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Official: it’s fine for racists to teach | Joseph Harker
Mar 13th
By refusing to bar BNP members from the classroom, the government is allowing these vile people to spread their hatred
The BNP’s march into the mainstream moves forward. Fresh from their top-table seat on the BBC’s Question Time (which marked International Women’s Day with an all-female audience; it marked last year’s Black History Month with an invite to Nick Griffin), party members have now been told that it’s OK for them to teach our children.
In a review which will shock many members of the teaching profession, not to mention ethnic-minority parents, Maurice Smith, former chief inspector of schools, concludes: “I do not believe that barring teachers or other members of the wider school workforce from membership of legitimate [sic] organisations which may promote racism is necessary.”
He reaches his decision because, in the last seven years, only four teachers, and two governors, have been found to be BNP members, and only nine incidents of teachers making racist remarks or holding racist materials have been uncovered. Banning BNP members would, he says, therefore be a “taking a very large sledgehammer to crack a minuscule nut”.
Two things here are breathtaking: one is that a man who held such a senior position in the running of Britain’s schools has such a one-dimensional and uninformed view of the issue of racism in our education system. Is he not aware of the underachievement statistics for many of Britain’s racial minorities, widely believed to be party fuelled by low teacher expectations? Is he not aware of the massive rates of exclusions and disciplinary procedures against black boys?
Does he really believe that racism is all about making offensive remarks, rather than promoting, openly or covertly, a system of inequality and injustice? If that’s the case, then, with people like him in charge, no wonder so little has been achieved in improving these statistics over the years.
He lists a number of bureaucratic “safeguards” to prevent racism in schools, but this is utterly unconvincing. Schools equal-opportunity policies are notoriously ineffective in making real differences, merely satisfying the box-ticking mentality which pervades the education system. And the “duty to promote social cohesion” is equality easy to subvert, the term often being used as a cover for anti-Muslim propaganda.
The second shocking development here is that his recommendations were immediately accepted in full by the schools secretary, Ed Balls.
Actually, given that all three parties are crawling over each other to win the votes of the “white working class” – whom they now subconsciously equate with racism and bigotry – it shouldn’t be a surprise.
Let’s be clear: the BNP is a racist party. It is anti-migrant and defines those of non-white racial origin as permanent second-class citizens, regardless of whether they were born here. It has been forced against its will to admit ethnic-minority members, but that doesn’t mean it’s suddenly become a party of race equality. In fact, the handful of minority members the party may attract will be fellow Muslim-hating extremists.
So when Ed Balls, in his reply to Smith, begins, “There is no place for racism in schools”, he shows himself to be a complete hypocrite by then going on to agree with BNP teachers.
If he’s OK with the party in the classroom, then he should be honest at least and say: “Yes, there is a place for racism in schools.” And, to black and Asian families in particular: “Yes, parents, when you leave your five-year-old at the school gates, we don’t care if you’re handing them over to someone who despises your race, despises your faith, and who wants to terrorise you and run you out of the country. As long as they don’t say it so anyone can hear.”
The complacency, as the BNP gains council seats and could possibly even gain its first MP this year, is staggering.
It is often said that for evil to flourish, all it takes is for good people to do nothing. As the BNP’s message of hate moves onwards, it is time for good people to take a stand.
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Teach First aims for top of the class
Mar 13th
You will progress faster than any other graduate programme. That is the promise one charity is making to encourage high flyers to pursue a career in teaching
They say those who can, teach; or at least that’s the catchphrase the government has long been using to entice graduates into the profession. But despite the fact that teaching has been presented as a recession-proof job choice, the government says it still needs more top calibre graduates to enter the profession.
A recent poll by revealed that many are put off by generalisations about teachers’ low pay and limited opportunities to progress.
While the Conservative party has been calling for teachers to be better qualified, Gordon Brown has reiterated the need for “empathy, understanding, passion”; all of which means one thing – motivated, hard-working graduates are in demand. Teach First, an independent educational charity, seeks to find said grads who can inspire and encourage pupils from poor backgrounds to fulfil their academic potential.
James Darley, director of graduate recruitment at Teach First, says: “There’s an educational disadvantage in the UK, whereby the wealth of a parent determines the quality of their child’s education. We can help change that by putting the best minds into the most challenged communities and help raise the achievements and aspirations of a child’s life.”
Teach First offers graduates a structured and rigorous two-year teaching and leadership development programme – the sort of training that most private sector companies have been forced to axe as a result of the recession. Darley points out: “It’s a scheme whereby you will progress faster than any other graduate programme – if you can deal with a classroom of 30 children disengaged with education, you can deal with a trading floor or an unhappy client.
“You have to not only have the subject knowledge but also be a good planner, organiser and leader and also think about humility and respect. If you are thrown into a community that’s very different to your own, you have to be able to get beyond that, get on their level and understand those children.”
The leadership development programme differs from the traditional teaching route of a degree followed by a post-graduate certificate in education (PGCE) because it instantly takes you out of the university lecture hall and straight into the classroom for hands-on experience, pretty much from day one. By this summer, the charity aims to have trained 2,000 high-flying graduates as teachers.
The programme lasts for two years, graduates receive a training salary of between £17,260 to £21,242, and, on top of that, the course modules count towards a master’s in educational leadership, providing another qualification (the MA is fully-funded provided it is completed within three years of starting Teach First).
The first year involves trainee teaching a 70%-full timetable and completing a number of assessments to acquire Qualified Teacher Status (the equivalent of a PGCE), while the second year involves more teaching in the classroom (as a fully qualified teacher) and completing the leadership element of the course.
After graduating from Oxford University with a history degree in 2008, 23-year-old James O’Donoghue spent a year gaining work experience in schools which spurred him on to apply for the Teach First scheme. Originally from East Sussex, he is now six months into his first year of the leadership development course, teaching history (as a trainee) in an inner city school in Birmingham.
“I’ve always believed that the best way to learn is to do, and I thought it was best to get hands-on experience straight away – the structure of the Teach First programme allows this,” O’Donoghue says. “Teaching isn’t easy, but I’m in a school that is really driven and a lot of people share the same ambition, which is to encourage the pupils to do well.
“I’m learning every single day and while it’s important to uphold Teach First’s message of being role models, you’ve got to recognise that the primary goal has got to be to get your basic teaching right – ultimately, it’s the quality of your teaching that will make the biggest difference to the kids in the classroom.”
For O’Donoghue, Teach First’s leadership development programme is a “very effective form of teacher training” but he stresses it’s not for everyone: “You have got to apply yourself – the nature of this course is so intense, and the stakes are sometimes exposed quite cruelly when it comes to performance. There is a lot of work, but there’s tremendous job satisfaction – for instance, my GCSE year 11 group was struggling, and were initially testing me out to see what they could get away with.
“But then, to get through that, to achieve mutual respect, to see them getting their heads down, asking for feedback, and taking a more long-term view – to knuckle down and work for a qualification that might not have been attainable before – is just incredible, and I’m so happy to see them working hard,” he says.
There are 150 places available on the Teach First leadership development programme for a June 2010 start to teach science, maths or ICT. Applicants require a 2:1 or a first and A-levels grade A or B in the subject they wish to teach (science applicants require at least two science A-levels at grade A or B). Apply online by 2 April at graduates.teachfirst.org.uk
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A ban-free solution to racist teachers | Hugh Muir
Mar 12th
If all teachers signed up to an equalities policy, a potentially problematic ban on BNP membership might not be needed
So as a judge rules that the BNP’s constitution remains discriminatory, does it matter if our schoolteachers sign up to a party that is intrinsically racist? I’ll say it matters. Let us be clear about one thing. The BNP may be legal but it is not like other parties. It is a party with philosophies based not upon what you believe but what you are. Where you come from and what you look like are the prime determinants of how Nick Griffin and his cohort assess your worth as a human being and your right to be part of 21st century British society. That, one can credibly argue, is the crucial distinction between that party and say, a rightwing Tory.
The party has, we know, been engaged in a legal tap dance of late following the challenge to its membership rules by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission. Race and culture doesn’t matter to us, its lawyers have told the court. But it was legal positioning and nothing more, and the judge saw through it.
The polices are still the same. Mixed race couples and mixed race children are still deemed abominations. The half-Turkish guy who was silly enough to join the party and become one of its go-to guys in Barking, east London is still “half a wog” to his fellow adherents. Griffin, when he can, will nip off to the American Renaissance conferences in the US where he can mingle with other extremist types and have his photo taken with heroes of the Ku Klux Klan. Don’t just listen to what he says on television. In his way, Griffin has been as astute a rebrander as that other great detoxifier David Cameron. Instead, look at what the true believers are saying in their forums about the very idea that the party might water down the racism. They are one set of angry people.
So the idea that one could possibly embrace the idea of his cohort as teachers as a pretty appalling one.
That said, should they face a ban? That’s trickier. I have no philosophical objection. My issue is that I think they would quite like a ban. Things have been quite sticky since the party’s profile was raised by Griffin’s election to the European parliament and his appearance on Question Time. Money worries; internal division. In some ways, the quest for martyrdom is all they have left.
There may well be an argument for the bans imposed by the police and the prison service, because staff in those professions wield so much discretionary power – in some cases the power of life and death. Can we make the same argument for the classroom?
I wouldn’t rule it out, but surely it would be simpler, if less dramatic, for schools and their governing bodies to say, “We have an equalities policy. It is backed by law. If you work here, you contractually sign up to it. If you espouse views in conflict with it or deviate from it in letter or in spirit, we will sack you.” Those are the rules.
For one of the most startling facts to emerge today is the disclosure that many schools still do not have an equalities policy. That should be rectified immediately. And once that has been done, all our teachers should be specifically and contractually obliged, as is the mayor of London under the Greater London Authority Act 1999, “to exercise their functions by having due regard to the need to promote equality of opportunity for all persons irrespective of race, sex, disability, age, sexual orientation or religion, to eliminate unlawful discrimination and to promote good relations between persons of different racial groups, religious beliefs and sexual orientation.” Teachers won’t mind. It’s what 99.9% of them do every day. And if a BNP member can honestly live up to that, they are probably in the wrong party anyway.
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Nick Griffin welcomes decision not to ban BNP teachers
Mar 12th
Party leader accuses education officials of taking no action against teachers promoting leftwing politics
The British National party (BNP) has accused local education authorities of taking no action against “leftwing teachers … promoting their own politically correct brand of politics” as it welcomed ministers’ decision not to ban BNP members from the profession.
The party’s leader, Nick Griffin, went on the attack after a government-commissioned inquiry into racism in schools said a ban would be disporportionate.
“All teachers should … keep their politics strictly separate from the classroom,” Griffin said.
“Several cases have come to light in recent times where leftwing teachers have been exposed promoting their own brand of politically correct politics in the classroom, with no action being taken by educational authorities.
“This is clearly wrong and should not be tolerated. Schools should be fountains of learning and study, not indoctrination centres.”
Christine Blower, the general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said that “by and large” the verdict of the review by Maurice Smith, a former chief inspector of schools, was measured and proportionate.
“Of course he was not asked to address the wider issue of the real and major threat of the BNP and other fascist organisations to local communities such as Barking and Dagenham, and Stoke,” Blower said.
“In communities such as these, schools are very real havens of community cohesion and tolerance. In the runup to a general election we cannot ignore the fact that there has been a significant upsurge of activity from the BNP. Should they be successful in gaining any further electoral ground that would be damaging”.
John Dunford, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: “Schools have a strong, clear ethos of tolerance and understanding, and the vast majority of teachers and staff have no hidden agenda. Of course people with racist views should not be working with young people in schools.
“However it is much less clear that there should be a blanket regulation on the issue. Existing protocols are already used in schools to deal with anyone whose behaviour is not acceptable, including disciplinary procedures and, if appropriate, dismissal.
“It is right that teachers and others should be forbidden to promote in schools any contentious position: political, religious or discriminatory. However there is a need for open discussion of difficult topics. The aim should be genuinely to challenge young people to think for themselves and to form their own opinions rather than to promote a particular ideology.”
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Ministers rule out ban on BNP teachers
Mar 12th
But inquiry is ordered into whether anti-racist measures are working adequately in private schools
Ministers have ruled out banning members of the British National party from the teaching profession, after an independent inquiry into racism in schools decided such a move would be disproportionate.
The issue of whether those who belong to racist organisations should be prevented from teaching – as they are from working as police or prison officers – will be reviewed annually.
But a separate inquiry has been announced into whether measures to stop racism being promoted in independent schools are adequate, provoking an angry response from representatives of the private sector.
In his review, Maurice Smith, a former chief inspector of schools, said he had decided banning teachers from being BNP members would be “taking a very large sledgehammer to crack a minuscule nut”.
Smith said: “To bar teachers, or other members of the school workforce, from joining non-proscribed organisations would be a profound political act.
“I have come to the view that the existing measures in place to protect children and young people from discrimination or political indoctrination are well-grounded, and comprehensive enough to mitigate the risk.”
Smith said that over the last seven years, only four members of the teaching profession and two governors had been publicly identified as being members of racist organisations, and only nine incidents of teachers making racist remarks or holding racist materials had been subject to disciplinary sanction by the General Teaching Council.
He added that, although the measures already in place were sufficient, some of them needed time to bed in, and could be improved upon.
But they had less impact in independent schools, where teachers do not have to be qualified or members of the General Teaching Council, he said.
“The most recent public concern is focused on independent schools staffed by unqualified teachers,” Smith said. “The measures to protect against the promotion of racism by qualified teachers have less influence in the independent sector compared to maintained schools, because there is no evidence regarding the proportion of teachers in the independent sector who are qualified.” He added that no evidence had been brought to the review about problems with racist incidents in private schools.
The Independent Schools Council (ISC) said it was dismayed to hear about the new review and had not been told of any concerns about the sector by Smith or the department for children, schools and families (DCSF).
The chief executive of the ISC, David Lyscom, said: “Independent schools operate within a framework of law and accountability that gives appropriate weight to the importance of diversity and the prohibition of discrimination. All independent schools must attain standards prescribed by the secretary of state to promote tolerance.
“All teachers undergoing induction at an independent school are similarly required to meet the same professional standards as those in the maintained sector.
“We have not been informed either by Mr Smith or by the DCSF that there are any concerns arising in ISC schools with regard to partisan political activities or, more generally, equality, discrimination or community relations.
“So we are dismayed that the secretary of state has felt it expedient to commission a further review that covers the whole sector. If there are issues in individual schools or types of school that raise concern, action should be taken in those schools.”
The ISC would cooperate with the review, he added.
The schools secretary, Ed Balls, said many independent schools belonged to associations that “provide a degree of self-regulation and discipline”.
Balls added: “All the available evidence suggests that these associations have high expectations of their members and have their own procedures for handling cases where problems arise.
“However, I remain concerned about Maurice Smith’s observations about the independent sector, and therefore I have asked him to explore further whether the current arrangements strike the right balance between allowing independent schools autonomy [to operate] in accordance with their ethos and values, and protecting the young people attending those schools from teachers displaying racist or intolerant views or behaviours that could be harmful.”
Smith’s review of independent schools will report back by September.
The inquiry was branded a “golden opportunity squandered” by the teaching union Nasuwt. Its general secretary, Chris Keates, said its report was “woefully inadequate and littered with contradictions”.
Keates said the review failed to provide any evidence about how effective measures already in place had been, and accused it of being “complacent about the dangers schools and children face”.
“Maurice Smith seems to have focused, to a point of obsession, on the number of incidents,” she said. “One incident is one too many. How many incidents would there have to be before Maurice Smith would be persuaded that further action is needed?
“The idea that a person who signs up to membership of the BNP can simply leave these beliefs at the school gate and behave as a ‘professional’ when they walk into school is risible.
“A principled stand was required. This is a matter of social justice, staff wellbeing and child protection.”
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In Kansas City, school’s out | Sasha Abramsky
Mar 11th
The closure of almost half of Kansas City’s schools shows what can happen when the wealthy opt out, and services suffer
Twenty-nine out of 61 Kansas City, Missouri, schools will soon be shuttered in a desperate bid by the struggling school district to stave off bankruptcy. At the same time, close to one-quarter of the city’s school employees will lose their jobs.
While many districts around the country are closing under-enrolled-in or low-performing schools in an effort to save money, the scale of KC’s decision puts it in a league of its own. Students around the city will be disrupted by the changes, as they lose teachers, have to travel further to school each morning, and possibly see their class sizes grow.
The number of students in Kansas City’s public schools – 18,000 – would indicate that it is a small town. But there’s not much that’s small about Kansas City. In fact, the core of the city, which is Missouri’s largest urban hub, has nearly half a million residents, and the broader metro area is home to approximately 2 million people.
Yet for decades its public schools have been in crisis and have haemorrhaged students.
For 26 years, Kansas City was under the largest court-ordered desegregation plan in American education history. At first this provided an opportunity to improve the system, injecting $2bn into local schools. But over time the benefits unleashed by the case were undermined by opposing demographic and political trends: Kansas City was bedeviled by white flight; and, eventually, it saw a near-total exodus of the middle classes, of all colours, into suburban school districts, charter schools and private schools. A few years ago, eight schools went so far as to secede from the school district, joining a suburban district that provided more resources to students.
By the time the desegregation case ended, in 2003, the city was no longer discriminating against African American students; but at the same time it was increasingly unable to provide quality public school education to any student. It had become a poster-child for educational dysfunction.
As a result, the schools that remained under the jurisdiction of the Kansas City school district saw their enrollment shrink by about 75% in recent decades, even as the region’s total population has grown. A number of schools were more than half-empty.
In many ways, Kansas City represents the depressing end-point I warned about last week in my article on California’s education cuts: a setting in which those with options have exercised them by opting out of the state school system, leaving the rump public sector both shrivelled and denuded of influential supporters in the community.
This week’s decision to downsize the system by close to 50% might well be the least bad option remaining to the board of education in the city given these harsh realities; but necessity doesn’t make these truths any less depressing.
If there are lessons to be learned from Kansas City’s dismal experiences, they are about the importance of holistic thinking: of looking for ways not just to desegregate schools but to preserve integrated, economically diverse urban cores; of providing middle-class families with reasons to continue using public services; of building up the notion of common community again so that the public sector flourishes rather than withers. Absent this, Kansas City might well represent a glimpse of a depressing American future: one in which those with resources opt out, en masse, from any and all public services, leaving the public sector to stumble drunkenly from one crisis to the next, a miserable-looking shadow of once-great glories.
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Science must be a major election issue | Adam Rutherford
Mar 11th
The data is unequivocal: investing in scientific research during times of recession results in economic growth
On Tuesday night, the science representatives of the three main parties jovially debated in front of a heaving Westminster audience, all pushing the agenda that science is now a central election issue.
Quite right too. All evidence suggests that increased expenditure in basic research results in economic growth. Conservative shadow science minister Adam Afriyie immediately set up their stall the wrong way round, by declaring that mending the economy came before investing in science. Science minister Lord Drayson countered, as he always does, by engaging well with critics, saying the right thing, but appearing hamstrung by his own party.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Royal Society, under Lord Martin Rees’s excellent leadership, has the very clearest view on what needs to be done. Published on Monday, their report entitled The Scientific Century: Securing Our Future Prosperity is a masterful document, packed with robust data, and well written to boot. In it, they recommend a long-term strategy of ring-fenced investment, and increased funding towards people rather than projects. It plays down the sometimes false dichotomy of “basic” as opposed to “applied” research, but reasonably promotes revenue generating academic-industry collaboration.
This debate doesn’t just centre on research. It also comes in a school education, and the Royal Society’s report hammers home the primary importance of specialist science teachers. Afriyie cited shadow children’s secretary Michael Gove’s predictable declaration last week that the curriculum should return to the old school and comprise “traditional” lessons. Bizarrely, they are claiming to battle endemic dumbing down not by employing the knowledge of education experts, but by asking celebrities. To shape the science curriculum, Gove volunteered public scientists and figures including lords Rees and Winston, the publicity-courting Baroness Greenfield and Carol Vorderman. While no doubt these have all achieved excellence in particular fields, none is a school-level educational professional.
The New Labour project was in the thrall of expert advice, sometimes taking it, and in the case of the sacking of drugs advisor David Nutt, conspicuously ignoring it. The Conservatives appear to be following suit. Alongside their celebrity-endorsed curriculum, yesterday they issued a report by vacuum cleaner manufacturer James Dyson. It’s not a bad document, glossy and vaguely in line with that of the Royal Society. But alongside Afriyie’s statements in the debate, it’s hard to see past this as being anything other than vacuous lip service, if you’ll forgive the inevitable pun. Dyson, for the record, manufactures his vacuums, not in the UK, but in Malaysia.
The Lib Dems’ Evan Harris is the only MP who genuinely appears to understand both the scientific process and the import of investing in that process to ensure our future. His position that the science budget can only be cut after we are out of recession is spot on. A coalition brought on by a hung parliament could result in the installation of this man as a science minister who will drive a genuinely progressive policy for the benefit of everyone. In a hung parliament, though, his position will be weakened in enacting those policies.
Science must be a major election issue. The data is unequivocal: investing in basic research during times of recession results in economic growth. That investment comes primarily at university level, and in hard times, by ring-fencing research council budgets. The current government has made some key progress on sorting out the science curriculum (such as on the teaching of evolution), but before 2009, the UK failed to meet its targets on attracting more secondary teachers into science and maths every year for a decade.
With little to call between the main parties on many issues, promises on how to bust the economic depression will be critical. Whichever party most heartily adopts the Royal Society’s recommendations will secure the UK’s future economically and, more importantly, create the science-literate society and research-driven economy we should all aim for. As this august organisation so pithily says: “Unless we get smarter, we’ll get poorer.”
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Lotteries can be destabilising, admits Ed Balls
Mar 10th
It is better for children to go to the same secondary school as their friends, says education secretary
School lotteries can be destabilising for children and bad for their welfare, the schools secretary, Ed Balls, told MPs today.
Balls said he was sceptical about a wholesale move towards a system of allocating all secondary school places on the the basis of lotteries, according to a BBC report. Banded admissions, where a certain number of places are allocated for each ability group, are fairer, he said.
At present, under the schools admissions code, schools can use lotteries if there is they are heavily oversubscribed. The intention is to make the system fairer for all children and prevent schools discriminating on the grounds of ethnicity, parental income or occupation, or on the basis of an interview with the headteacher.
Giving evidence to the cross-party Children, Schools and Families select committee, Balls said: “The reason I’m personally cautious about lotteries is [that] I think the transition from primary to secondary school is a difficult transition, and it’s good that children move with their peers and their friends.
“It being a complete lottery as to who gets to move I think is destabilising to children, and bad for their welfare. I think people being able to go to their local school is a good thing.”
Balls admitted high house prices around popular schools could create unfairness and said banded admissions were the best way to ensure a comprehensive intake, said the BBC.
Questioned about national tests for 11-year-olds, Balls defended English and maths exams as a key measure of primary school performance.
Two teaching unions announced last month their intention to ballot members on whether to boycott this year’s key stage 2 tests.
The National Union of Teachers (NUT) and the Council of the National Association of Headteachers (NAHT) said league tables based on results of the tests negatively affected their members’ pay and conditions.
The ballot will open on Monday and close on April 16.
Balls told MPs that he and the schools minister, Vernon Coaker, had written today to primary school headteachers, calling on them to work together to improve the “assessment and accountability system”.
The letter said: “With you, we want to create a strong and fair framework for school accountability which encompasses a rigorous assessment system where the contribution of teacher assessment is established and respected.”
A new school report card is due to be introduced in 2011, with information on children’s wellbeing as well as attainment, and plans are in place to strengthen the weight given to teacher assessment, it added.
But externally validated checks needed to continue, Balls stressed.
The letter said experts had “recommended that key stage 2 tests in English and maths should at this time remain as a key accountability measure for all primary schools”.
It continued: “This is a recommendation that we have accepted and we believe, therefore, that it is essential that tests take place as planned, whilst at the same time we continue to monitor and improve the consistency of teacher assessment.”
But Balls and Coaker acknowledged concerns about “teaching to the test” and said guidance had been published to help teachers and pupils avoid “last-minute drilling”.
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Why university standards have fallen | Geoffrey Alderman
Mar 10th
The disempowerment of academics and a corporate model of governance have driven down standards, not Blair’s 50% target
The new “manifesto” – Talent, Opportunity, Prosperity – published by the Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGR) deals with a number of core issues in the current debate about the future shape and direction of higher education in the UK. Here I want to concentrate on just one of them, namely academic standards.
What the AGR says is that the nebulous commitment made by Tony Blair in 1999 – in which (to quote him) he “set a target of 50% of young adults going into higher education in the next century” – has actually devalued the currency of a degree and driven down standards by forcing thousands of students to enrol onto programmes that lack academic rigour and which are delivered by “below-average institutions”.
More specifically, the AGR manifesto declares that government-imposed targets designed to increase the number of students from deprived backgrounds risk being met only by lowering the academic standards of the institutions that meet them.
I believe that there has been a decline in academic standards overall in British higher education over the past two decades, but not for the reasons advanced by the AGR. The evidence for this decline is contained in the 2009 report, Students and Universities, of the then select committee on innovation, universities, science and skills. In my written and oral evidence to this inquiry, I identified the following factors as fundamental to this decline:
First, the league table culture that has permeated the senior leaderships of many British universities, resulting in intolerable pressures on academic staff to pass students who should rightfully fail and to award higher classes of degrees to the undeserving.
Second, pressures to maximise non-governmental sources of income, primarily from “full fee-paying” non-European students, to whom it is deemed prudent by these same senior leaderships to award qualifications to which they are often not entitled, so as to ensure future “market share”.
Third, the increasing and increasingly stupid use of students’ course evaluations as pivotal factors in the academic promotion process. To put it bluntly, a conscientious academic with poor student evaluations may find it difficult or even impossible to obtain promotion because her/his students do not like getting the low grades they may well richly deserve.
Fourth, the breakdown of the external examiner system, due partly to the near-universal modularisation of degree programmes and partly to the abysmal remuneration for work of this sort. The evidence given to the select committee of improper pressure on external examiners makes exceedingly grim reading.
Fifth, the relative leniency shown towards academic dishonesty, coupled with the tendency of university administrators to insist that plagiarism be viewed through the prism of what I believe is termed “cultural relativism”.
So, let me be quite clear: I do not believe that “more” necessarily means “worse”. But I do believe that more has come to mean worse because of the toxic combination of factors I have listed above, and which are obviously interrelated.
At bottom, more has come to mean worse because of poor quality university leadership, aided and abetted (it is true) by even poorer quality government oversight. David Lammy’s call to university vice-chancellors last September to “get better at telling your story” betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem, which is not about perception (or PR) but about a reality that Lammy and his department seem unwilling or perhaps unable to confront.
If there is, perchance, any spare cash for education, it should go into the primary and secondary sectors, where it is needed most. The current cap on university tuition fees should be removed, but the removal should be accompanied by a comprehensive system of financial aid, so that admission to university is “needs blind”.
At the same time, academics must be re-empowered, and the pseudo-corporate model of university governance imposed by Conservative and Labour governments since 1979 must be replaced by the collegiate model, which alone has the capacity to restore national and international confidence in the high standard of the British university degree.
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Teacher racism is rare | John Dunford
Mar 13th
Posted by John Dunford in Politics
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Disciplinary procedures are already in place to deal with staff with discriminatory views – there’s no need for a BNP ban
It goes without saying that schools should be places that promote tolerance and understanding, and that there is no room for racist views in such organisations. However, the decision of the government not to ban teachers who are members of the British National party (BNP) or other groups that may promote racism is a welcome glimmer of common sense in an otherwise increasingly frustrating political landscape.
School are havens of fairness and inclusivity and only a handful of cases have come to light of teachers with BNP membership or extremist views. It goes without saying that young people should not be subject to racist views in the classroom, but a blanket ban surely falls into the category of sledgehammer to crack a nut.
The vast majority of teachers and staff have no hidden agenda, put the interests of their students first, and concentrate on teaching and providing a role model for widely accepted standards of behaviour.
Schools already do an excellent job of making sure that those who hold discriminatory views are not welcome. Each school has a set of values and a strong ethos. In many cases these are explicitly set out in a policy or document which includes reference to all staff having a commitment to treat all members of the school community with tolerance and respect and to promote community cohesion more widely. As part of recruitment processes, a school will use this policy to check that prospective employees agree with its ethos and to screen out those who are not able to support it.
Likewise, the general injunction that schools and teachers should not promote particular positions – political, religious, or discriminatory – continues to work well, as do the powers schools have to enforce it.
Disciplinary procedures are in place to deal with teachers or other staff who are overtly or covertly racist, and schools can dismiss staff for this when appropriate. In the case of teachers, dismissal is followed by referral to the General Teaching Council and can lead to the person being barred from teaching. There is no reason to change processes that work well and can be used to deal with the rare cases where trust is betrayed.
Of course it is right that teachers and others should be forbidden in schools to promote any contentious position. However, open discussion of difficult topics must be possible.
The aim should be genuinely to challenge young people to think for themselves and to form their own opinions, rather than to promote a particular ideology. Students should not be made to feel that their identity is under threat or that they are being attacked or belittled. With those provisos teachers should feel that they can tackle difficult issues without being accused of misbehaviour.
As in all areas of society, there is some racism in schools but very rarely on the part of school employees, who in almost every case take pains to project and live by values based on respect, tolerance and the intrinsic value of every human being.