“a better all round learning experience … attending school”

Over the weekend I was chatting with a teacher friend of mine about a 15 year old student that he has in his class who has severe learning difficulties, dyslexia and he has spent the whole of his secondary career learning to speak English as an additional language.  When asked questions in class he usually smiles and answers with just one or two words almost entirely unrelated to the correct answer; in exams his answers often consist of little more than words extracted from the question he is trying to answer. This young man is ’statemented’, which means that his local authority has acknowledged that he has learning difficulties that are beyond the resources of his school to meet. Despite this, according to my friend, he has no additional resources allocated to him  – no teaching assistant sitting with him helping him understand what the teacher is saying or differentiating his work and for four years he has made little or no progress.

You may wonder why I have mentioned this young man in my home page news. Well, over the weekend I also read about the case of Elysha Robertson, a  seven year old in Rotherham who suffers from a disease related to motor neurone disease but so rare that doctors don’t even have a name for it. Elysha’s intellectual ability is unimpaired but the disease has robbed her of all movement from the waist up. She now communicates using her toes and is fed via a tube into her stomach.

Elysha’s mum withdrew her from a local special school because she felt that the school was not doing a good enough job of educating her daughter. Mrs Robertson has said “I want to teach my child at home because I believe she has made better progress than she did at Newman School where she was taught before.”

The response of the local authority has been aggressive and intolerant.  The Council’s social services department supported by the school is arguing that Elysha could be suffering from isolation and missing the company of other children, and has opted to use legislation relating to child abuse and neglect to call a case conference and demand that the Robertson’s attend.

A spokeswoman for Rotherham Council has stated ” .. the authority would always recommend that children receive a better all round learning experience from attending school.”  I couldn’t help thinking of the young Asian boy taught by my friend when I read this!

Narcissistic children and self-esteem

There can be no doubt that self-esteem is an important part of people’s lives. It is also true that we all like to be encouraged and affirmed in what we do and who we are – it makes us feel good about ourselves.

Historically, British schools have been pretty poor at developing pupil’s self-esteem; in fact I would argue that they have often done serious damage to pupils in this regard. Some years ago I came across a youngman in his 20s who when he was 16 and about to go into his GCSE maths exam had been told by his maths teacher, that it would be a waste of his time and that of the exam marker if he actually bothered to sit the exam. Five or six years later when I met this young man he still regarded himself as ’stupid’ – not merely in maths but generally. I was reminded of this young man, this week when I read of a paper presented at the Association of School and College Leaders conference in Birmingham by Dr Carol Craig suggesting that our schools are in danger of producing narcissistic children who are likely to develop an “all about me mentality”. The ‘praise culture’ was something that also arose in a conversation I had with a former colleague a few weeks ago. We had worked together for a number of years in special educational needs within a mainstream school. She told me of a new member of staff who was inclined, in her opinion, to praise children for ‘almost anything’ – if a child sat quietly for five minute, he was praised before the rest of the class; if he wrote two or three lines in English, he was similarly praised. In the opinion of my former colleague this devalued praise – the child was simply being praised for what he should have been doing in the first place!

Teachers are, however, in a very powerful position within their classrooms. Ultimately, it is teachers who decide what is truth and what is not,what is correct and what is wrong. I have often chided teaching friends of mine by saying that as teachers we are the only individuals who ask people questions to which we already know the answer! That position of power is so easily abused when a child is scorned or even mocked for not knowing the answer that the teacher is looking for. In my experience, far from creating a generation of narcissistic egoists, my feeling is that teachers do not give children sufficient real praise. Those of us who are home educating need to guard against the same failing – our children need to be encouraged not only when they do well, but also when they have tried their best – and as parents we are best placed totell the difference.

By the way, if you are interested in what happened to the young man with the appalling maths teacher, heeventually went to university and secured a very respectable 2:1degree, but only after good people convinced him that his schoolexperience was inaccurate and that he was actually quite able!

Why we offer IGCSE qualifications

Manchaster Grammar School, one of the most prestigious independent schools in the North West of England, announced last week that it was replacing all of its GCSE exams with IGCSEs. Although this might appear as a minor decision akin to a school changing its exam board in history or maths, the reality is that there is an increasingly political dimension to the quarrel that is taking place in England over supporters of GCSEs and IGCSEs. Government funded schools are forbidden from offering students IGCSEs because the Department for Children, Schools and Families does not accept that IGCSEs assess the National Curriculum, which is what must be taught in English and Welsh schools. Independent schools can offer IGCSEs, because they do not receive government money.

In recent years there has been a growing lobby that has argued that GCSEs have been dumbed down, made less of a challenge; this lobby further suggest that IGCSEs have maintained their intellectual rigour and are therefore more worthy exams for 16 year olds – a good grade at IGCSE says more about a particular student than does the same grade at GCSE, so the argument goes.

These arguments have not been helped by the high master of St Paul’s School in London who recently described GCSEs as “simply pap, … baby food, … examination rusks…” In response, those who support GCSEs have suggested that the shift to IGCSEs is being done for marketing reasons or for elitist feelings of superiority. IGCSEs give certain independent schools boasting rights over their state school cousins!

This whole discussion is especially topical, it seems to me, coming as it does a week after I announced to NorthStarUK would effectively be scrapping GCSEs in September. Why do we, in NorthStarUK, offer IGCSEs and not GCSEs? Well the simple answer, as I pointed out last week, is that GCSEs have been closed off to us by new government regulations. However, I would argue that IGCSEs are better qualifications than GCSEs, in any case! In my opinion, there are a number of reasons for this, none of which are to do with elitism or because of a supposed dumbing down in GCSEs -

• IGCSE specifications, more often than not, have a wider range of topics to study than GCSE. The National Curriculum has had a stifling effect on school curricula.
• IGCSEs have an international dimension to their courses that is normally absent in GCSEs. In my opinion, this is especially important for young people who are going to be adults over the next 50 years.
• IGCSEs are based around terminal exams, which is education speak for saying that students are assessed by one or more exams at the end of the course. The new GCSEs will be assessed by a series of modular tests where students will be permitted to forget the material after the module has ended.
• IGCSEs are not affected or shaped by politicians – our current national curriculum has seen more changes over the last ten years than I care to remember, and all have been affected as a result of political pressure.

“Children brought up to be ignorant”

The following is a letter that was sent to the Independent in response to a rather unpleasant letter from Helena Cox  published in today’s newspaper. Ms Cox’s letter claimed that home educating ‘fundamentalist christian families’  were brainwashing their children and she claimed that this was tantamount to child abuse.

Dear Sir

Re Helena Cox’s letter – Children brought up to be ignorant

I was astounded to read Helena Cox’s letter of the 18th March and, I must confess, somewhat disappointed that the Independent felt able to publish something so filled with prejudice and discrimination.

Based upon some part time work as a home tutor Ms Cox feels qualified to write in such intolerant terms about families who are undertaking their moral responsibilities as parents so seriously that they are prepared to sacrifice in all manner of ways to raise their children to be effective and useful members of society. There is a growing body of research both from UK and American academics that clearly demonstrate that home educated children – even those from Christian families – out-perform their peers in academic, maturational and social measures. Maybe Mx Cox needs to read more widely.

It seems, according to Ms Cox, that  all children should be taught, ideally by people like herself, in order to ensure that  they grow up to be as tolerant as she is towards minorities now living in Britain.

Having sent twenty years mixing with home educated children and their parents, I simply do not recognise the picture that Ms Cox paints. ‘Brainwashing’,   ‘child abuse’ as well as the wonderfully pejorative use of ‘fundamentalist’ betray Ms Cox for what she really is – an illiberal, intolerant statist who would have all children, in schools being taught the same government approved curriculum to ensure that they could exercise free will, as adults! Even the Dark Ages were not as dark as that!

Steve Richards, B.Ed., M.A. (Educ), M.Ed.

Educational Director, NorthStarUK

Home Page News 2 March 2009

The subject of home education continues to attract a fair amount of media interest. There was a fascinating article in last week’s Independent newspaper which was in the main pretty balanced – you read the article in full by clicking here.

I received an email from a member of staff at the Department for Children, Schools and Families last week expressing some dismay that I was not embracing the most recent consultation mor enthusiastically and that I was being critical of the DCSF’s behaviour in the area of home education. You may be interested to read the reasons that I gave for my mis-givings over the current consulation -

1. The re-visiting of this matter less than 18 months after a successful consultation that resulted in the publication of very good guidelines to LAs on the topic of elective home education;
2. The short time period of the consultation;
3. The decision to undertake academic review after the consultation, rather than before, which would have made far more sense, because this would have allowed the academic review to feed into and affect the consultation;
4. The wording of a number of the questions in the current consultation – notably “Do you think that home educated children are able to achieve the following five Every Child Matters outcomes?” Leaving aside any discussion about the appropriateness of applying the ECM’s outcomes to individual families, this separates home educated children in a way that is, in my opinion, discriminatory.
5. The wording of the final question – “Some people have expressed concern that home education could be used as a cover for child abuse, forced marriage, domestic servitude or other forms of child neglect. What do you think Government should do to ensure this does not happen?” is flawed in so many ways. Without defining who the ’some people’ are, the question is almost worthless and is profoundly discriminatory – the vast majority of children who are abused, neglected, experience domestic servitude, and are forced into unwelcome marriages, actually attend school. If LAs cannot protect even these children, then the application of the ECMs agenda to home educators is not only entirely inappropriate but it actually smacks of hypocrisy.
6. If the DCSF was serious about supporting home educators they would ensure that their policies in this area were research driven. The DCSF has never funded serious longitudinal research into elective home education or even as far as I know commissioned a comprehensive literature search in this area. In the absence of these, the DCSF leaves itself open to accusations of prejudice, discrimination and simply being nobbled by LAs, certain children’s charities, some of those in the educational media and certain politicians all of whom were unhappy with the outcome of the last consultation.