Bad Education E-Book

Phil Beadle

• Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Phil Beadle has been described as The scourge of education policy makers and A prolific writer of articles challenging the status quo in education. Bad Education is an anthology of his best columns. Written in his trademark, simple, luminous and down-to-earth style, this collection is a wry look at more or less every element of educational change over the last five years.

Leseprobe

Praise for Bad Education

Bad Education brings together and updates Phil Beadle’s columns in The Guardian over the past six years. In them, he has brought a critical eye to bear on such topics as Michael Gove, OFSTED, the treatment of trans-gendered children, assessment for learning, ICT, the attack on political correctness and even chewing gum. His views are not always predictable – or entirely consistent – and the reader may be in for a few surprises. The book is in the best traditions of ‘crap detection’ and, even when you don’t agree with Beadle, he makes you think – and chuckle!

Professor Geoff Whitty, Director Emeritus, Institute of Education, University of London

If like me, you have very much enjoyed reading Phil Beadle’s ‘On Teaching’ column in the Education Guardian over the years you will be delighted with this anthology ranging across Politics and Policy, Pedagogy, Performance, People and Personalities and Phil’s great passion Literacy and English teaching. We have the authentic voice of this excellent classroom practitioner and education commentator who with wit and humour and penetrating insight provides an original, searching and provocative commentary into the educational changes over the last few years.

This book will entertain you but it will also make you think again about educational policy and practice.

Professor David Woods CBE, Chief Adviser for London Schools and Principal National Challenge Adviser

This is Phil Beadle at his feisty, acerbic best. He surveys the current educational landscape and leaves it scorched and smouldering, taking on attention-seeking politicians and madcap theorists and putting them firmly in their place. It’s a book that’s full of humour, provocation and untarnished common sense – and which fights the all-important cause of good teachers and their pupils.

Bad Education is written with Beadle’s trademark passion and exuberance. Time and again, he reminds us why we chose to become teachers, cutting through all the clutter and distractions that can mar our day-to-day work.

Keep a copy close at hand for the times when the world of education seems to have gone mad (which is rather too often these days): Beadle’s book is like a thermos flask of reassurance and unpretentious wisdom. It’s one of those texts we all need to sustain us through the tough times – a rare combination of a work that makes us feel better about ourselves whilst also challenging us to raise our game. It’s the kind of book every teacher – and everyone who pontificates about teaching – needs to read.

Geoff Barton, Headteacher, King Edward VI School

Phil Beadle is a worthy successor to the late, great Ted Wragg as a chronicler of all that is best and worst in education and teaching. His 1000-word Guardian articles provide a dose of medicine that is guaranteed to alleviate the symptoms of teachers who look around them and find only contradictions. The articles are both amusing and deeply serious.

Phil Beadle’s well-written, extremely readable articles challenge both orthodoxies and cant. They show the effects of the solutions in search of problems to which the education profession is constantly afflicted and they cry out for evidence-based policy to underpin the work of schools. Phil Beadle always imbues the latest crazy top-down policy with timeless bottom-up good sense and wit.

It is not only government ministers that come in for criticism, but also taxi drivers, quangocrats, editorial writers, academic selection, homophobia, ICT and much more.

A book to be read, dipped into and returned to again and again. But, above all, a book to be read by all who have the interests of young people and their teachers at heart.

John Dunford, Chair, Whole Education, Chair, WorldWide Volunteering, Chair, Chartered Institute of Educational Assessors

Has Phil Beadle been writing his column for The Guardian for only six years? It seems as if he’s always been there, ready to comment on – or more likely drive a coach and horses through – the latest back-of-an-envelope government solution to the nation’s educational deficiencies.

Here, just in case you missed any of them, or simply to recapture and dip into at leisure is a Beadle anthology. The pieces deal with just about all of the staffroom coffee-break, anger-management, you-couldn’t-make-it-up issues that came up during the period covering the long twilight of New Labour and the dawn of the multi-coloured swapshop that is the Coalition.

Right at the outset he has the measure of what drives the Cameron– Gove approach to education. It’s ‘... entirely concerned with lucre and its redistribution away from the pockets of schoolteachers.’ This they will achieve, he explains, by sidelining local authorities and in the process diminishing the power of the teacher unions.

It’s that straight cut to the chase that makes Beadle essential reading. His swipes are widely distributed. He’s bothered at the way “teaching” is being pushed out by “learning”, for example – ‘… whilst teaching will often cause learning, learning will only in very sad circumstances cause teaching.’

That doesn’t mean he’s always in favour of the way teachers work – or are persuaded to work. He has a go at the tyranny of the ‘four-part lesson’, and the writing of lesson objectives on the board.

Of course he can annoy us along the way – he shouldn’t forget that it was the very ICT enthusiasts he has a pop at who were the first to cry out against the abuse of PowerPoint and interactive whiteboards. That, though, is part of the relationship between Beadle and his readers. He isn’t handing out comfort blankets.

Part of that edginess is seen in some of the more serious and much needed challenges you’ll find here. Every teacher knows, for example, that, in Beadle’s words, ‘British schools are the final, blithe bastions of homophobia, which is, and has always been, at epidemic proportions in them.’ His use of ‘blithe’ here is appropriate because, he goes on, ‘Homophobia, in British schools, is the last remaining acceptable prejudice.’

Every teacher needs to read this book. More importantly, every head teacher and governor needs to read it. And even more importantly still, every administrator and politician needs to read it too. And when they encounter, as some members of all those groups surely will, passages that make them throw the book across the room, let me appeal to them to pick it up and read that bit again, this time with a bit of thought and a lot of humility. Because they’ll find that Beadle’s great strength lies in the fact that behind the ire and the feisty polemic lies a lot of thought and humility of his own, and plenty of humanity too.

Gerald Haigh, former teacher, head teacher, school governor and author

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Guardian News and Media Ltd for permission to reproduce the material in this book.

Preface

In 2004 the then editor of The Guardian’s education supplement came to see me teach. We chatted briefly after the lesson, and for some reason I decided that it would be amusing to wind him up by pretending that I was married to Marian Bighead, then Deputy Editor of The Times. (I have never even been in the same room as her and, to date, have no explanation as to why I enjoy completely unnecessary lying so much.)

He recognised in me a flagrant lack of something, and a few months later asked me to write a public apology for my behaviour at an awards ceremony that he too had attended. This included the phrase ‘significantly over-refreshed’ and made reference to ‘having cleverly slept in my suit’.

It is now 2011. My column entitled ‘On Teaching’ has run in The Guardian’s education pages for seven odd years. This book is an anthology of those columns.

Aside from being a husband and a father, it has been the defining honour of my existence having been gifted the permission to write about education for what I regard as the most politically important and vital organ in British life. And I extend my profound thanks to the editors who have guided me delicately through the process of sculpting readable copy: particularly Will Woodward, Claire Phipps and Alice Woolley, who, though I have never met her, is one of my favourite people.

Foreword

Phil Beadle has never impressed me as much as he did the first time I met him. He was in a classroom, teaching in one of the less fragrant parts of east London; and I was watching him, judging – the layperson in a trio deciding whether he should be named secondary schoolteacher of the year. His lesson was extraordinary – magnetic and dynamic, brimming full of ideas – transcending even the obvious but necessary artifice of the event (his students knowing that we were watching him) – risky and eyebleedingly fast-paced. I’d like to pretend, particularly to Phil, that I had swung it for him in a Twelve Angry Men sort of way. But it was, as they say, a unanimous verdict. My two colleagues, both wise, retired teachers, could see what I could fumble towards, that this guy could walk the walk and talk the talk. We had our winner.

Shortly after that he became famous.

And shortly after that he became one of our columnists.

The two events are connected, and not only because chippy, frustrated rock stars, who also used to work in the city and decide to become teachers and then become among the most gifted practitioners of their generation, do on the face of it at least have the potential to be pretty interesting to Guardian readers. I was editing Education Guardian and, with an eye on what could transpire, I asked him to write a piece about his award-winning night (he got drunk; he lost a laptop; he banged his head on the underside of a chair that he slept under. He’ll tell you the rest). It was, not unlike his lessons, snappy and funny and true. Much to my delight he repeated a line he had used on me as he descended the stairs backstage at Drury Lane, clasping his Teaching Awards gong, which moderately appalled me at the time. The Poster Boy Of Inner City Education could write, too.

‘On Teaching’ (a Ronseal name for a column if ever there was one) was launched a few weeks later. I’ve moved jobs and no longer commission him and I read him as an interested amateur. I like the chalkface ones the best, the war stories from the classroom; and the elegant skewerings of the latest faddish piece of education theory or (often IT-related) me-tooism. Looking back over the seven years I’m struck by how optimistic some of the early ones feel, redolent of that mid-Blair era where the money was starting to stream into the empty reservoirs of school budgets and teachers’ pockets, by how the kind of teacher that Phil represented was beginning to blossom in a more benign political climate, as if in some kind of post-revolutionary spring. It doesn’t feel that way now.

After Ted Wragg died I hoped Phil could fill some of the crater-sized hole left by that giant of a writer, and Phil wrote even more regularly for us, in Ted’s slot, more generalised comment pieces. Phil gave that up after a while, fearing it was too much and that the original column was suffering. He was probably right. Ted was – still is – irreplaceable; Phil was – is – his own man, too iconoclastic to be exactly the voice of teaching in the way Ted was. But I hope it doesn’t besmirch either man to say that Phil’s writing has some of the spirit of Ted’s – generosity, a candidness, an eye for the ridiculous; and passion. And more prosaically, but for the paper’s purposes absolutely necessarily, a crossover appeal, an ability to engage the general reader and the professional reader in subjects that one may know nothing about and the other may know pretty much everything about. For a section like Education Guardian, that quality is pure gold. Right now I don’t think there’s anybody writing the kind of thing that Phil does as well as Phil does. Compared to Teacher of the Year it’s not much of an award but if there was one going for the most consistently enjoyable education writer in the British Isles, I very much doubt there would be much of a shortlist.

Will Woodward

Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgements

Preface

Foreword

The Learning Environment

Life in a Glass Dungeon

Macramé versus Rio Ferdinand

Performance

Classroom Organisation

In Defence of Front of Class Teaching

Pedagogy

Let’s Plaster On a Fake Grin and Trawlthrough This Sorry Sack One More Time

Multiple Intelligences

The Marshmallow Test

Get Yourself a System!

Of Seating Plans and Sealing Wax

Key Words

The State Approved Method of Instruction

Hands Up!

Mind Maps

Brainless Gym

Marking

Assessment for Learning

Satisfactory?

ICT

Wind Up a Spod 1

Wind Up a Spod 2

Wind Up a Spod 3 – The Interactive Whiteboard

Failed Attempt at Wind Up a Spod 4

People and Personalities

What’s So Wrong With Liking Your Students?

Edutainment

Haircuts

Neckties

Chewing Gum

Boys

Fear and Loathing

Waterloo Road

Literacy

Blaming the Sector Before You

It’s Political Correctness Gone Mad!

Learning from the Enemy

Adult Literacy

Boys’ Reading

Literature

Education for Leisure

Andrew Motion

Politics and Policy

Teaching on the Cheap

Shaking the Spindlier Tree

Welcome Mr Gove

Handsome Dave

Licensed to Teach

Early Years Foundation Stage

What is Personalisation?

Religious Studies

Floor Targets and Secondary Moderns

Importing the Private Sector

The Myth of the Failing School

Private Schools

The Epidemic of Homophobia

Trans Kids

Drugs

Class

Vocational Learning

White Working Class Language

White Working Class Boys

Class in the Classroom

References

About the Author

Also by Phil Beadle

Copyright

The Learning Environment

Life in a Glass Dungeon

Whoever designed the school I’ve just started working at has obviously been properly briefed on the full range of stereotypical judgements it is possible to make on the young people who go there. Anyone’s first impression on entering the building is that it bears a startling resemblance to Alcatraz, the key function appears to be the lockdown. And then you enter the classroom.

The wall decoration du jour in my new classroom appears to be the unpainted breeze block. Initially, I’d thought, perhaps foolishly, that this was some post-modern nuance of architectural philosophy. ‘Ah. Well noted, Mr Beadle. We keep the walls functional as an inverse correlative of the school’s approach to learning and, indeed, to teaching – should it exist. The hue of the walls serves to minimise visual noise, and the exquisite sparseness means children can project their thoughts, hopes and aspirations onto the blank, grey canvas of the brick.’

No such cobblers, I’m afraid. The walls aren’t painted because, if they were, the building would fall down. Given that it houses 1,200 students and there’s quite a lot of glass, this would be considered a bad thing.

Speaking of glass, not since my days as a Penge window cleaner’s assistant have I seen quite so much of it. The school is, for a limited period only, at the bottom of the league tables, and this, of course, inevitably affects admissions. Consequently, there are several boys and girls in attendance to whom Mr Naughty is not a stranger. Last year, so I am told, this fatal combination of naughty boy and glass palace combined, in startling symbiosis with the presence of small stones in the bits where trees are planted, to produce an array of aural shivering effects and a glazing bill in the region of £13,000 per month.

The building is shaped like a cheese wedge, meaning that classrooms at the front of it have sloping ceilings in the region of over 30 feet high on the right-hand side, 8 feet high on the left. Personally, this leads me to feel I’m teaching in an educational version of the crooked house amusements one might find in a post-communist, Hungarian fairground; though the kids tend not to notice. What they do notice though is that the rooms are unbearably hot in the summer, and that the only windows available for opening are narrow-eyed fellers whose bottoms are some 29 feet up in the air.

Teachers responding to a class’s complaints of stuffiness must involve themselves in a ridiculous ballet, in which, with the aid of the school’s single 30-foot long pole, they attempt to co-ordinate their hand movements to unhook the window latch at a distance of what must feel to them like several miles. So extreme is this distance, that the merest half-tremor of the little finger can cause the hook to miss the latch by an acutely embarrassing distance. Whole double lessons are wasted as male students collapse into torrents of uncontrollable hysterics while gamine, female teachers attempt vainly to open a window. ‘Face it, miss,’ the boys chortle joyously and rhythmically, ‘You ain’t got the control to get the pole in the hole.’

When the window is finally opened, after several lessons marked by much hilarity and little learning, no one notices the breeze, of course; it’s 30 feet up! A whisper across the foothills of heaven. Of no use at all to the earthbound.

The second floor, however, is so well acquainted with the heavens it tempts students to pay an early visit to them. The main corridor is a balcony many miles above the ground, with only the frailest of railings separating students and teachers from a meeting with their maker. I have held informal chats with colleagues on that balcony, our backs glued with vertiginous fear to the wall furthest away from ‘touching the void’.

‘What do you think of so and so’s attainment so far this year?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t care about education. I’m going to fall. Fear the railing! Fear the railing!’

This would be bad enough were it not for the existence of the viewing platform. At one point the balcony sweeps out, in a grand arc, supported by nothing, leaving the foolhardy student or teacher who stands on it feeling exactly as safe and secure as if they were teetering at the edge of a promontory overlooking a Norwegian fjord, supported only by a thin elastic band.

Thankfully, no one has tipped over the edge just yet. The students seem to recognise some of the potential dangers the structure presents and behave appropriately on the top floor. And, in all honesty, this particular glass palace is a far better educational environment than, for instance, the school I worked in where there were so few tiles on the roof that a man (whom the kids had wittily named ‘Rufus’) had set up home there; or the school in which the toilets resembled the seventh circle of hell so accurately that you were given a special award for risking the hem of your trouser in the bosom of the sit-downs. (And at least no one thought it would be a sensible idea to put a trading floor in the atrium!)

So, yes, it is better to work in a glass palace than a decaying wreck. The students seem to feel that the building respects them, and behaviour and learning are both showing a marked up-turn. It wasn’t like this last year, though, and the building was exactly the same. What reason then for the improvements? What reason for the fact that the glazing bill hasn’t even reached £100 this month?

The reason is that a school is the human beings in it, not the fabric that surrounds them. The school in which I work is on a steep upward trajectory, and it is on this trajectory because the human beings in it, staff and students, are forcing it. It’s all very well architects deciding to experiment on children with some of their more outré creative ideas, but if a school isn’t managed well, it will fail, be it palace or dungeon.

Macramé versus Rio Ferdinand

You may find this column a bit listy. The reason you will find it so is that it is going to be written in list form: a list of all the display items found in the corridors of Rosebrook Community School in Mansfield, followed by the display items in a counterpoint secondary school. There is a point to this.

When you enter Rosebrook Community School, piped classical music (Vivaldi’s Four Seasons as imagined by Nigel Kennedy) haunts and excites. You notice that behind your left shoulder there is a sound of trickling water, and turn to see a small indoor fountain laughing gaily, water gently tickling a bed of small stones. Following the direction of the sound, you come across a wall on which paper skeletons dance next to real X-rays of legs and diagrams of the human body: ‘This is how we move and grow,’ it says. On the opposite side of the entrance hall, slightly to your right, is a huge board covered in stars that have been cut out of Post-it notes and covered with glitter; on each star is the name of a child. There are hundreds of stars.

On entering the secondary school, you approach a reception desk over which is a sign bearing the school’s name.

Past Rosebrook’s central recess area, in which there are a few small chairs and a table for kids who need to just sit and chat, or for those odd occasions when they might need to talk with the head (you get a sense that they are deliberately that size so that in moments of crisis the head can sit and talk softly to his pupils, all the time aware that he will be able to empathise better with them if he somehow manages to get his robust frame on to the same level as their somewhat smaller bodies), there is a display of children’s photos. These shining faces are accompanied by the kids’ manifestos for election to the School Council; it seems every child in the school has been instilled with sufficient ambition to put themselves up for high office and, next to this, there is a wall display of work on Joseph’s coat: kids have used ICT applications to design dreamcoats, constructed prototypes, made their own coats and then written evaluatory recounts in the form of acrostics, which are, of course, written on coat-shaped paper.

In the secondary school foyer/atrium there are some expensive windows and a poster of Rio Ferdinand pretending to read a book that is too hard for him.

The recess area at Rosebrook leads onto the main school corridor. Before you get to this though, you must pass the slideshow of lesson activities on a screen, the photos of kids’ faces that have been warped, so that they resemble cartoon characters or Picasso pastels. On entering the corridor you are struck by the sheer craft involved; every single possible material is used to construct these displays: old newspaper is given fresh use, cut into the shapes of the leaves of palm trees, painted eggs hang from branches to form Easter Trees, year one’s ‘Man on the Moon Display’ features tin foil, paper plates painted silver, and glitter everywhere; there are model spitfires, gas masks, Greek pots, fireworks, diaries, hot air balloons and tractors. Best of all, better than the rainforest the kids have constructed, better than the cocktail stick flags, the Medusa peg bags, better even than the detailed papier-mâché models of the water cycle, is the version of Monet’s Water Lilies which covers a whole wall. This is so beautiful as to feel slightly out of context, hidden away in the far reaches of a corridor in a school at the edge of a Mansfield council estate. It is breathtaking! Using print, needlework, paint, threaded felt and shiny card, the children at Rosebrook have – together: collaboration towards a finished product is valued highly at the school – produced a work of art that, for me, shames the original.

Down the corridor in the secondary school Michael Owen is also pretending he enjoys reading. He has his thumbs up and a fake smile plastered across his gob.