Curios of the week #96

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

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Last week featured that strange time of year—the space between Christmas and New Year. As a teacher and school leader, I have always had the privilege of not having to work during this period and so it is a time of quiet rejuvenation and attending to the present over the past or future.

I have been on a number of walks, sometimes with Alfie, our cavoodle. We walked past the old brewery in Buninyong where I encountered the largest riot of kookaburras I have seen. One New Year’s Eve, as a family, we walked across to Lake Wendouree to catch the firework display which, mercifully, was at 9.30 rather than midnight. I was, naturally, in bed by the witching hour.

This week’s Curios include a journal, a ‘tax break’, a made-up thing and much more.

Headline of the week

I don’t pitch to newspapers any more. I would like to appear in more mainstream forums and I think people would be interested in what I have to say, but I grew frustrated with writing articles that were never published. However, during the period I did pursue this, I learned a few things about what we now call the mainstream media.

One of these is that writers do not choose the headline. That is the editor’s job and it can lead to problems and misunderstandings. Sometimes, a journalist will be unfairly criticised on social media for a hyperbolic headline that misrepresents their story. That may be a factor in a recent piece by UK journalist Oliver Wright for The Times headlined, ‘Make lessons fun to keep children in school, ministers told.’ Interestingly, the print version appeared to have had the slightly different title of, ‘Make lessons fun to keep children in school, says union,’ which makes me wonder whether someone from the union in question complained.

The article is a little more nuanced than this. In 2010-2014, education minister Michael Gove introduced reforms to school accountability in England that centered a core group of General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) subjects for students in England to study to sixteen, including English, maths, science, a foreign language and history or geography. This has apparently led to a decline in subjects outside this core group. Some of this was to be expected, although it’s not clear whether other factors, such as the expensive of running some alternative subjects in financially constrained times, have also been involved.

I don’t have a major problem with this. We don’t even have exams at sixteen in Australia—I wish we did—and if you are going to have them, it makes sense to focus on a core set of subjects centered around English and maths. After all, students can take up other subjects later. Sixteen is an age where we want to keep students’ options open and the vast majority are capable of achieving competence in a basic core of academic subjects. Or are they?

According to Pepe Di’Iasio, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL):

“This has led schools to reduce the provision of vocational and creative subjects, such as art, which provide an outlet for less academic students.”

Who are these ‘less academic students’ and how can they be identified prior to the age of sixteen? I think we are at risk of setting low expectations. And we all know who these low expectations will be set for—the disadvantaged and boys, particularly those who exhibit challenging behaviour.

The idea expressed elsewhere in the article that this is somehow a cause of school suspensions and expulsions is bizarre.

Yes, we fail students, primarily by not teaching them how to read. There will be some who have been so failed and are therefore so disengaged from school that they do need an alternative to the regular curriculum when they reach their teens. However, our focus should be on reducing their numbers by teaching them better. Variations in general intelligence do exist, but I don’t think many are born destined to be a ‘less academic’ student to such an extent they are incapable of studying GCSE maths.

Class war of the week

I don’t think it is a coincidence that these calls are being made at a time when Bridget Phillipson, the current education minister, appears to be struggling. The old educational establishment in England—that Gove dubbed ‘the blob’—sense an opportunity to turn back the clock and they are pursuing this through the submissions they are making to the curriculum review Phillipson established last year.