In the Scotland on Sunday's latest redesign this past weekend, the Scottish Tories' Education Spokeperson Liz Smith used the primary guest slot to great effect in making her party's case for 'Second Chance Centres':
When it comes to persistently unruly pupils, my solution is to take them out of mainstream education and teach them in separate Second Chance Centres until they know how to behave. Why? Well, because I want well-behaved pupils to be able to get on with learning, and teachers to get on with teaching without the distraction of a few badly behaved pupils. But I also want persistently unruly pupils to get the chance to realise that they are not helping themselves by persistently behaving badly. They need a second chance to refocus their lives.
To be moved out of mainstream education into a Second Chance Centre would send a real message to the pupils concerned. It wouldn't just be another detention or suspension and they wouldn't be sent home with nothing to do. They would be removed completely from the mainstream environment and taught by specialist teachers.
It gets my vote.
I didn't go to the worst school in the world but it certainly wasn't one of the best. There were nutcases and headbangers sprinkled around liberally enough to leave any given class vulnerable to significant disruption.
I vividly remember in Accounting & Finance the implementation of the policy where disruptive kids were mixed in with the quiter ones who were genuinely their to learn. This was in the hope that some of the knowledge and calmness would rub off on the less attentive members of the class. I can't remember it working so well, any advantage for the disruptive kids was only due to significant disadvantage to the quieter ones. A friend of mine, a full 14 years after the fact, still houses visceral hatred for the guy who was sat next to him after making his life a misery for that year.
I guess, given I am now an accountant, I must have got off relatively lightly.
So Liz Smith is well and truly on the right track with her plan to take the problem right out of
the equation, allowing those who want to learn to get on and do so, but while still keeping all kids inside the system so there is always a route back to as full an education as one could wish.
Backing this up by giving teachers more powers and having clear, simple and consistent rules within the classroom should at least be an improvement on the status quo, if not quite a 'golden bullet' of a solution.
So that's the gold star for the Tories, the tick, the passing grade, the shiny apple for Liz Smith. But sadly that's where it ends. On the other main education policy David Cameron gets a 'must try harder'.
The plans for 'free schools' where parents can pull their kids out of struggling schools and place them into more successful ones is not only an administrative nightmare waiting to happen, it will also guarantee a significant smattering of ghetto schools up and down the land.
Given that the parents would be taking the funding as well as their children from any schools that are facing difficulties, the mountain to climb for the schools with the most challenging circumstances just gets higher and higher.
In giving families too much power and too much choice, the Conservatives have followed the Liberty with too casual a regard for the Fraternity and Egality. One needs a healthy mix of all three for any public policy to be fully justifiable.
We've already seen the gap between the rich and the poor widen under Labour. By setting up pseudo-comprehensives through misused parent power, we would be guaranteeing that a huge proportion of kids that need the most help would be infact getting the least.
And the underlying assumption that most schools out there aren't already trying their hardest to improve standards and services but would instead need money as the key motivating factor is more than a little bit insulting I would have thought.
There is still a while to go before the next election. Maybe Cameron should spend some time in one of those much-needed Second Chance Centres and rethink the other side of his education policy.
50% is a pass though so it's good to see the Tories come up with refreshingly radical ideas and not being afraid to fight either election, be it Scottish or UK, on new policies.
11 comments:
"free schools" seem to work extremely well in Belgium.
They say such schools work well in Sweden too but they also have a much higher rate of tax there, more parents reading to kids in mornings, more sport facilities and no school uniforms. Who is to say which is the reason for their rather vague 'success'? Indeed Sweden had 100% literacy and numeracy until very recently. They didn't achieve such a perfect standard by moving most of the money to the most able students. We need a catch-all solution and this isn't it.
without reading this article i had just made a similar-ish comment in the scotsman on an education blog article relating to my schooldays and the problem of unruly children, deja vu stuff indeed.
although i would add i think a bit of discipline to keep the nutters in check as it does no harm.
for many they get none anywhere else so boundaries are crossed and not checked, and are never returned to.
Jeff, I saw the Newsnight segment that focused on this proposal from the Conservatives, and the point about the independent and state sector both raising their game under such a scheme was a valid one.
Not enough has been made of the fact that despite the extra money, our education standards have stagnated while England caught up and then overtook us. Its one of the biggest failures under devolution, and there has to be questions asked of those running it for the last 12 years.
Under previous Westminster governments, our academic record was one to be admired, and without resorting to the grammar school system it has to be said. The policy advocated by the Conservatives is very in keeping with the parental power driven higher standards before devolution and PR.
In fact, both Salmond and Kennedy admitted as much a few years ago. So anything encourages that power back into the hands of the parents, and way from a never ending minority or coalition of parties in Holyrood is a good thing. Otherwise no one will be held responsible, or have the impetus to really address the problems.
The draw backs of our current devolved Parliament will become more apparent with the decline of our education and health services, another big issue coming over the horizon.
The way it has worked in practice in Sweden mainly has been to prevent the closure of small schools. The 'free' schools in Sweden average a total of 180 pupils.
I cannot believe that David Cameron is serious about this policy - certainly not along the Swedish model. It would be wildly expensive at a time when public spending has never been under greater pressure.
Doesn't this already happen with streaming in secondary schools.
i.e. Credit / Standard / Foundation?
I fear that Liz's idea are to keep them in the 'system' but in a completely different 'building', hardly the bets way to inspire the disruptive ones surely., neither I might add is grouping them together as the above system used to do.
There has been little research but this is somewhere where I think smaller more diverse classes could benefit.
Equally there has to be a greater emphasis on non-academic learning, i often disruptive students simply don't recognise the link between education and getting on in life...... that link must be reinforced right from P1
Jeff:
"they also have a much higher rate of tax there"
Sweden had high taxes before the bourgeois parties lead the government there, and in fact, the burden of tax is in a downward trend in Sweden. So this is a red herring.
"more parents reading to kids in mornings, more sport facilities and no school uniforms"
Norway has the same, and yet their performance on international educational league tables can be characterised as "distinctly average". Belgium, on the other hand, is a leading light. The last round saw Finland in the top spot, who use a comprehensive, entirely state-based education system. But it costs a lot more than Belgium's entirely private, money-goes-with-the-child system.
"Sweden had 100% literacy and numeracy until very recently"
No country has ever had a 100% literacy rate, not even Belgium.
"They didn't achieve such a perfect standard by moving most of the money to the most able students. We need a catch-all solution and this isn't it."
You don't seem to understand how the system works. Every child will have, say, £5000 pinned to their school blazer for their education. The cleverer boys and girls would not get any more money than those who find the three R's challenging. Those who perform poorly have the same right to change school as those who perform well. Indeed, those who perform well will likely stay where they are, and those who perform badly (one would hope) would move to schools more suited to their needs.
Money would not be moved to the most able students (indeed, a perfect system would see money moved away, since able students need less attention).
I'm not sure that measuring pass rates at particular levels of examination between Scotland and England is an apt comparison, in terms of measuring "standards".
I don't think that by debasing exams, so that more kids pass is anything to be proud about. And that is arguably what has been happening in England and to a much lesser extent in Scotland. Nor is it indicative of having better "educational standards". Surely the debate should be about "quality" rather than "quantity"?
Fitalass, fair point, clearly the status quo is not an option and maybe free schools have merits that I don't yet appreciate.
Anon, good effort at pulling the post apart. Your main point that the money would stay the same doesn't quite stack up. I understand every child has the same pound sign above their head but if Posh Academy can squeeze in a thousand kids then it'll hit the jackpot while Skid Row High struggles along with 80kids, barely any cash and we have an exacerbated problem that affects all of society, including the mums and dads that thought they'd left the riff-raff behind.
Jeff, I disagree.
Lumping 'unruly' kids together will lead to an unruly environment, akin to prison.
Lumping the 'good' kids together will not prepare them properly for the big bad unruly world. Remember, they are learning life skills as well as technical skills.
We have some great teachers out there, but we also have some not so great, with poor judgement. Who will decide the good kids from the bad kids? And anyone who knows anything about kids will understand that the damage is done very early on in life. 'Second-chancers' will be identified early in primary school. That will be their destiny. Their lot. If they are excluded from the mainstream, they will become the 'no-chancers.'
Standards and discipline are important, for both teachers and kids, and so is the Headteacher. Their leadership will determine how the school will perform. Greater emphasis on this will produce better quality leaders.
Most of all, I believe parents' choice of where their kids will be taught, is the really key factor. If their kids are automatically zoned, then they will take more of an interest in the school itself. It will be a greater part of the community and it's aspirations.
30 years ago, many Comprehensives from socially-deprived areas, had better attainment levels than those from more affluent areas. This was down to good leaders, natural zoning, and better discipline. It was far from perfect, but free schools were better than many today.
By the way Jeff, they say the 'quieter ones' are always the worst.
"I'm not sure that measuring pass rates at particular levels of examination between Scotland and England is an apt comparison, in terms of measuring "standards"."
They don't use those metrics in the comparison...
"A CLASS has 28 students and the ratio of girls to boys is 4:3. How many girls are there? Which of the following is made using bacteria: yogurt, cream, soap or cooking oil? Simple enough questions in any language (the answers, by the way, are 16 and yogurt). But when half a million pupils from around the world were set questions like these, some countries, just like some pupils, did very well and some very badly.
The tests were set for the largest-ever piece of international education research, the Third International Maths and Science Study (TIMSS). Of the 41 nations participating in this first phase, Singapore was teacher's pet: the average scores of its pupils were ...
"
The methodolgies for measuring attainment I have seen are always independent of the country's examination system.
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