewhat eroded, if far from obliterated; the obvious social manifestations of a manufacturing economy have been replaced by the more fluid forms of a service economy; the increasing emphasis of reformers and activists has been on issues of gender and ethnicity; and a series of politicians and others have sought to assure us that we are moving into “a classless society”. Yet the fundamental social reality remains profoundly and obstinately otherwise. Britain is still a place where more often than not it matters crucially not only to whom one has been born, but where and in what circumstances one has grown up.  It would be manifestly absurd to pin the blame entirely on the existence over the past few centuries of a flourishing private-school sector. Even so, given that these schools have been and still are places that – when the feelgood verbiage is stripped away – ensure that their already advantaged pupils retain and extend their socio‑economic advantages in later life, common sense places them squarely in the centre of the frame.  Is it possible in Britain over the next 10 or 20 years to build a sufficiently widespread consensus for reform?Or, at the very least, to begin to have a serious, sustained, non-name-calling, non-guilt-ridden national conversation on the subject of private education? A poll we commissioned from Populus shows a virtually landslide majority for a perception of unfairness about private education, indicating that public opinion is potentially receptive to grappling with the issue and what to do about it. The poll reveals, moreover, that even those who have been privately educated, or have chosen to educate their own children privately, are more likely than not to have a perception of unfairness.  The question of what to do about a sector educating only some 6% of our school population might seem relatively trifling, and difficult to prioritise (especially in challenging economic circumstances), compared with say the challenges of quality teacher recruitment across the state sector or the whole vital area of early-years learning. Yet it would be a huge mistake to underestimate the seriously negative educational aspects of the current dispensation and to continue to marginalise the private-school question. The private schools’ reach is very much broader than their minority share of school pupils implies. Unless some radical reform is set in train, an unreconstructed private-school system, with its enormous resource superiority and exclusiveness hanging over the state system as a beacon for unequal treatment and privilege, would make it hard to sustain a fully comprehensive and fair state education system.  Ultimately, the issue is at least as much about what kind of society one might hope the Britain of the 2020s and 2030s to be. A more open society in which upward social mobility starts to become a real possibility for many children, not just a few lucky ones? A society in which the affluent are not educated in enclaves, and in which schooling for the affluent is not funded at something like three times the level of schooling for the less affluent? A society in which the pursuit through education of greater equality of life chances, seeking to harness the talents of all our children, is a matter of real and rigorous intent? A society in which there is a just relationship between the competing demands of liberty and equity, and in which we are, to coin a phrase, all in it together? For the building of such a society, or anything even remotely close, the issue of private education is pivotal, both symbolically and substantively. The reform of private schools will not alone be sufficient to achieve a good education system for all, let alone the good society; but it surely is a necessary condition. At this particular moment in our island story, the future seems peculiarly a blank sheet. Everything is potentially on the table. And for once, that has to include the engines of privilege. For if not now, when?  • Engines of Privilege: Britain’s Private School Problem by Francis Green and David Kynaston is published by Bloomsbury on 7 February (£20). To order a copy for £17.60 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99  There are broadly two types of option: those that handicap private schools, making them less attractive to parents, and those that envisage “crossing the tracks” – some form of integration with the state-school sector. Some reforms would have much more of an impact than others.  1. Handicaps  Contextual admissions to universities Where universities, especially the high-status ones, make substantial allowances for candidates’ school background; alternatively, as another method of positive discrimination, some form of a quota system.  Upping the cost Where the fees are substantially raised, making some parents switch away from the private-school sector and opt for state schools. Even though tax subsidies are not huge, the government could reduce them, for example by taking away charitable status (from those schools that are charities) or by requiring that all schools pay business rates in full (as in Scotland from 2020).  Alternatively, something that would “hurt” a bit more, government could directly tax school fees (as in Labour’s manifesto pledge to impose VAT or in Andrew Adonis’s proposed 25% “educational opportunity tax”).  2. Crossing the tracks  There are several proposed schemes for enabling children from low-income families to attend private schools. Mainly, these would leave it to schools to choose how they select their pupils. Some are relatively small in scope, including a proposal from the Independent Schools Council that would involve no more than 2% of the private-school population. Others are more ambitious: the Sutton Trust’s Open Access Scheme proposes that all places at about 80 top private secondary day schools would be competed for on academic merit. The government would subsidise those who could not afford the fees.  In another type of partial integration, schools would select a proportion of state-funded pupils according to the Schools Admissions Code, meaning that the government or local government would set the principles for selection and the extra places would become an extension to the state system. We suggest a Fair Access Scheme, where the schools would be obliged initially to recruit one-third of their pupils in this way, with a view to the proportion rising significantly over time.


theguardianuk--2019-02-09--Schools staff crisis looms as austerity hits teachers pay

Schools staff crisis looms as austerity hits teachers’ pay

Ministers have conceded that teachers’ pay has fallen by thousands of pounds a year since the public spending austerity drive began, amid warnings of a “looming crisis” in attracting and retaining new staff.  Classroom pay has fallen by more than £4,000 a year since 2010 in real terms, according to a government assessment. Damian Hinds, the education secretary, warned that only a 2% increase can be expected for the next academic year.  The admission comes in the Department for Education’s official submission to the School Teachers’ Review Body, which makes recommendations on pay deals. It states that pay is also lower than it was 15 years ago in real terms. “From 2002-03 to 2017-18, classroom teacher median salaries have seen a drop of 10% and overall teacher median salaries of 11% in real terms,” it says. It argues that the fall was smaller than that suffered by private sector graduates.  Unions have been calling for a 5% rise for the next academic year, arguing that low pay makes it hard to retain staff. Last year, about 60% of teachers were expected to receive below-inflation awards.  Mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the National Education Union, said: “We welcome the DfE’s admission that teachers’ pay has fallen so far in real terms. It is no good Damian Hinds trying to argue that this is the same for private sector jobs – those figures reflect the many graduates forced into low-paid, part-time, semi-casual jobs, whereas we are talking about the pay rates being offered to those joining a profession.”  The number of secondary school pupils is forecast to rise by 15% during the next decade. However, the government missed its recruitment targets for trainees for the past six years, with the biggest shortfalls in key subjects like maths, modern foreign languages and physics. Ministers have responded with a series of measures designed to ease the pressures with job shares, more support for new staff and a reduction in paperwork.  James Zuccollo, from the Education Policy Institute, said there was evidence that “targeted pay increases” could greatly reduce the looming crisis. “Recent research suggests a 5% pay supplement for early-career science and maths teachers could have avoided the increased shortages since 2010, for instance,” he said.  “The government’s new bursary scheme for early-career teachers may help to tackle acute retention problems in shortage subjects and disadvantaged parts of the country. But, unless it is applied immediately to existing teachers, it is likely to be a few years before we see any improvements to exit rates.”  Hinds has announced that English schools will no longer be punished for failing to meet government standard on tests, in an attempt to release teachers from the stress of results and stop schools with challenging pupils from being punished. He also wants to cut down on marking, data collection and lesson planning.  However, Angela Rayner, the shadow education secretary, said years of cuts had led to teachers being “thousands of pounds a year worse off. Across our schools we are seeing the result in the crisis in teacher recruitment and retention. Teacher recruitment targets have been missed year after year, with more teachers leaving the profession than joining. In response to this crisis, the government will give the majority of teachers another real-terms pay cut.”  Labour is pledging to end the public sector pay cap with additional, ring-fenced funding.  School leaders have been angered by a suggestion last week that they will have to fund this year’s pay increase from their existing budget, without extra help from the government. A note from the department warned: “A pay increase for teachers of 2%, in line with forecast inflation, is affordable within the overall funding available to schools for 2019 to 2020, without placing further pressure on school budgets.”  A Department for Education spokesperson said: “Last summer saw the biggest teacher pay rise in almost 10 years, worth between £800 and £1,366 for classroom teachers and supported by a £508m government grant. In addition to an annual pay award, many teachers also receive increases from promotions and responsibility allowances.  “Whilst we know pay is an important issue for teachers, there are also other factors which can affect recruitment and retention. That is why in January we unveiled the first ever integrated recruitment and retention strategy in England, which will provide teachers with more early careers support and opportunities for flexible and part-time working. The strategy also builds on the work we have done to support school leaders to strip away unnecessary workload.”


theguardianuk--2019-03-12--Lessons in Sweetieland Matthew Bournes old primary school dance his Nutcracker

Lessons in Sweetieland: Matthew Bourne's old primary school dance his Nutcracker!

It looks, at first glance, like a regular rehearsal for a school play. A line of primary students march around the hall brandishing handmade props, feet stomping and pigtails swinging. But this school in Walthamstow, east London, has a superstar alumnus and all the pupils – almost 500 of them – have been enlisted for his latest gala production.    Matthew Bourne, the British choreographer who was knighted in 2016 and is about to receive a special Olivier award for his achievements in dance, attended Roger Ascham primary school in the 1960s. He has returned to his old patch to prepare a one-off performance this Friday. A new version of his 1992 classic Nutcracker! will be performed by the pupils – and two teachers – as part of this year’s London Borough of Culture celebrations in Waltham Forest.  Bourne, best known for reimagining Swan Lake by replacing the female corps de ballet with a male ensemble, has happy memories of Roger Ascham. Born in Hackney, he moved to Walthamstow aged six. His father worked for Thames Water and his mother worked part-time for the local council; both were also youth workers. Bourne and his brother grew up in a rented house in nearby Douglas Avenue. “There was no drama class as such,” says Bourne of the school. “But I was so grateful to them for letting me do what I clearly wanted to do.” Aged eight, he put on his own versions of Cinderella – “All the boys played girls and all the girls played boys” – and Mary Poppins in the school hall. His love of both stories endured. In 2017, Bourne’s Cinderella, set during the second world war, was a hit at Sadler’s Wells; his celebrated version of Mary Poppins is back in the West End later this year.  Bourne says that staging this 45-minute Nutcracker! will give the students a “sense of unity” and the feeling that they’ve “conquered something together”. Certainly, the whole school is buzzing. In rehearsals, class 1B (aged 6-7) are busy running on the spot, then practising robot poses, jerking their bodies while trying to keep straight faces. One student gets a high-five from Gavin Eden, part of a small team from Bourne’s company, New Adventures, who have been based at the school for six weeks. “Wiggle like you’ve got no muscles,” one group are told by Kerry Biggin, who performed in Bourne’s professional version of Nutcracker! as Clara.  As the children assemble a Nutcracker soldier puppet, brandishing body parts on sticks, I step out to meet some of the sixth-year students. “It’s a big opportunity,” says Mila. “We’re working with people who are really top-class.” Yasmina thinks it’s great that “everyone gets to have a part” while Thevhan says he wasn’t sure what to make of it at first. “And then I started to like it,” he says, busting out some moves as he talks: “Yeah, I get this, yeah!” Emily, from year 5, proudly says: “I’m one of the choreographers” and Mila explains the concept: “There are six storytellers who help tell the story.” Yasmina explains: “The storytellers get sucked into the book.” Thevhan says that in dance “you use your body to replace the words”. Emily reflects: “It’s quite hard!”  The project was designed to change the model of an “artist in residence” so that it’s not about an artist creating a solo work reflecting on their individual experiences. Instead, it’s a collaboration – and the process is as important as the final production.  Dancer Michela Meazza – who played Princess Sugar in Nutcracker! – says this new version relocates the story from an orphanage to a Victorian school. This means the children “can start thinking about the differences between their schools and Victorian times”. When the action shifts to Sweetieland, the show’s appeal for the students is self-explanatory. “They become snowflakes, there are chocolate rivers,” explains Meazza. “We can play a lot with their imagination.”  Biggin believes the landscape has changed for dance education since she was a child: “We had a ‘music and movement’ class. The teacher would bring in a tape recorder and press play. The tape told you what to do, like ‘Run! Stop!’” A PE teacher who was passionate about dance recognised her talent and encouraged her to pursue it in her spare time. Eden, 34, remembers his school as “absolutely not supportive of me, as a boy, dancing. For the end of year show they would not encourage me to dance, which was a shame.”  New Adventures hope the project will encourage pupils to think of dance as a career option. There are many benefits of dance, they say, include confidence building, a sense of empowerment and accountability. Meazza says that Bourne’s professional productions are always based on individuals’ contributions. “Everyone brings something to the creation of the material, to the choreography, the ideas, the story. The same approach has been used with the children. “We teach them a little bit from the show but it’s very important that they create their own movement and we include that in the piece. So there is a sense of ownership. They can feel: ‘I’ve created this and I’m performing it. And some of my friends are performing my movement.’”  In the hall, I see the children practise the art of taking a final bow. But the company is also helping them to explore techniques for handling pre-show jitters, including breathing techniques and ways to focus, which will prove to be transferable skills.  The performance takes place at Walthamstow Assembly Hall on Friday and is for family and friends only. Entry is free, which wasn’t the case for the shows Bourne staged at home as a child. “I advertised them,” he remembers with a laugh. “You’d get a free cup of tea and a biscuit with your ticket.”


theguardianuk--2019-03-15--Schools have become fourth emergency service for poorest families

Schools have become 'fourth emergency service' for poorest families

Schools have become “an unofficial fourth emergency service” for vulnerable families across England and Wales, offering food parcels, clothing and laundry facilities to those worst affected by austerity, according to a new report by a headteachers’ union.  A majority of the 400 school leaders surveyed by the Association of Schools and College Leaders (ASCL) said they were seeing a “rising tide” of poverty among their pupils, at a time when they were having to cut their own budgets and receiving less support from local councils.  Sarah Bone, headteacher of Headlands school, a comprehensive in Yorkshire’s East Riding, said: “We have far too many children with no heating in the home, no food in the cupboards, washing themselves with cold water, walking to school with holes in their shoes and trousers that are ill-fitted and completely worn out, and living on one hot meal a day provided at school.”  Other heads reported pupils with no winter coats, while others said they regularly had to buy shoes for their pupils.  “A decade of austerity has wreaked havoc with the social fabric of the nation and schools have been left to pick up the pieces while coping with real-term funding cuts,” said Geoff Barton, the ASCL’s general secretary.  “They have become an unofficial fourth emergency service for poor and vulnerable children, providing food and clothing and filling in the gaps left by cutbacks to local services.  “Politicians must end their fixation with Brexit and work together to build a new sense of social mission in our country. We simply must do better for struggling families and invest properly in our schools, colleges and other vital public services.”  Nearly all of the headteachers who responded to the survey said schools struggled to access local mental health services for pupils needing specialist care, which they attributed to both cuts in services and increased demand.  Nine out of 10 heads said they gave clothes to their most disadvantaged pupils, and nearly half said they washed clothes for pupils. More than 40% reported operating a food bank at the school or giving food parcels to pupils and their families.  One school leader commented: “In 24 years of education I have not seen the extent of poverty like this. Children are coming to school hungry, dirty and without the basics to set them up for life. The gap between those that have and those that do not is rising and is stark.”  Another teacher said some families had nowhere left to go for help: “We have seen an increase in the number of families needing support for basic human needs.”  Edward Conway, headteacher of St Michael’s Catholic high school in Watford, said: “Pupil poverty has increased significantly over the past eight years, with us providing food, clothing, equipment and securing funds from charitable organisations to provide essential items such as beds and fridges.”  The report comes as the ASCL meets for its annual conference in Birmingham, with Damian Hinds, the education secretary, addressing the headteachers on Friday.  Hinds will unveil a new strand in his efforts to make teaching more attractive, with a new expert panel to advise on teacher wellbeing headed by Paul Farmer, chief executive of the mental health charity Mind.  “Like any really important job, teaching comes with its own challenges and, whilst rewarding, I don’t need to tell you how stressful it can be,” Hinds will tell the audience of around 1,000 school leaders.  Farmer said he welcomed Hinds’ support for wellbeing in the workplace. “Teaching staff do an incredibly important and demanding job, so employers need to support their staff so that they can come into work at their best,” he said.


theguardianuk--2019-03-24--Blocked drains mystery stinks heads warn of schools repair crisis

Blocked drains, mystery stinks – heads warn of schools repair crisis

In one of the classrooms of Gillotts secondary school in Henley-on-Thames, there is a mysterious, acrid smell. It is a school day but the room is empty because this “awful” scent, a mix of damp and chemicals, clogs children’s throats and clings to the teachers’ hair and clothes long after they go home.  “That classroom is shut and unusable because of the smell – and I could really do with that classroom,” said headteacher Catharine Darnton. Her state school has 900 pupils and, like many other heads across the country, she has struggled to maintain her dilapidated building in the face of the government’s austerity cuts. As well as the stink, heating failures and electricity blow-outs have led to partial temporary closures of the school and blocked drains have threatened to leak raw sewage onto the playground. Darnton has been forced to take money intended for the education of students and allocate it to repairs and even capital expenditure. The low point came when, in winter, the building was so cold and dark she had to consider closing the school. “It was insane,” she said.  Last week, a survey of 3,500 teachers revealed two-fifths of schools have set up buckets to catch drips when it rains and over a quarter do not believe their schools are in a good state of repair. The research, by the survey app Teacher Tapp in collaboration with Schools Week, found that teachers working in schools built in the mid-20th century were the most likely to report using buckets – but even in schools built in the 2010s, around 27% of teachers still reported having to resort to this tactic.  Theresa Madden is among the many headteachers who have learnt to dread bad weather: “When it rains, I worry about where the building will burst at the seams.” She teaches at St John Fisher Catholic College, a comprehensive school in Staffordshire. Despite achieving “excellent” outcomes for her students, Madden said “years of underfunding mean we are reactive rather than proactive to repairs. We receive just over £20,000 in capital funding annually which we could spend tenfold on repairs alone, before we even consider small projects. It is shameful the government fails to recognise that underfunding means young people are receiving an education akin to 50 years ago.”  Darnton, like Madden, is calling on the government for more capital investment. Gillotts was one of five schools in Oxfordshire designated for a full rebuild under Labour, but this was cancelled after Michael Gove axed the Building Schools for the Future programme in 2010. The school’s capital budget used to be about £80,000 a year, but was cut by 80% to £18,000 in 2011 and has stayed at that level ever since. Also, funding per pupil has remained the same (around £4,700) between 2012 and 2018: a cumulative 16% cut after inflation is taken into account.  The terrible stink first emerged in classroom X2 when a 40-year-old leaky pipe caused a huge heating failure. Even after further leaks partly closed the school, the government’s central improvement fund repeatedly refused applications to fully repair the school’s disintegrating underground heating system, landing Darnton with a £30,000 bill and effectively wiping out her year’s planned maintenance budget. While she was trying to find funds to repair the leak, the smell got worse.  Now the heating is fixed but she has been forced to allocate £11,000 for air tests and underground drilling to try to get rid of the stench, and still cannot use the classroom. It may have be demolished and rebuilt – and that is not the only significant expense Darnton is facing this year. In December, a blocked drain threatened to send raw sewage back up through the school’s pipes. After repeatedly paying £1,500 to clear it, Darnton is now facing a bill of around £50,000 to keep sewage out of her playground.  Most of this colossal expense, she says, could have been avoided if the school had been able to afford to line its drains, as it was advised to do, a few years earlier. “By not maintaining our schools, we are storing up problems and the cost is higher when we have to do it in an emergency,” she said.  What upsets her most is the government’s lack of respect for heads, who are speaking out. “The government mantra is that there has never been more money for education. It doesn’t matter to me how much money there is across the system. What I see is that I’ve had real terms cuts to my funding every year.” She is working 70-hour weeks, trying to make do with the current level of funding. “I can’t go on doing that. I’m desperate for my capital funding to be reinstated.”  A Department for Education spokesperson said: “We have allocated £6bn in capital funding to maintain and improve ... school buildings since 2015, which includes an additional £400m for schools in 2018-19.  “In addition, our Priority School Building Programme is rebuilding or refurbishing over 500 schools across the country, and we have reduced delivery timescales and driven down the costs of building schools. As the National Audit Office said in its report from February 2017, the Priority School Building Programme has delivered schools around a third cheaper than Building Schools for the Future.”“We are updating our information on the condition of state-funded schools in England, so that we can carry on targeting funding.”


theguardianuk--2019-04-10--Schools put down your begging bowls Unite and protest instead Holly Rigby

Schools, put down your begging bowls. Unite and protest instead | Holly Rigby

Given the [£5.4 billion ](https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/mar/25 /schools-funding-shortfall-of-54bn-worse-than- estimated)[shortfall](https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/mar/25 /schools-funding-shortfall-of-54bn-worse-than-estimated) in funding that schools across England have suffered in the last three years, it’s little wonder that school fundraising efforts to plug these gaps have had to become increasingly creative.  In the school I taught in last year, the school building was hired out in the evening to raise extra cash, so it wasn’t unusual to finish my marking to the lively sounds of the local Ghanaian church service in the canteen next to my classroom. At the end of last term, my current school hosted a conference for 500 teachers from across the country for a lively day of collaborative discussion on classroom pedagogy, with tickets costing visiting teachers £50 a head.  Now a Guardian [report](https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/apr/09 /cash-strapped-english-schools-turn-to-online-donations-to-close-funding-gap) has shown that schools are embracing the modern trend for crowdsourcing and taking their fundraising efforts online. Gone are raffles of supermarket shampoo sets and Saturday afternoons spent flogging crumbling Rice Krispie cakes. Instead, the Guardian has shown that more than 1,000 schools are raising money through crowdfunding platforms like JustGiving or creating Amazon wish lists of basic supplies such as notebooks, glue sticks and cleaning products.  With any cash injections to schools from the Treasury looking unlikely, schools should not be blamed for trying to raise the money they need to keep afloat. But allowing local community groups to use school premises after hours or organising events for teachers to collaborate in shouldn’t be luxuries that schools have to charge for. When schools have to proffer their online begging bowls for pencils and lined paper, we know that something has gone seriously wrong with our school system.  We must not underestimate how dire the situation has become, even if the chancellor, Philip Hammond, insultingly claimed that schools only needed “[little extras](https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/oct/30/schools- angry-philip-hammond-budget-little-extras-education)” in last year’s budget. Teachers are volunteering to reduce their [salaries](https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/mar/30/teachers- volunteer-pay-cut-save-colleagues-jobs-furzedown-funding) in order to safeguard the jobs of their teaching assistants. A school in [Stockport](https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/feb/28/school- stockport-close-early-fridays-lack-funding) is closing early on Fridays to save money on salaries and utilities. And a recent [survey](https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/mar/24/schools-repair- crisis-blocked-drains-mystery-stinks-budget-cuts) of 35,000 teachers on the parlous state of school buildings has found that two-fifths of schools had set up buckets in their classrooms to catch drips when it rained.  In light of this, charitable fundraising efforts are only ever going to provide a temporary sticking plaster over the wound inflicted on schools by this government’s punishing austerity agenda. These fundraising efforts, no matter how innovative or well meaning, also risk legitimising the “[big society](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/jul/19/david-cameron-big- society-launch)” ethos once espoused by David Cameron, which suggested that individual generosity could patch up the unjustifiable gaps in state provision created by Conservative austerity.  Instead, schools would be far better served if they joined the mass campaigns to pressure the government to increase school funding, particularly given there will be a spending review later this year. The National Education Union (NEU) is organising a mass [planning day](https://neu.org.uk/togetherforeducation) in Westminster’s Central Hall in June to bring together school leaders, teachers, parents and local councillors from across the country to build on the existing success of its School Cuts campaign. Just last week, the NEU collaborated with the f40 campaign group for fairer funding in education, chaired by Conservative councillor James McInnes to deliver a letter signed by [1,000 councillors ](https://www.bbc.com/news/education-47772862)demanding that the education secretary, Damian Hinds, delivers billions in funding in the upcoming spending review.  I’m personally not going to hold my breath over Hinds’s promise that schools have a “[strong case](https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/mar/15/uk- headteachers-told-they-have-strong-case-for-extra-funding)” for extra funding. After all, there’s a reason why 750,000 people [switched their vote](https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/jun/20/schools-theresa-may- electorate-cuts) in the 2017 general election as a result of worries about school funding. Many of these votes went to Labour following its promise to invest [£6 billion](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/may/09/labour- pledges-6bn-annual-boost-to-school-budgets) in schools if elected.  I understand why people committed to their local schools have not wanted to stand by and watch as school leaders and teachers struggle to provide even the basics our children require for a decent education. But fundraising is not the answer. Instead, passionate educationalists everywhere must now unite to take mass action to ensure we have a government committed to providing the school funding that our children and their schools deserve.  • Holly Rigby is a teacher, a Labour party member and an activist in the National Education Union


theguardianuk--2019-04-11--Ofsted uncovers 500 suspected illegal schools in England

More than 500 suspected illegal schools, educating thousands of pupils, have been identified in England over the past three years by the schools watchdog Ofsted, according to data published for the first time.  Some of the schools were in an appalling condition with rat traps, exposed wires and open sewers, Ofsted inspectors said. In one, pupils were left to play computer games all day, while in another inspectors found children in every classroom repeating religious texts with no other apparent education going on.  In some cases local authorities were unwittingly sending children to unlicensed alternative provision. In one case, a council paid £27,000 a year for one of its students to be educated in an unregistered setting. Elsewhere, students were found being taught by teachers who had been banned and untrained staff who had undergone no employment checks, in buildings where hygiene and facilities were poor.  The data, released by Ofsted on Friday and never published before, shows the illegal schools task force has investigated 521 settings, and inspected 259 since January 2016.  Ofsted estimated that 6,000 children were being educated in the 259 unregistered schools it has inspected to date but, according to Ofsted’s deputy director, Victor Shafiee, who heads the unregistered schools taskforce, the figures represent the “tip of the iceberg”.  “All my inspectors tell me there’s still lots out there,” he said. “It just isn’t good enough that vulnerable children, isolated children, end up in these places where there is no oversight, no quality assurance, and they are out of sight.”  He said the most vulnerable children ended up being looked after by the least capable adults and as a result were “robbed of their life chances”. Parents were often misled, sometimes paying £7,500 a year for their child to be educated in an illegal or unregistered school.  “People hang on to the bottoms of lorries, and jump trains to get to this country because education is free. So why would you then send your child to an unregistered school and pay for them to go to these settings? It is something that I find unfathomable,” said Shafiee.  Almost a quarter (23%) of the unregistered schools Ofsted inspected were in London, with the rest evenly spread across the country as far afield as Cornwall and the north-east. A fifth (21%) were faith schools, including 36 Islamic, 18 Jewish and 12 Christian schools, and 28% were alternative provision for students who struggled to cope with mainstream education.  “As today’s data shows, this is not simply an issue with faith settings, nor is it limited to certain areas of the country,” said Shafiee. “Unregistered schools come in many shapes and sizes, and not all of them are run with malicious intent. But all children deserve the best.”  So far, 71 of the schools have been issued with a warning notice by inspectors; 15 of those have since closed down while 39 have changed the way they operate in order to comply with the law, and nine have registered as independent schools. So far, however, there has been just one prosecution, with two more prosecutions pending.  Ofsted is calling for greater powers to inspect unregistered schools and says the current legislative framework is inadequate, with inspectors unable to seize evidence, hampering potential prosecutions.  Sue Will, an inspector on the unregistered schools taskforce, said she had been shocked by health and safety issues at some of the schools she had visited. She said she had seen portable buildings balanced on top of one another to maximise space. “Some of the buildings that we have been to are in really poor state – unsafe. We are not just talking about run-down places that could do with a lick of paint, we are talking about some not very nice places at all.  “Open sewers, rat traps in rooms … exposed electrical work. I’ve seen holes in walls and floors, I have seen locked fire doors, I have seen holes where children have probably punched plaster walls. That is the bit for me that I always find so shocking.”  An institution must register as a school – and therefore be open to inspection by Ofsted – if it is providing full-time education to at least five children of compulsory school age, or one child who is looked after by the local authority or who has special educational needs. The Department for Education (DfE) says that 18 hours or more a week constitutes full-time education so some providers avoid having to register by operating for 17 hours and 50 minutes per week.  The DfE said a new register for children not in school – recently announced by the government – would help councils to identify children in unregulated settings and intervene. A spokesperson said the DfE had already signalled its intention to legislate to enable Ofsted gather evidence to support prosecutions and help close down illegal schools.


theguardianuk--2019-04-16--The Great British School Swap review racial harmony Its childs play

The Great British School Swap review – racial harmony? It's child's play

Pupils from Asian and white-majority areas are put into a classroom together in a well-intentioned social experiment that fails to get to the root of prejudice  Amina, a brown-skinned, teenage, Muslim pupil from Saltley academy, a secondary school in a predominantly brown-skinned Muslim area of Birmingham, thinks white people have different accents. “They’re like: ‘Ew, yew fucking plonkah!’” Her friends, of similar ethnic and religious heritage, think white people have “really messy houses”, they “don’t give a shit” and have “alcohol bottles everywhere”. They “have their feet up watching TV with a bowl of popcorn on the sofa”. There also seems to be a consensus that white people go to “naked beaches” a lot.  White-skinned Lucas from Tamworth Enterprise, a secondary school in a predominantly white area of Birmingham a few miles away, thinks Muslims “worship a god called Allah and their prophet is Muhammad Ali”. He is doing better than Lauren, who thinks Islam may be a country, and Dan, who reckons Mecca is a YouTuber. They and their friends think Muslims wear burqas, smell of curry, shop at Primark and can be “horrible and nasty people”.  “That’s because of terrorism,” Cabdul explains wearily to his fellow Saltlerians as outrage begins to build.  Welcome to The Great British School Swap (Channel 4). It is the same premise you have seen before, only this time it is set in schools instead of homes. Or it is the other premise you have seen before, but this time looking at race and religion instead of money and class. Two groups of people who don’t normally meet are forced to spend time together in each other’s environments in the hope they can all learn something about themselves, about each other and, hey, maybe about life, too.  In this opening episode, the Tamworth teenagers (a dozen boys and girls aged 13 and 14) are bussed across the invisible lines that separate them from Saltley. They will take part in a week of specially devised lessons aimed at making both groups think more deeply about messages they have received uncritically and ideas they have internalised.  As is almost always the case with even the most well-intentioned social-experiment programmes, the pace is dizzying and the results maddeningly superficial. There are plenty of telly-worthy moments – the strangely pure innocence of Dan, for example, as he explains earnestly that he doesn’t use the word “Paki” because, in Tamworth, “there’s no Pakis around to say it to”, or the explanation from one student to another of what a golliwog is: “A black doll, costs about £7.”  There is the standout character around whom a whole series could be built: the mighty Kiran, who has yet to have an unexpressed thought. On white girls’ clothing, she says: “You seen ’em on the streets in short skirts and boob jobs? Are you being serious? Keep it PG!” Talking about a transgender pupil, Lucas (a model of impressive grace under increasing pressure, as his gender becomes a source of growing fascination to many Saltley students), she admits: “Do you want my honest opinion? I just don’t like gay people. I feel weird around them.”  And yet she is charming. She is clearly wrestling with herself and the received wisdom with which she has grown up. The obviousness of the cogs turning is enough to give you hope. As Mr Turnkey, the headteacher at Tamworth, says: “The important thing is that we’re working with minds still open to change.”  But it feels so slight, so fragmentary. The sense of the programme itself preaching to the choir is pervasive. Of course, you can take your own deep dives into more thoughtful waters off the rocky promontories that the pupils’ unguarded words, attitudes and relationships provide, but only if you are already that way inclined.  If you want to inspire deeper thought among a wider demographic – as you surely should, to justify putting these children in extremely exposing positions – then you need to drill down, follow through, unpick some issues and lay them out for examination.  It isn’t clear yet whether the next two episodes will do that. A trailer for next week’s show, which concentrates more on the children’s parents, suggests that, whether it is as superficial or not, it is going to be several degrees bleaker as they work with minds less open to change.  On the upside, you can already see the two dozen children doing each other good. Simply getting to know each other – none of them drunk, naked, terrorists or clad in Primark – is enough to have an effect. It’s so simple, isn’t it? And so, so hard.


theguardianuk--2019-04-17--A bunker for Bauhaus design school comes home to Weimar

A bunker for Bauhaus: design school comes home to Weimar

The German city of Weimar has long bathed in its historic cultural heritage, boasting such illustrious former residents as Goethe, Schiller, Bach and Liszt. Its quiet cobbled streets are lined with creamy stuccoed piles where great men of letters convened, and stately theatres where premieres were performed. But, while it is happy to wallow in the völkisch annals of its distant past, the city has never much cared for the fact that it spawned the most influential art school of the 20th century, perhaps of all time.  “People here are still a bit unsure about the Bauhaus,” says Wolfgang Holler, museum director of the Klassik Stiftung Weimar, the city’s foundation for classical heritage, which has opened a new Bauhaus museum to mark the school’s centenary. “It is still very much a backward-looking place.”  One hundred years after the Bauhaus was founded here, Weimar has come to terms with it just enough to allow a museum to be built. The small town of Dessau, where the radical school was forced to move in 1925, still boasts the dazzling white studio buildings designed by its founding director, Walter Gropius, while Berlin, where it moved again in 1932, has the Gropius-designed Bauhaus Archive. Both have (delayed) buildings in the works to mark the centenary.  But Weimar, which remains a stronghold of the conservative forces that originally pushed the school out, has only ever had a paltry display tucked away in a poky space – until now.  Standing as a chiselled concrete bunker on the edge of a new public square, the €27m (£23m) Bauhaus Museum is a stark arrival. It presents a windowless frontage to the square, exuding the austere presence of a memorial, a mute grey block that might not seem out of place at the Buchenwald concentration camp nearby. Some locals have even compared it to the Wolf’s Lair, Hitler’s eastern front headquarters.  “It was important to express Weimar’s ambivalent relationship with modernism,” says the museum’s architect, Heike Hanada, who studied and taught at Bauhaus University in Weimar, and won the project in an anonymous international competition in 2012, having built nothing else before. “It also had to respond to the politically charged site.”  The museum stands next to the Gauforum, a puffed-up administrative complex built by the Nazis in the 1930s as the headquarters of their slave-labour programme. Its central courtyard, originally named Adolf-Hitler-Platz, remains fenced-off to prevent neo-Nazi gatherings from occupying the space – a very real threat in a city where the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland is poised to make strong gains in forthcoming elections. As a blunt grey block inscribed with horizontal strata, Hanada’s building has eerie echoes of the Gauforum’s stone tower, designed to the directions of Hitler himself. “Unfortunately, he was not so bad at architecture,” she says, although she insists that any similarity is a coincidence.  The Third Reich may have been interested in the monumental power of a particularly steroidal kind of classicism, but it had no time for the avant-garde work of the Bauhaus, labelling its output “degenerate” and finally closing the school in 1933. The museum’s sombre character is strangely fitting: it is a mausoleum for a school of thought that Weimar once did its best to eradicate.  The subdued container is, thankfully, enlivened by the colourful stories found within it. History has done its best to normalise the Bauhaus, straightening it out as a pure, modernist bastion of form follows function, but the truth is it was a weird, riotously plural place, particularly in its early years. The Bauhaus Weimar period, from 1919-25, is by far the most strange and untold of the school’s history, so this museum fills a welcome and fascinating gap.  The exhibition begins by introducing the range of oddballs and eccentrics who made up the school’s initial teaching staff, alongside a rich range of work their students produced. We meet Gertrud Grunow, who taught classes in “harmonisation”, rhythmic gymnastics where students learned how to relate colours to certain sounds, movements and materials. “You close your eyes and, after a short period of inner reflection, you receive an instruction,” wrote an observer of her class, “either to imagine a certain colour ball and to feel it by penetrating it with your hands, or to concentrate on a note played at the piano. In less than no time, almost everyone is fully in motion.”  Grunow was recruited by Johannes Itten, a primary school teacher-turned-painter Gropius hired to run the preliminary Vorkurs, a compulsory six-month programme for new students. A shaven-headed mystic who wore his own special uniform of funnel-shaped trousers and a high-necked jacket fastened with a belt, Itten was the most cultish of the Bauhaus masters. He was a devout follower of Mazdaznan, a neo-Zoroastrian movement that prescribed a strict vegetarian diet and breathing exercises, which he conducted at the beginning of each class. His methods attracted as many critics as disciples: he “had something demonic about him”, said one former pupil, which might not have been far off the mark. Among his many rambling essays was a text on how the white race represented the highest level of civilisation (this unsavoury side is glossed over in the museum).  The work students produced during these early years was as peculiar as the teaching staff. The winning design for the Bauhaus emblem, by Karl Peter Röhl, looks like a masonic seal, depicting a matchstick man holding up a striped pyramid surrounded by stars, circles and a reverse swastika. Plans for a Bauhaus commune by Walter Determann show a huddle of traditional log cabins in a forest setting, while another of his psychedelic drawings imagines housing and studios arranged in a crystalline starburst. It is a fusion of the folksy and expressionist that also imbues the woodcuts of the printing department, and the rustic pots produced under Gerhard Marcks, who moved the school’s ceramics studio to the town of Dornburg, where he lived with his apprentices like primitive settlers, making jam jars to sell at farmers’ markets.  It is all as far from the minimal “Bauhaus style” as could be imagined. The exhibition paints a picture of the school as a lively, ad hoc place with no single clear direction but a multitude of experimental goings-on, a heady melting pot of visionaries and vegans, conservationists and cosmologists. It was a messy, conflicted place, housing the competing interests of art for self-fulfilment and hard-nosed design for industrial production – and many shades in between. As Gropius put it: “My sole aim is to leave everything in suspension, in flux, in order to prevent our community from solidifying into a conventional academy.”  On the second floor, the wild world of Bauhaus theatre, music and parties takes over, with a section devoted to the school’s theatrical laboratory, headed up by Oskar Schlemmer. The experimental tutor – who made his name with the futuristic Triadic Ballet in 1922, with performers dressed as space-age lollipops – encouraged his students to work in miniature, developing marionette theatre and puppet shows. Many of their surreal creations are on show here, along with scenes from the outlandish dressing-up parties. “Tell me how you party,” Schlemmer proclaimed, “and I’ll tell you who you are.”  The more familiar, later side of the Bauhaus is not forgotten either, with a large area devoted to the products of the furniture and metalwork departments, from a pleasingly DIY-store display of doorhandles to shelves piled high with kitchen utensils, crockery and coffeemakers – stripped-back designs that have become so familiar.  But there are some gaping holes, which the centenary could have provided a timely point to address. Along with some Bauhauslers’ questionable attitudes to race, the subject of gender inequality is mostly ignored. As early as 1920, Gropius suggested that student “selection should be more rigorous … particularly in the case of the female sex, already overrepresented in terms of numbers”. He had reckoned on “50 ladies and 100 gentlemen”, but the reality was more like half of each, since the Weimar constitution guaranteed women unrestricted freedom to study. Some histories have painted a picture of merry equality at the Bauhaus, but this masks the reality that Gropius recommended women be sent straight from the Vorkurs to the weaving workshop, and he agreed with Marcks to admit “no women at all if possible into the [pottery] workshop, both for their sakes and for the sake of the workshop.”  One of the few who asserted herself against these restrictions was Marianne Brandt, whose elegant metal teapots and ashtrays, composed from elementary forms of spheres and triangles, have become notable symbols of the Weimar Bauhaus. Her products are on show here in a glass vitrine (and on sale in the gift shop, from €150), but without so much as a caption. Similarly, the contribution of Lily Reich to the well-known works of Mies van der Rohe is barely mentioned.  As you leave the museum, down an imposing five-storey staircase in a narrow slot at the rear of the building, a large window frames a view of the rolling countryside, where a memorial tower stands in the distance. It marks Buchenwald, whose gates were designed by prisoner Franz Ehrlich, a former Bauhaus student. It is a powerful ending. As Germany faces the rising spectre of rightwing nationalism once more, the museum provides a poignant reminder of how fragile our freedoms remain.


theguardianuk--2019-04-18--Teaching union warns of super-sized classes in English schools

Teaching union warns of 'super-sized' classes in English schools

Class sizes in secondary schools in England will hit a 40-year high owing to a sharp increase in pupil numbers being compounded by the growing funding crisis, teachers’ leaders havesaid.  Kevin Courtney, the joint general secretary of the National Education Union (NEU), predicted that significantly more secondary school pupils would find themselves being taught in “super-sized classes”, which will “enrage” parents.  Secondary schools in some areas of England are already starting to experience significant growth in pupil numbers as a bulge in the population caused by rising birth rates in the 2000s makes its way through the education system.  School funding cuts are also having an impact. Last year education unions claimed that cuts were forcing up class sizes as schools sought to balance their budgets by cutting staff, with 62% of state secondary schools in England reporting larger class sizes than two years earlier.  In an address to delegates gathered for the final day of the NEU annual conference in Liverpool, Courtney accused the government of failing to prepare for the crisis, while class sizes continue to grow.  He told the conference: “We are about to see a significant increase in the number of secondary school children in super-sized classes. And my prediction is that this will enrage parents. The government can keep repeating its lines about more funding than ever before, but what’s happening to class sizes will give the lie to that.”  Courtney went on: “Astonishingly, we are about to see the number of secondary children in classes of 31 and above is about to pass the number in primary schools. That’s completely unprecedented in this country.”  Historically, classes in secondary school have been smaller than those in primary, but the rapid increase in secondary pupil numbers means that may change. There is also mounting concern that a recruitment and retention crisis means England’s secondary schools will not have enough teachers, particularly in subjects such as modern foreign languages, maths and science.  Many secondary teachers are already having to teach outside the subject they trained in – for example, PE teachers taking maths classes. “This represents a real problem in our schools,” said Courtney. “It represents a real problem for our members as well as their pupils. It’s a real problem this government has seen coming for 11 years. It’s a real problem it hasn’t dealt with.”  The secondary school-age population is forecast to grow by nearly 20% over the next decade. The government has been working to build capacity, but more than 10% of secondary school teachers left the profession last year. The government has also missed its targets for recruiting secondary teacher trainees for five years in a row.  Courtney also used his speech as a rallying call to urge parents to campaign on the issue of school funding in the run-up to the local elections, urging them to “ramp it up even more” in the case of a general election.  “Our funding campaign is going from strength to strength,” he said. “School funding is an issue that will not go away for this government … No politician in this country can safely ignore the fact that three-quarters of a million people changed their vote in the last general election because of school funding.’”  Teachers and school leaders were criticised in the rightwing media for their role in the campaign against funding cuts two years ago, before the 2017 general election, when education became the third most discussed issue on the doorstep.  The Department for Education has been contacted for comment. Previously it has said that the government is on track to create a million new school places by the end of this decade – the largest increase for at least two generations.


theguardianuk--2019-06-25--Tuesday briefing Nice work if you can get into the right school

Tuesday briefing: Nice work if you can get into the right school

Hello, I’m Warren Murray with the day’s conversation-starters.  Members of the uppermost echelons of British politics, the judiciary, media and business are five times more likely to have been to private school than the general population. Privately educated people, many of whom went to Oxbridge, continue to dominate high-ranking jobs: 39% had an independent education compared with 7% of the general population, according to a study called Elitist Britain 2019 by the Sutton Trust and Social Mobility Commission. The report identifies a “pipeline” from fee-paying schools through Oxbridge and into top jobs.  Luke Heselwood from the Reform thinktank says the “scandalous” figures show that the UK is far from being a meritocracy. “Fixing this will require serious reform to the education system as, despite improvements, the most advantaged are nearly 10 times more likely to attend elite universities than the most disadvantaged.” The shadow education secretary, Angela Rayner, said: “The old boys’ network and the old school tie still hold back talented and hard-working people from less privileged backgrounds.”  Love holding me back, says Johnson – Boris Johnson has set out on a media blitz in which he is vowing never to reveal the events that led to the police being called to the home of his partner Carrie Symonds. The Tory leadership frontrunner insisted on the BBC that “I do not talk about stuff involving my family, my loved ones” because “that is not fair on them”. Johnson is now understood to be rolling out a “media blitz” for the coming days, beginning with a series of closely controlled events on Tuesday. Rival Jeremy Hunt’s camp pointed out that “bottler Boris” has declined all television debates until Conservative members have already begun returning their ballot papers.  In a BBC interview, Johnson defended his Brexit plan to renegotiate a deal with the European Union but admitted he could not rip up the entire withdrawal agreement; and said he would tackle the Irish border “on the other side of 31 October during what’s called the implementation period”, but then was forced to agree the UK would not get an implementation period without the withdrawal agreement.  Sweaty times – It is going to feel like 47C in parts of Europe as an unprecedented week-long heatwave rolls across the continent. Meteorologists say temperatures will soar from Spain to Switzerland as hot air is sucked up from the Sahara by a storm stalling over the Atlantic and high pressure over central Europe. Officials in Paris have set up “cool rooms” in municipal buildings, opened pools for late-night swimming, installed extra drinking fountains and postponed school exams. Temperatures in the French capital reached 34C on Monday and that’s just the start. France’s deadliest recent heatwave was in August 2003 when almost 15,000 mainly elderly people died as hospitals were overwhelmed.  Roof over Archie’s head – Frogmore Cottage cost the British taxpayer £2.4m to renovate so Harry, Meghan and Archie could live there, accounts reveal. The 18th century Grade-II listed house – which is actually rather large and uncottagey-looking – is close to Windsor Castle. The bill included work to convert the five apartments in the building back into one single dwelling, which is now the couple’s official residence since they left Kensington Palace to set up their own royal household. Defective ceiling beams and floor joists need doing, as well as upgrades to the heating, power, gas and water.  ‘Someone knows who she is’ – A woman posed as the aunt of a cyclist who was killed in London to speak at a meeting against plans for a new segregated bike lane, according to the victim’s mother. Kensington and Chelsea council rejected the scheme. Eilidh Cairns died aged 30 in 2009 after being hit by a tipper truck in the borough. Her sister, Kate Cairns, who founded the road safety charity See Me Save Me after Eilidh’s death said the bike lane scheme, had it been in place, “would surely have prevented the death of my sister”. Eilidh’s mother, Heather, blasted the “effrontery” of the mystery person as she demanded the council identify her: “Someone knows who she is.” The cycle lane plan was drawn up by the office of the London mayor, Sadiq Khan. The borough says it is producing its own plan to direct cyclists to back streets rather than have protected lanes.  Down with filth – The notion that over-cleanliness is bad for children’s health is a dangerous myth, a report from the Royal Society for Public Health has warned. In its survey, 23% of 2,000 people thought “hygiene in the home is not important because children need to be exposed to harmful germs to build their immune system”. “The time has come when we need to sort this one out,” said Sally Bloomfield, lead author of Too Clean or Not Too Clean. “The public is becoming very confused.” Playing outside in the dirt does children good by exposing them to good bacteria, but it is vital they wash their hands before eating and after going to the toilet, says the RSPH. It stresses the importance of cleaning food preparation surfaces and wash dishcloths, but most crucial is hand washing – after going to the toilet, being around pets, before and after preparing food, and after coughing, sneezing or nose-blowing. Adults get four to six colds every year, children pick up six to eight, around one in 20 people get the vomiting bug norovirus, and it could all be kept in check by proper hand washing and hygiene, says the RSPH.  The Tory leadership hopeful has been avoiding questions on how the police were called to his home after an altercation with his partner. But will questions about Johnson’s previous behaviour and character damage his chances of becoming prime minister? The Guardian’s chief political correspondent, Jessica Elgot, discusses how the incident has been handled by Johnson’s campaign team and the wider questions that have arisen over his judgment and character. And, Bethan McKernan on the mayoral election rerun election in Istanbul that has dealt a serious blow to the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.  For almost half a century, the left has won progress on how people think about prejudice, personal identity and freedom, exposed capitalism’s cruelties, sometimes won elections, and sometimes governed effectively afterwards. But it has not been able to change fundamentally how wealth and work function in society. The left, in short, has not had an economic policy to answer that of the right: privatisation, deregulation, lower taxes for business and the rich, more power for employers and shareholders, less power for workers.  Capitalism has been made to appear inevitable, and any alternative impossible. But in recent years the prevailing system has started to fail. Rather than sustainable and widely shared prosperity, it has produced wage stagnation, ever more workers in poverty, ever more inequality, banking crises, populism and the climate crisis. Even some rightwing politicians concede the seriousness of the crisis. A huge political space has opened up, and a transatlantic movement of leftwing economists is building a practical alternative to neoliberalism. The result, the new economists claim, will be a “democratic economy” that suits society, rather than a society subordinated to the economy.  Fifa is holding a priority investigation, to be concluded within 48 hours, into the behaviour of the Cameroon team during their 3-0 loss to England in the last 16 of the Women’s World Cup. The hype around the US finally appears to be waning, even as the Americans beat a resilient Spain side 2-1 with the help of two penalties. Stina Blackstenius fired Sweden into the quarter-finals but they needed a penalty save from Hedvig Lindahl to beat Canada 1-0 in Paris.  Eoin Morgan has declined to join the chorus of voices asking supporters not to boo Steve Smith and David Warner in today’s World Cup match at Lord’s, adding that the pair may have served bans for last year’s ball-tampering scandal but rebuilding public trust takes longer. If England needed a reminder of just how fragile their hopes of making the semi-finals currently are, the presence of Bangladesh breathing down their neck in the standings following a convincing win against Afghanistan provided it. And the Australian Christian Lobby is hosting a fundraising effort on its website for the former Wallabies star Israel Folau after his GoFundMe page was shut down.  The digital bank Monzo is being valued at £2bn after a new wave of fundraising attracted £113m from a group of investors led by Y Combinator, a firm best known for Airbnb, Dropbox and Reddit. The bank has two million users and is aiming to increase that by 50% this year. On the markets, stocks have been down in Asia as investors await the outcome of this weekend’s meeting between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping. The FTSE100 is set to drop 0.3% at the opening while the pound is buying $1.275 and €1.117.  The picture of Boris Johnson holding hands with his girlfriend Carrie Symonds features on several front pages today, though many papers express cynicism about the timing and staging of the pic. “What a Carrie on”, says the Mirror, while the i has: “Johnson breaks his silence but refuses to discuss his ‘loved ones’”. The Telegraph writes: “Boris tries to keep the show on the road” and says that while the “picture paints a thousand words” it “raises many more questions”.  Other papers don’t feature the picture but still report on the Tory leadership dramas. The Guardian has: “Johnson plans media blitz as Hunt calls him a ‘bottler’”, the Times says “‘Cowardly’ Johnson launches fightback”, the Express reports on Jacob Rees-Mogg coming to Johnson’s defence: “Time to stop the war on Boris”.  The Mail features the picture of Johnson and Symonds and a deeply unimpressed headline: “Boris and the Mills & Boon scene that takes us all for fools”, though its main story is “Your £2.4m bill to do up Meghan and Harry’s cottage”. As is the Sun’s: “Harry’s £2.4m home Megover”.  The Guardian Morning Briefing is delivered to thousands of inboxes bright and early every weekday. If you are not already receiving it by email, you can sign up here.


theguardianuk--2019-07-04--700 English schools reported over asbestos safety concerns

Nearly 700 schools have been referred to the national health and safety body over concerns they are failing to safely manage asbestos in their buildings, potentially putting thousands of staff and pupils at risk, it has been revealed.  It is thought that about 90% of school buildings in England contain asbestos, often around pipes and boilers, and in wall and ceiling tiles. The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) advises that it is only a risk if it is disturbed or damaged, which releases fibres into the air.  However, campaigners and unions say asbestos in schools is often poorly managed and that staff are frequently unaware of its location in the buildings they work in. Even low levels of exposure to asbestos fibres can cause cancer decades later. Research has shown that exposure to asbestos is more dangerous the younger a person is, raising concerns over the future health of children.  Last year, the government launched the asbestos management assurance process to find out more about asbestos in schools. According to information released following a freedom of information request, of the 2,952 schools bodies that responded in full to the survey, 2,570 (87%) reported having asbestos in at least one of their buildings.  The Department for Education (DfE) has now referred 676 state-funded schools and academies in England to the HSE as they did not provide evidence “that they were managing asbestos in line with regulatory requirements”. The HSE will now carry out inspections of some of those schools.  Kevin Courtney, the joint general secretary of the National Education Union (NEU), which is part of the joint union asbestos committee, said: “The fact that nearly 700 schools have been referred to HSE because they weren’t able to satisfy the DfE that they were managing their asbestos in line with legal requirements, is a shocking indictment of current systems of oversight.  “The lives of thousands of staff and pupils could be at risk in these schools. The HSE, which lacks resources following years of budget cuts, will now be expected to investigate these cases and we are concerned that it may struggle to do so.”  The HSE estimates that about 5,000 people die every year in the UK from asbestos-caused cancers, which can develop decades after exposure.  According to figures from the ONS, since 2001 at least 305 teaching and education professionals have died of mesothelioma, a cancer almost exclusively caused by asbestos. A 2018 study suggested that there were five times more deaths from mesothelioma among teachers and three times more among nurses than expected in populations not exposed to the substance.  In 2017, an NEU survey of members found that of the 46% of respondents who had been told that their school contained asbestos, half had not been told where the asbestos was located. Nearly 75% of those who had been told where it was located said the asbestos was in accessible locations, such as floors, ceilings, and window frames.  Materials containing asbestos become more dangerous as they deteriorate or get damaged, and 60% of the school estate is more than 40 years old, according to the NEU.  Lucie Stephens started campaigning about asbestos in schools after her mother, Sue, died of mesothelioma in 2016. Sue had worked as a primary school teacher for 30 years and was diagnosed with the cancer in 2014.  An inquest found she had died from an industrial disease and that on the balance of probability she was exposed during her time as a teacher in schools in Buckinghamshire.  “What really bothered Mum was that because she didn’t know there was asbestos there, she wasn’t able to protect herself, but she also wasn’t able to protect the children she was teaching,” said Stephens. “So she unwittingly exposed her children to asbestos as well and they will be in their 40s now.”  Stephens and the joint union asbestos committee are calling on the government to implement the phased removal of all asbestos from schools, something that was recommended by the all-party parliamentary group on occupational health in 2012.  Stephens is also campaigning for the government to release the names of all schools with asbestos in and is raising funds to build a website to make the information accessible. The DfE has so far refused to release the names on the grounds it would deter schools from sharing information with it in the future.  In April, Latimer AP academy in north London was forced to close when asbestos was discovered inside door frames in its Victorian building. Last month, the HSE confirmed it had found traces of asbestos at Brunel primary and nursery academy in Saltash, Cornwall, following an investigation.  Charles Pickles, an independent asbestos campaigner who until recently worked as an asbestos consultant, said: “In the 60s and 70s we all knew that smoking was dangerous, then suddenly we became aware that passive smoking could cause cancer as well. It’s the same with asbestos.  “If you were a builder or working in an asbestos factory in the 60s, 70s or 80s you could have had huge exposure and your fate may be sealed, but most of the asbestos that was manufactured then is still in our public buildings now. There is no safe level for exposure to asbestos. It’s still there and it will be getting disturbed.”  A DfE spokesperson said: “The safety of pupils and staff is our highest priority which is why we have asked schools to provide information through the asbestos management assurance process. This data will help the department develop a greater understanding of the management of asbestos in schools. We plan to publish a report of the findings shortly.”  A HSE spokesperson said: “The HSE have worked with the DfE to use the asbestos management assurance process returns to provide targeted intelligence for a planned programme of proactive visits to schools.”