jimsweetman's posterous

Jim Sweetman @jimbo9848

There is a large can of worms opening up around educational assessment and examinations in this country with a variety of competing pressures vying for attention. We have just had the latest figures on the amount schools spend annually on examinations and assessment, and now we have Pearson, or rather ExExcel, looking to cash in on the debate over standards as if they are the safety net not the problem!

It all starts with Michael Gove and the notion, shared by his cronies, grandparents, Daily Mail and Telegraph readers, Toby Young, Melanie Phillips and the heir to the throne that examinations have somehow 'got easier' than they were in their day and are testing silly things which lack the obvious applicability of, say, Ancient Greek. It's a good argument to put forward in the pub, the golf club or, unfortunately, in the Cabinet room as it makes the proponent look clever and, of course, everyone can be an expert in education and assessment because they went through it sometime and somewhere.

Although these arguments - wherever they take place - go around in circles, there are two key elements which constantly resurface. The first is that examinations must be easier because more students succeed at them. The second is that you can now sit examinations in insufficiently academic subjects and be rewarded with spurious academic qualifications.

The first argument is easy to counter. Unless education is a complete waste of money, we must, as a society, be getting cleverer. People must be more literate and numerate than they were one or two generations ago and more knowledgeable. Examination passes, in a commonsense way, show this to be true. More people take examinations, more people succeed at them but that doesn't mean that the examinations are easier. Golf club man, or even Cabinet table man, will think that norm referenced assessment worked in his day although he won't state it like that. He probably cannot see the absurdity in any endeavour of doing more to increase success while limiting it to the same percentage of the population. He cannot tell the difference between a prize for being top and an accreditation for recognising achievement. However, he thinks he can tell what grade creep is and remains surprised that standards are rising as he thought a standard was always static. There is some wobbly language here because it is the standard of performance which is, of course, rising not some peculiar gold standard which is being overthrown.

Another complication which the he forgets is that the whole notion of school improvement supported by external inspection is predicated on rising standards of performance. OFSTED, if it has any worthwhile quality at all, must be committed to school improvement and that is dependent on improvements at school level examination in performance. If there was no grade creep or performance advance - choose your words - the OFSTED endeavour would be a waste of time as would the national investment in education.

Incidentally, if you are teacher you can identify clear evidence of raised standards simply by reading the absence notes sent in by the parents of the pupils in your class. With the odd exception, the overall trend will be to note that your pupils are better at expressing themselves than their parents. Do a project involving the grandparents, and the differences are even starker. Of course, this won't be apparent if Daddy read classics at Cambridge after being flogged at Harrow but over our society as a whole the evidence is clear.

That observation helps to pinpoint the real anxiety behind this argument and that is the concern that the educational elite (to which the supporters of this argument inevitably belong) is being threatened by the inexorable rise of the oik. It was bad enough when oiks were let into secondary schools and started getting GCSEs but now they get A Levels, go to university to do sociology and business stuff, read chicklit on the tube, prefer rock music to opera, monopolise television and don't wear ties to work - choose your own bugbear!

Once it is understood that this is the bedrock of the arguments about standards it is easy to see how that connects to the other obsession about vocational education. The logic of the argument that education prepares you for life and employment and therefore you should learn and be assessed in areas related to life and employment is self-evident. And, to be fair, in the 19th century a good grounding in Greek and Latin was going to be helpful if you aspired to be a country curate, a botanist or a diplomat. However, things have changed in the 21st-century and the idea that schools should not teach people about technologies, media, other cultures and languages as well as the skills associated with major sectors of employment and aspects of business and manufacturing is simply indefensible. There is simply not some higher knowledge which, once acquired, allows you to dip into any lower status knowledge you need. If you think that, you will constantly be out-googled by everyone.

That hasn't stopped the educational elite from doing its best to sabotage the vocational curriculum in all of its forms over the past fifty years. In the 1960s, it was the CSE in Motor Vehicle Technology and in the 1970s it was GNVQ. More recently, it has been the diploma programme. Essentially, all the attempts to broaden subject areas and to include practical or work-related activities have been shafted and the English EBacc with its assumption that all you need to get by is English, mathematics, a science and a language is another manifestation of the trend. What is feared is not the study of non-academic subjects but the notion that they should have parity with what Cabinet table man did when he was at school or that their introduction might lead to a more egalitarian society.

Luckily, other pressures away from schools and education are leading to the democratisation of knowledge. As our access to information and knowledge has increased exponentially so we are beginning to understand better that what we know as a society - and perhaps even as a world - is partial and constantly in a state of flux. Even in atomic physics it is evident that there is no absolute knowledge and many of the facts we learned in school in history, science and geography lessons now turn out to be assertions and suppositions or even temporary fashions. The current wrestling over what the school curriculum should look like reflects this societal uncertainty over knowledge and the elite concern that commodified knowledge - possessed and defended by that same elite - is under threat from the wisdom of the crowd.

Of course, it is easier to bury your head in the Daily Mail or to slap each other on the back in the bar than to engage too deeply with these arguments so, at an individual level, it is possible to merely splutter with indignation. The problem is that this spluttering leads to government intervention in education and a froth of sea changes in public examinations. And, funnily enough, these are not as bad for Pearson and the other national awarding bodies as they sometimes seem to suggest.

The fact is that over the past twenty years they have been enabled - and often encouraged - to make examinations and assessment increasingly convoluted, detailed and expensive. Occasionally, they have been thrown into reverse as was the case with vocational qualifications, key skills and examination overload at A Level (GCE). They have dumped coursework, then introduced modularity and then seen that come and go. Chasing the tale of a government which fundamentally doesn't want more people to succeed in education is a challenge.

However, the chaotic flux based on the chaotic arguments outlined above allows them both to say that they are responding to the requirements of government and the concerns of the public while consistently increasing the reach and cost of assessment. When schools spend more on examinations than on books and on providing students with information then there is something wrong but these diversions tend to obscure the simpler facts.

Things are not going to get better. Haphazard and prejudiced interference where ever it surfaces is not going to improve education and when, or whenever, we have a new national curriculum you can be sure that it is going to require another new series of examinations and more changes, and, of course, a further modest price increase in the examination fees to cover it.

Jim Sweetman @jimbo9848

There is a natural affinity between dogmatic religion and top-down politics - both know what is good for you and are happy to dispense the medicine. There has also been a tendency for religions - over the centuries - to manufacture opponents so when Baroness Warsi who is, we have to remember, a government minister talks about the rise of militant secularism she is in much the same category as the Spanish Inquisition.

In fact, secular people take a very relaxed attitude towards religion. We don't typically get too stressed about the religiosi running schools, sending bibles to all and sundry, organising prayers before meetings, fretting about what people wear or constantly infiltrating sex education and health services. We don't even mind them organising bands or even doorstepping us. In short, secular people are anything but militant. They lack any organisation and, for the most part, they get on with their lives since they have the unique insight that they are only here once!

However, if the Baroness is going to get on her high horse it is arguably time that the education of our children was divorced from religion. The French education system managed this over two hundred years ago and is the better for it. In opposition to the self-evident perception that schools are about enquiry rather than the delivery of divine information, it is commonly argued that Catholic secondary schools do rather well and they are popular with parents as if that justifies something. The truth, of course, is that Catholic schools are inherently selective and they don't get involved with the bottom end of the ability range or the social scale while employing informal exclusion procedures and, occasionally, using interviews, churchgoing and the advice of parish priests as part of their selection processes.

Secularists just seem to accept that for the most part and might be inclined to consider miraculous conversion if they are teachers as there is a dire shortage of school leaders who are practising Catholics. However, people ought to be aware that, increasingly, some Catholic schools have governing bodies infiltrated by Opus Dei and extreme fundamentalist views and their policies on sex education border on the bizarre. It is no surprise to find homophobia alive and well in this sector. And, to be fair, the Catholic schools are not alone since we secularists have raised no objections to the idea of evangelicals who know about second-hand cars taking over the education of our children as well.

Also, it would be good if we could de-establish the Church of England along the way and sort out the monarchy but that is probably a step too for most militant secularists who would just like it to be recognised that the majority of people in this country do not practise a religion, whatever they might put on forms and where ever they might get married or buried, and are not in need of conversion.

Changing the status of the Church of England might allow us to take some rational decisions about our political relationships with Islamic states, let alone about Sunday trading or the blasphemy laws, and we might be able to get rid of the recurrent national preoccupation to organise crusades against the Muslims. It is hard to believe that if we lost the head of the Church of England and the Archbishop of Canterbury we would somehow be devoid of moral leadership. You could turn the argument on its head and note that it would be nice to have a president who represented the moral vision and purpose of the nation rather than a family which still has princes and princesses and a hereditary principle which includes an absolute right to govern.

One could go on about this but it would be falling into the trap set by the Baroness who simply cannot wait for lots of militant secularists to rush out of the woodwork burning Bibles and shagging in the streets. In the end, it is easier and more convenient to let our children be taught absurd stories and untruths about divine watchmakers in their school lessons and to let them find their own way in sex education. However, we ought to remember along the way that we do have a lot of disaffection and alienation in young people, an unnecessarily high rate of teenage pregnancy and a lack of national vision and purpose. And, if, eventually, we lose one of these crusades us secularists are going to have to put up with some more crap from someone else!

The sight of Will Hutton morphing into Melanie Phillips is more than anyone should have to put up with on Sunday morning! Teachers don't put up with second best, the vast majority of schools do an excellent job and an economist with any understanding of socio-economic factors should know that education cannot compensate for society.

But Will doesn't want teachers to be defensive, so here are a few things for him to consider.

One, teachers and schools are not accountable for what is taught in schools. They have to deliver the national curriculum which is made up of too much knowledge, too few skills and an essentially Victorian range of subjects. Since 1990, the content of the curriculum has been driven by an ideology which looks back to the past and any attempts to modernise it (ICT, citizenship, vocational skills) have constantly been rubbished by a social elite who look back on their own education and think that because it succeeded for them (University, good job, well paid) that it is appropriate for everyone.

Two, schools are measured on bad statistics. Politicians and lazy experts ramble on about GCSE as if it has some kind of special status. It hasn't. It is a complicated and elaborated test based on the knowledge and skills, but mostly the knowledge, in the national curriculum. Like a lot of tests it has significant weaknesses. These include the facts that it doesn't measure the performance of people who don't do very well, it doesn't differentiate effectively between people who do extremely well, it is mostly based on writing so it is often just a test of that, it rewards memory rather than understanding so you can cram dates and do better and, if you have supportive parents, they can help you with your coursework and give you a 20% start! A very slight annual improvement is built into the system by the awarding organisation's who run it for commercial purposes but because of the way grades are awarded it is not capable of measuring genuine improvement in the education system.

The emphasis on five good passes which is the basis of national school statistics means that, at the age of 16, around 20% of young people have no discernible qualification whatsoever and the next 25% have only a mishmash of credits. This gives a distinct advantage to anyone taught in the selective or independent system because the bottom 45% who are not going to succeed are kept out of the classrooms. None of this is rocket science, Will!

Three, no one knows how well schools do. People who visit a lot of schools regularly are generally quite impressed with the state of schools and learning given the problems with curriculum and testing. OFSTED pretends to know about schools but in fact it knows almost nothing. In shorter and shorter inspections, it receives the school's objectification of itself set against examination data. It fluffs up this data with silly notions like value-added but, really, all it does is play games with the simple GCSE or national testing 'pass' rates. The schools that do well in OFSTED inspections are those with good examination results and aspirational parents in reasonably prosperous areas.

If this happened all the time it would suggest that school inspection was some kind of procedure designed to defend the status quo and elitist education so OFSTED pretends it can see quality in different areas but it can't. For years, it took schools in areas like Hackney as being beacons of improvement as if gentrification never happened. If you don't have the right results, the right parents and the right social and economic context your school cannot improve against the OFSTED criteria. It doesn't matter whether you call schools satisfactory or in need of improvement when your focus is so narrow and your measures so unreliable.

However, OFSTED still pretends to know better and is now moving towards no notice inspections which cause headteachers to lose their jobs on the basis of flimsy statistics and weak observation. This causes the system to try to deliver the kind of education which OFSTED wants to see. In the prosperous, middle-class school this works all right but everywhere else it leads to difficult curriculum compromises, inappropriate teaching and stress.

Sir Michael Wilshaw wants excellent leadership in schools and, funnily enough, he has it in most places. If he went away and let headteachers lead, select and develop their staffs and define their curriculum model in conjunction with the community their leadership would be even better.

Four, there is no need for Will Hutton to belittle the unions. They are right to defend their members and even their pensions and to resist the demoralising pressures which drive schools downwards. Occasionally, like any trade union they are slow to accept change but they are not the problem in schools today.

Five, Will Hutton seems to think there is a conspiracy to protect inadequate teachers organised by school leaders in conspiracy with gangs of lazy staff members. Has he ever been into a school or is this based on his watching of 'Please, Sir'? He shows no understanding of what schools are like today and the levels of accountability at which they operate. Of course, there are some weak teachers just as there are ineffective practitioners in the health service, local government, Westminster, the House of Lords and the civil service. Teachers are simply more exposed but if anyone thinks that school leaders today do not have challenging and difficult conversations with underperforming staff then they are simply not on the right planet. Schools are confronting these issues on a daily basis.

If you still think that Will Hutton is right, it is worth considering how - like the health service - schools are vilified by those who don't use them. The parents of school-age children are overwhelmingly supportive of the schools in which their children are taught. There is not a huge groundswell of parental dissatisfaction except perhaps among the parents who send their children to independent schools or bus them around London in their four-wheel drives.

Sir Michael Wilshaw's carping is wrong on so many counts and his proposed changes will not be effective. Not only should they not be backed by right minded people but people like Will Hutton should not use platforms like The Observer to present such lazy and uninformed opinions in support of them.

It was around lunchtime on Tuesday when it started to become clear that this might be it. Mum had had a serious stroke in the morning and was unconscious. The doctor, the nuns who look after her so well at Maryfield Convent and my sister Debbie all decided that she should stay at the home and not go to hospital. It was an excellent decision.

The family started to gather. Dominic was on his way down from London by train and by the time I ran my sister Barbie she was on the M25. I called my older brother Simon who lives in Felixstowe and luckily got hold of him. He came over to Bury St Edmunds and we travelled down together. Although we knew it was serious at this stage, Mum had had similar incidents before Christmas and pulled round.

We arrived at the convent at around 5 PM. Mum was settled in bed, head slightly raised in and out of sleep. Debbie, Barbie and Dominic were already there along with Barbie's husband Keith. I was at one side of Mum and took over the holding of her hand as Simon did on the other. She was quite aware at this time and able to squeeze our hands and reply to questions. I think she could also follow the nattered family conversation moving over all sorts of past events and times. I talked about painting the old family bungalow with my dad and travelling down to Highcliffe on the milk train at dawn and I could feel myself filling up with the memory. We all talked and Mum listened, smiled and occasionally responded.

Along the way, my brother Bill called from Washington. He spoke to Mum on Debbie's phone - a short conversation but an important one for both of them. At the end, Mum said goodbye - just that.

The others had been there for a while and we had logistics to sort. Simon went back with Dominic by train, Barbie and Keith went to stay with their son who lives locally, Debbie and Fraser went home and I said I'd stay, at least, for a while.

It was a quiet time but close, simply holding Mum's hand and smiling when she opened her eyes and looked around. We agreed how good it had been to see everyone. She was visibly tiring and asked me to call the nurse so she could settle down, for the night she said. One of the sisters came and said she would bring another in a few minutes because it would be easier with two of them. In the meanwhile, Mum said I should go now and she would be fine. When the sisters came back, one of them said how nice it was to see all of the family and asked mum if she had had a good day. 'Yes' she said 'I've had a lovely day'. As the nuns prepared to settle her down, she turned to me as I kissed her on the cheek and said ‘Goodbye’. It was the second time I'd heard her say that. Not see you tomorrow but goodbye.

Having seen her recovery during the day, I planned to stay the night with Debbie and Fraser and go and see her in the morning. That plan was upset. At around one o'clock in the morning, the convent phoned and said that Mum had died shortly after midnight.

Debbie I got up and dressed and made our way back. Mum was just as we had left her but her head was inclined to the left as if she was deeply asleep. When I kissed her cheek and stroked her hair, she was still slightly warm as if she had not quite left. Debbie and I sat there for a few minutes with our own thoughts. After, we talked to the nurse who had been on duty and who had been with mum when she died. She said that she had simply slipped away and that was what we saw as well.

After the formalities, we went back to Debbie's. I didn't expect to sleep but I did with all sorts of odd early memories playing in my head. The taste of scraping the last remnants of cake mix from the bowl, Mum in her red coat and done up in her little black dress as she called it. Mum and Dad dancing the foxtrot in the church hall. Saturday mornings and Mum and Dad up late, a bit of friskiness in the air and smiling, with The Love of Three Oranges booming from the gramophone. They were a good team and now they are both gone and a chapter in my life has closed.

It was the best of passings and I'm happy to believe that she was glad to be reunited with Dad without my thinking too long or too hard but enjoying the moment with them. I think we would all wish to go as easily.

Jim Sweetman @jimbo9848

Although he is not universally popular with party members and has already said some inappropriate things about free schools, it is good to see Stephen Twigg back to shadow the education portfolio. He was a popular minister with teachers who thought that he knew his stuff. You can't help feeling as well that Andy Burnham will be much happier back with Health.

When Andy Burnham was looking after education the message often was that there wasn't much to say. The headline was that university fees would drop under the next Labour administration or, perhaps, go back to a little more than they used to be in the pre-coalition days. Well, that was fine, and hunky-dory for those who wanted their children to be lumbered with a £30,000 debt instead of £40,000 plus but maybe there was an overlooked bit of space for some kind of vision about what higher education and degrees were all about when Chinese and Indian universities apparently had the capacity to turn out fifteen fully-trained city slicker graduates every minute.

Of course, every step was difficult. Labour did a lot to education apart from massively investing in it and it wasn't all good, which left Andy Burnham sometimes defending the indefensible. So, he said things which suggested he was in favour of things which didn't work in the past. He hinted at the value of centralised policy making as if telling schools that they have to have a literacy hour and a numeracy hour for every child and every day could still be helpful, and as if that might make teachers feel valued and the lessons more appropriate to the needs of individuals. He was always on the back foot in defending the overcomplicated, and now unlamented, diplomas as he was in attacking the extension of the academies programme or the underpinning ideology of the English Baccalaureate.

Meanwhile, Michael Gove had, and continues to have an easy ride, considering the huge cutbacks he is implementing. He is the man who stopped all those expensive Schools for the Future being built, who introduced Free Schools in new premises which still have to be paid for, and is turning lots of failing schools into academies. He continues to avoid, by the skin of his teeth, being named for anything to do with News International which once gave him a lot of money for doing very little.

However, parents, even if they are uncomfortable with the reduced role of the local authorities and the increasing lack of local accountability sense that, in their backyard, an intolerance of underperformance and more school to school support might pay off. Gove’s insistence on basic skills in reading and writing, raising standards, fostering excellence, supporting the traditional curriculum and examinations, pooh-poohing innovation and vocational courses, and emphasising choice has a superficial appeal to many parents and is not a million miles away from what Tony Blair might have said during one of his regular forays into education.

Someone now has to challenge the ideology which lies behind this. There is an intention in the Gove agenda to fragment maintained education into routes and pathways which benefit elites and foster backdoor selection. The emphasis on excellence hides a belief that some people are simply better than others and should go to better schools. The requirement for a variety of education providers is just one small step away from allowing education for profit in the maintained system.

So, what we really need from Stephen Twigg is a new vision based on the 21st-century rather than the 19th, a system which is not preoccupied with testing but focuses on learning, and teachers who are trained to know a lot about their subjects and to communicate that knowledge with enthusiasm.

We also need him to rubbish the teaching of Latin, be critical of the limited reach of the EBacc and expose the snobby reality of the Acton Free School for four wheel drive parents. In between, we need him to challenge Michael Gove at every opportunity over whether he is still a headline seeking journalist or simply the mouthpiece of right-wing unreformed elitism. The need for education, education, education - and for everyone - is as real and compelling as ever.

The quality of Dell Customer Service used to be something of a joke. There were apocryphal stories about how long you could be kept hanging on simply waiting for any advice and how the technicians could take you on a roundabout journey checking things which you knew perfectly well were not the problem before agreeing to help you.

So when the trackpad on my new Dell Vostro started to misbehave I was worried. It was one of those disconcerting faults which comes and goes and a Google search suggested that it is fairly common on some of these models. When I bought the computer I customised it slightly and I used the online sales chat to confirm what options were possible. I remember thinking then that it was a helpful way to sort these options because the chat gave you a record of what had been agreed.

When I went back in looking for technical support, and after a bit of ferreting about, I found a similar window and, to my surprise, I found the same adviser called Ann Llarenas. It crossed my mind that perhaps all the online advisers have the same name! She took my details and arranged for the laptop to be collected and repaired. It was collected and returned but the repair had not been successful - they simply changed the trackpad - and the underlying fault remained.

Luckily, I didn't have to go back into support. I simply e-mailed Ann and she had it collected again. I got back a laptop which was substantially changed. The whole base was new and it worked but the memory cover on the base had been damaged and it no longer fitted. Another e-mail, another collection and another return and the memory cover popped off immediately I opened the box.

That kind of thing drives most consumers into apoplexy but I had good service from Ann so I e-mailed her again. This time although I only have the standard collect and return warranty, she sent me an engineer and, yesterday, he fitted a new memory cover and checked the machine over. Fingers crossed, everything is now working. Ann phoned me personally this morning to check.

I'm sure I've been lucky to find such an excellent adviser and to have received such excellent support but it is worth noting how on this occasion Dell got it right and thanks to Ann Llarenas we'll go on buying their computers.

Not a lot of people know much about Andy Burnham but a lot more know about Michael Gove. He is the man who stopped all those expensive Schools for the Future being built, who introduced Free Schools in new premises which still have to be paid for and is turning lots of failing schools into academies while avoiding by the skin of his teeth being named by anything to do with the Collapse of the Murdoch Empire which once gave him a lot of money for doing very little.

So, yes, back to Andy Burnham!  Well, he is actually the Shadow Secretary of State for Education and the message is that there isn't that much of a message. The headline is that university fees will drop under the next Labour administration or, perhaps, go back to a little more than they used to be in the pre-coalition days. Well, that's fine, and hunky-dory for those who want their children to be lumbered with a £30,000 debt instead of £40,000 plus but maybe there's a bit of space for some kind of vision about what higher education and degrees are all about when Chinese and Indian universities apparently have the capacity to turn out fifteen fully trained city slicker graduates every minute.

Then, there is another message about how comprehensive schools are a good thing and there is nothing wrong with vocational education except that no one has the balls (sorry, dreadful pun) to deliver it without festooning it in the paraphernalia of qualifications, basic skills hurdles and an administrative structure that beggared belief and has disappeared without a trace. The other bad news here is that all the comprehensive schools are now going to be turned into academies so, if they play their cards right,  they will each get £25,000 for helping to abolish the comprehensive system. Only the most insightful of people will see that they then become, in the words of Estelle Morris, bog standard academies!

To his credit, Andy Burnham is going to dig up Tomlinson. This sounds like something that Sherlock Holmes would have done better but it is apparently another attempt to make academic subjects read by chaps who are going on to read classics in Cambridge comparable to those studied by oiks  who are going on to read The Sun. Like a lot of his predecessors, Andy Burnham does not realise exactly what this might entail in terms of challenging the vested interests of the qualifications system. There was a perfectly good system of vocational qualifications called GNVQ which got jumped on the early 1990s because it was too successful or, in other words, because it gave the wrong people a step to social and intellectual advancement. Digging up Tomlinson is sadly only the first stage on what would be a hard road.

On the negative side, he has said things which suggest he is in favour of things which didn't work in the past. He still hints at the value of centralised policy making as if telling schools that they have to have a literacy hour and a numeracy hour for every child in every day will be helpful, and as if that will make teachers feel valued, the lessons appropriate to the needs of individuals or even keep parents happy. There are areas where old Labour and the mystical visions of Tony Blair or at least his experiences of education in Islington simply didn't get it right and it would be a bad mistake to go back there for simply not thinking about the alternatives.

Of course, the alternatives are hard to think about. The right-wing media, Parliament, the establishment, people who succeed in business and just about anybody else apart from X Factor winner's and Big Brother contestants were successful at school and, therefore, naturally think, firstly, that they know about education and, secondly, that their education was the best. They are the people who parrot about falling standards every summer but unfortunately, they are wrong about education as people who think they are right on the basis of narrow experience often are.

So, what we really need from Andy Burnham is lots of discussion, a new vision based on the 21st-century rather than the 19th, a system which is not preoccupied with testing but focuses on learning, and teachers who are trained to know a lot about their subjects and to communicate that knowledge with enthusiasm.

We also need him to rubbish the teaching of Latin, the absurd pretentions of the snobby EBacc and the Acton Free School for four wheel drive parents and, in between, to challenge Michael Gove over whether he is still a headline seeking journalist in a right wing newspaper or simply a lunatic who has got the keys to the asylum. The need for education, education, education is as real and compelling as ever.

Have you noticed how current bank advertising is so keen to emphasise the friendly face of banking. Not surprising really since these banks almost bankrupted the world a couple of years ago. We are still living with the consequences but the latest Goldman Sachs annual bonuses amount to almost exactly the same as the cash they were given to bail themselves out. How stupid do they think we are? I wonder the same when I read about how the financial crisis has damaged the economies of Eurozone countries and I hear bankers talking down the prospects of Greece, Spain and Italy on television while their colleagues in the industry are increasing the rate of interest on the bonds which, allegedly, will help them get through it. Internationally, they are corrupt, untrustworthy and without integrity but you still might hope for something different from your local bank. No chance!

Last Saturday I bought a holiday. It is the kind of thing you might well do on a Saturday and I paid around £800 for it by direct debit from my Co-Operative Bank current account. I moved to the Co-Op because I felt they were ethical and honest, by the way. I didn't put the cash payment on a card because that would cost me an extra £20. I don't keep a lot of money swilling around in my current account at 0% interest so I went into my online Santander business account to transfer some money across.

Of course it is my money but when I want to send it to another bank it takes three banking days and they don't work on Saturdays and Sundays. There is a scheme called faster payments which is instant but the sums you can transfer are limited - a maximum of £300 where my account is concerned. So, the holiday money goes straight out of my account but the transfer can take five days.

Why does that happen? Why do different banks and building societies have different arrangements or make faster payments difficult? They don't have any difficulty making faster payments when they are taking in your salary or a direct debit and there is no conceivable way that their electronic systems could delay a transfer. They do it, they make it happen and they come up with weasel words about security which are simply nonsense. They keep the money so that they can make a profit from it.

On Tuesday, I get a call from the bank. Can I answer some security questions so that they can tell me I'm overdrawn and, by the way, they're going to charge me £20 for the three days when I was overdrawn. I argue my case, explain politely about the failings of the faster payments system, and explain a little more rudely about how unfair this is but the £20 charge is non-negotiable. Banks are not supposed to punish their customers these days and there has been a lot of discussion about how charges should relate to the actual cost of an activity but if they're charging interest on my small unauthorised overdraft it is at over 1000%.

I make another transfer from my business account to cover the overdraft which will, of course, also take three days to arrive. So, my wife kindly does a faster track payment from her bank so that we are instantly back in the black as well. She banks with HSBC.

My bank doesn't give a toss. On Friday, I get a letter from the Head of Unsecured Debt Management ticking me off with helpful comments like 'to avoid unexpected overdraft charges you should regularly monitor your account' and asking if I would like to contact the Consumer Credit Counselling Service. It is letter GC25 and I expect they send them to hundreds of people every week. It is unnecessarily rude, inappropriate to me and assumes that I have committed some kind of cardinal sin in making a payment when there are not the funds in my current to cover it.

Although the phrasing has been modernised, it is exactly the kind of smug and pompous letter that banks have been writing for years. Behind it is the implication that they have somebody over a barrel and, for some reason, they are entitled to punish them. This is the modern age. Wouldn't it be simpler if I'm about to go overdrawn to send me an e-mail or a text message asking me to add the funds to my account by a set date? Or failing that, they can just not make the payment. Why do it and then go into punishment mode? The answer is obvious, more profit!

It is clear that the area of capital that the banks ignore is trust and, as they should know, it takes a while to build trust and not too long to lose it. They would do well to compare themselves with the big supermarkets who invest a lot of money in trust although they might call it customer service. See how easy it is to send something back to Amazon or Tesco and get a refund compared with asking your bank what a particular payment referred to or why they have charged you £5 because you haven't paid £500 a month into your account this month even though you paid £1000 last time!

There's a new document coming out next week about the regulation of banks. The industry has opposed any change to the status quo tooth and nail especially changes which allow other players into the market. They have an easy monopoly and they know it - try comparing their services and costs! But if Tesco expands their banking to include current accounts and offers online banking without completely stupid security arrangements like mini-keypads, silly questions and daft pictures, I’m going. And if they add in transparent costs, email communications and instant transfers, I'll be first in the queue.

It is well understood that one of the most challenging aspects of working with a group of online learners is sustaining their attention and focus. If members of the group fall behind, work at a slower pace or begin to surface the learning, the impact on the group dynamic can be considerable. In the worst cases, this can be infectious, negative and lead to an unsatisfactory experience for everyone including the facilitator who may also be working against a KPI which assumes a high measure of completion.

The reasons why participants drop out of short courses are similar to the reasons they give for inattention to other forms of CPD. Typically, these relate to too much work, conflicting diaries and dissatisfaction with the offer. In the online environment, falling behind is also cumulative in contrast to, for example, missing one session of a CPD programme. Once you have fallen behind online, there is a perverse incentive to never go back. It is also the case that the reasons which people give may not be completely accurate. Workplace stress, a lack of work-life balance and being taken out of one's comfort zone in terms of technology are also significant factors which participants typically prefer not to admit to. So what is the best way to keep people engaged? Here are some tips:

Lead with the expectations: In the first e-mail communication be explicit about the time requirements, the reading involved, and the technology which is going to be used. Underline that participation at this level is a requirement but also give participants a clear and explicit opt out as you do this, suggesting that they can withdraw or postpone. Invite them - giving them clear notice - to a WebEx seminar, the date and time of which are not negotiable. In practice, experience shows that most subsequent dropouts did not attend the introductory WebEx.

Confirm the expectations in the WebEx: Again, as you outline the course learning objectives (and these do need to be explicit) reaffirm the expectations and add the need for mutual support in the co-construction of knowledge. Describe the learning journey which the group is corporately attempting. Set deadlines and expectations for the first unit such as assuming that everyone will contribute within 48 hours. Explain why they need to read one another's blogs and reply to forum discussions in terms of understanding what e-learning is and the role of communities of practice and communities of inquiry. Make the completion criteria transparent as well. If you are using evidence-based assessment, introduce it now so that people can begin to accumulate evidence and see the finishing line from the start.

When the programme starts: Intervene intensively. If people have not contributed within the specified time follow it up. However, also model good contributions yourself (as long and as detailed as you would want those from your best participants to be) and respond in detail to what you see as good contributions. Where there are short or shallow contributions, ask specific follow-up questions. E-mail all participants regularly with updates including generalised prods - three people have yet to add their comments to this unit and so forth. In an intensive course, e-mail every weekday. It is well worth frontloading your efforts as a facilitator.

As the programme develops: Open new units on the days you said you would. Belbin finishers will try to rush through but keep to your timetable. Don't compensate or give dispensations for under underperformance. If people are going to dropout then it is best that they do so as soon as possible. Remember if they do not complete the first unit they are nonstarters! Pursue latecomers.

Some people will become established as lurkers. They will participate regularly and at the minimum level. Lurkers give a variety of reasons for not posting including that it is not necessary, that they need to find out more about the individuals in the group first, that they think it is helpful to others not to post unnecessarily, that they think the technology is unhelpful or that they begin to feel that the context of the group is not for them.

Some people would argue that these varied reasons can be reduced to a feeling of low self-esteem and an assumption that any contribution made would either be negatively assessed by the group qualitatively or would simply not match up to the corporate standard. Setting clear standards for contributions is one way to deal with lurkers who will provide a variety of excuses and often blame others or the course construction for their own actions.

Setting the appropriate pace on a course is also important as is maintaining trust. Make sure that you open new units when you say you will and contribute regularly. However attractive the prospect, do not introduce extra work or resources which people have not been told about in advance. Also, do not clutter your site with additional links. This simply overloads the enthusiastic and the willing.

It is important not to underestimate the difficulty of completing a short course. There is a lot to do and if your participants are not at ease with the technology, using old-fashioned equipment, or feeling challenged then they are going to feel that they are under pressure whatever happens. An open space or forum where people can sound off may be a good idea.

Finally, talk a lot about the co-construction of learning and the importance of learning as a community. Congratulate the group as well as individuals in your e-mails and celebrate completion as you reach the end. If you have factored in a closing WebEx session, make sure that it is celebratory and reflects the standards achieved by the best participants. Remember that although bad practice can be infectious, good practice and good modelling will also have a positive impact across a group and enjoy the journey yourself.

Jim Sweetman

It's that time of year for examination results and, as usual, they are showing a small overall improvement. Although it is always possible to find somebody to moan about this and to say that standards were higher in their day, we would be in big trouble without this perennial growth known as grade creep. If we didn't have it, there would then be no school improvement since that is measured on the same figures, and OFSTED would have to say that all our schools were rubbish in spite of billions of pounds of investment, and then we couldn't have any academies if schools were not improving, and we would have to abandon the curriculum because it would be clear that it wasn't working, and Michael Gove would have to resign and go back to News International. And, so on!

So if that isn't worth commenting on, then what is? The figures we really need to sit up and take notice of are those that describe the differential performances of boys and girls at GCSE when they are 16 years old and on the verge of adulthood. The gap has been slowly increasing year by year and now just under 20% of passes achieved by boys are at the top two grades (A* and A) in contrast with 26.5% of passes achieved by girls. That is a big difference and people should be worried.

According to the BBC, Andrew Hall who is the director general of the biggest examination board in the UK says examiners are 'scratching their heads' over this trend which must be something to do with 'boys and girls maturing at different rates'. He doesn't really sound very bothered does he? And he certainly doesn't want to blame any aspect of the examination system for it.

A good reason why he and everyone else ought to be concerned is what happens at the other end of the scale where at grades D, E, F, G and unclassified you find that the boys achieve 34% of them while girls achieve only 26.5%. In other words, at every grade boys achieve less than girls and at the bottom end lots more boys get qualifications which are increasingly worthless as colleges, apprenticeships and training place more stress on a minimum grade C in English and Mathematics. Of course, people talk about these bottom grades as if they have some currency but, in practice, they are not worth much in terms of buying entry into a job or further training.

The place that these people then end up is in the NEET statistics standing for 'Not in Employment, Education or Training ' and in the 16 to 24 age range there are now almost 1million of them. The figures indicate more or less equal numbers of boys and girls but since a large proportion of the girls are mothers it is the young male cohort which is most worrying. Add in the fact that NEETs are concentrated in areas of social disadvantage and you don't need to run an examination board to see how this lack of any prospects relates to the disaffection which ends in alienation, gang membership and rioting.

The very term NEET is also a dreadful blanket label for the socially excluded. It defines people in negative ways and leads governments into intervention and reduction programmes instead of tackling the issues. It is one of the ways in which our society has forged the social exclusion of rioters and looters which the media have then discussed as if it is a lifestyle choice.

It gets worse. Recruitment consultants talk about 'identity capital', the package of educational, social and emotional resources which influence adult employability. Ex-bankers do pretty well on this measure but young men from disadvantaged areas with no discernible educational qualification, emotionally and financially impoverished and without role models are at the bottom of the heap. It would be funny if it wasn't true that the very expensive ConneXions service set up to target this problem was based on the idea that counselling would help. Of course it wasn't effective. It was just more labelling, more fire-fighting and a bit more reinforcement for the socially excluded tag.

So why do boys do so badly in education or to be more precise why and how does the education system stuff the chances of boys so pointedly? This question doesn't get asked much because some boys do okay and it is therefore assumed that the others are defective. Some boys go to independent schools and get different kinds of education and some boys get a leg up into what are called - without any sense of irony - jobs for the boys.

To be fair to the man from the examination board, maturation is an issue but only when attainment is locked to age. In other words, we expect boys to be able to do things as well as girls at key stage one ignoring the fact that their motor skills are less well developed and their concentration spans shorter and then we test them and the boys do less well and so failure is helpfully embedded from the start.

As the boys grow up and become active and curious, we insist that they are sedentary and focused and emphasise writing as almost the only output of schooling forgetting that being slower to develop motor skills made the boys untidy and instilled bad habits from the start. When the boys want to start doing things with their hands and making stuff, we want them to stop and do more writing and when they want to talk and learn from one another we tell them to be quiet. Is it any wonder that it is cool not to be interested in learning?

What is new in this and why has it made a difference now? Whatever one thinks of the national curriculum, it is indisputable that it puts facts and spoon feeding in front of discovery and it requires less practical work, less independent work, less exploration and more writing. Couple this with key stage testing which tells everyone which level they are at and makes that information public so that boys see they are not doing well in class, and link that to expectations of teacher performance which make teachers intolerant of boys who try but don't succeed. Then, downplay the practical and vocational subjects and the opportunity to get dirty hands, to make music and create art throughout secondary education. Put in more testing just to make clear to the boys that they are failures and by the time you get to GCSE your self-fulfilling prophecy will come true.

A lot of readers will think this overstates the case. They will argue that boys need more discipline to help them concentrate and because some boys succeed then they must all have the potential. Grown-up girls and grown-up successful boys are unlikely to want to admit to their advantage even as they castigate the rioters for, allegedly, socially segregating themselves by language, clothes and culture. Perhaps it is time that they did. The gender gap in education is a lot more pernicious and more worthy of study than some people seem to believe.