michael gove

matt b

matt b

Indexing all opinion
I'm Sixth Form, not school, but have had to join NUT anyway, for a number of boring reasons.

Gove really is a prime cunt
 
you

you

Well-known member
Acme Evil Hog
Acme Veil Hog
Magic He Love
Male Vice Hog
Lame Vice Hog
goldfish-faced cunt
govedm0603_228x326.jpg
 
jenks

jenks

thread death
Saw that - I spent all of Friday fine tuning a risk assessment for an overight trip to Stratford as our kids had won a competition and are performing there at the Swan on Tuesday. When I thought it was all complete I was asked, in all seriousness, if I had a risk assessment for walking next to a river. The risk assessment was already over sixty pages long!!!

If this goes through it might actually be the only thing the Tories have ever done to reduce teacher workload.
 
you

you

Well-known member
probably shouldn't say this online but.....

where I work the risk assessment is:

"Low"

"Completed upon site, available upon request"

nothing more needed!
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Very moving open letter to Michael Gove from an English teacher at a small school in a deprived area with lots of foreign-born pupils:

Dear Michael Gove,

You will never read this, but I feel compelled to put it out there in the faint hope that more people will realise the repercussions of your latest initiative.

I am proud to work at a small school, on a small estate, in the most deprived ward in the county. The life expectancy in this ward is a full 20 years lower than the neighbouring village, which tells you a little bit about our intake. Add to this that within our 530 students, we have 36 different languages spoken and over 40 per cent of students do not count English as their first language.

Effectively, we are everything you hate and everything you would like to abolish. We are the skidmark on the sparkling underpants of your brave new world of academies and free schools. It is no secret that you would like nothing more than to see us swallowed up by a nearby school which features higher in your flawed league tables, but we have worked relentlessly hard to maintain our independence and have done enough, miraculously, to keep our heads above your floor targets for the last couple of years...
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Of course the perennial problem of grade inflation remains but anyone who's not a goldfish-faced cunt can surely see that arbitrarily capping the number of candidates who can get a certain grade halfway through the school year and moderating kids' coursework down a whole grade without even telling them before their exams is not really the fairest way to do this.

BTW don't read the comments if you want to avoid shitting yourself with rage.
 
B

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
i didn't realise quite how appallingly this had been done.

So, one thing I don't understand - the colleges are now taking in way less students than they expected, or had they committed to more conditional places than they could ever handle in the first place?
 
jenks

jenks

thread death
I have held back from venting yet again about Gove but this disingenuous bastard had the temerity to say his heart went out to all those who sat exams this summer.

He claims to have had no influence on Ofqual and that it would be totally wrong of politicians to interfere with an independent organisation. All utter cant and bullshit. He wants the exams to look discredited so that he can bring in old fashioned exams that people like him were good at at school.

And the classic response is a fudge rather than a budge - nothing wrong with the results but we'll give you a free resit but we won't say how we are going to staff it or pay for the extra resources or just generally get you ready for an exam which you were well and truly ready for in June.

No-one has really addressed the fact that this has only occured in English - next year Maths and Science go from modular to linear, so expect a sudden drop in 'standards' or correction of 'grade inflation' (how quick we are to embrace that term without a full investigation of just how/why kids are getting better grades. Could it have something to do with the amount of time/effort kids and teachers are putting in. Relentless money spent on intervention as we run from fear of triggering an OFSTED inspection?)

A few personal anecdotes - my dept were set the task of gettin 92% of kids A-C grades in English - our highest ever was 78%. We are an all boys comp in a grammar area, so the top 20% has been creamed off already. These targets are set by a nameless/faceless organisation called The Fischer Family Trust and their data is used by OFTSED to set targets and measure schools.

so..We did everything we could and I reasonably expected to get about 80% - based on all the data I had, where grade boundaries were in previous exams, examiners coming in and talking to us etc. We got 70%. Obviously pissed off but the same kids, taught by the same teachers also did an English Literature GCSE - 88% of them got a C or more. Lit is considered to be harder and we usually perform 10% below the Lang.

As has been pointed out kids cannot now go and do apprenticeships, teachers of sixth form are finding classes to be smaller or closed, possibly meaning redundancies or short term contracts not being renewed.

I'll stop - I'm taking two boys up to be part of a national youth theatre ensemble for the RSC and The National Theatre. A reminder of why I still hang on in doing a discredited job.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Damn, that's really shitty. Sorry to hear that.

I don't think the 'grade inflation' issue can be dismissed entirely. I mean, this is the first year GCSE results haven't improved since they were introduced, isn't it? It would be fine if that meant each successive year of candidates were genuinely leaving school better-educated than the last, but employers and admissions tutors don't seem to think this is case. It could also be that kids are getting better and better at passing exams (presumably via teachers getting better at preparing them), which isn't the same thing, but if that's the case then it seems natural to argue for tougher exams. Or at least exams that are less easy to pass by rote learning.

Not knocking teachers at all here BTW, and I can only imagine how frustrating it must be to have to teach to such a prescriptive curriculum and then get kicked around by both the govt and the papers...
 
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you

you

Well-known member
"A few personal anecdotes - my dept were set the task of gettin 92% of kids A-C grades in English - our highest ever was 78%. We are an all boys comp in a grammar area, so the top 20% has been creamed off already. These targets are set by a nameless/faceless organisation called The Fischer Family Trust and their data is used by OFTSED to set targets and measure schools. "

good to see capitalist quantifying put to good logical use here...
 
jenks

jenks

thread death
you said:
good to see capitalist quantifying put to good logical use here...
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i'm not really sure what you mean?

the fact that schools are set targets?
the fact that stats are part of the standard language of teachers?
the fact that targets are meaningless? Or are meaningless outside of context?

Not only teachers but many other areas are aware of a set of linguistic expectations, to use a certain set of words, to mould their own discipline to a series of interchangeable abstract nouns. This doesn't mean we cannot see behind the bullshit, instead we are forced to play their game based on targets etc If we do not then we do not get to do the job we want to do.

I am surre there are others on here who work for public services and feel the heavy hand of government equally, or even more, acutely.
 
jenks

jenks

thread death
Mr. Tea said:
Damn, that's really shitty. Sorry to hear that.

I don't think the 'grade inflation' issue can be dismissed entirely. .
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T - i do not disagree that results have gone up but am a bit concerned at the willing acceptance of the terminology of 'grade inflation' in a contextless account - a discussion the current government do not want.

why have grades gone up? Well partly because there is a constant pressure to make sure every kid that can will get a C. So, where in the past kids might get a bit of extra homework they are now having to come in during the Easter holidays or forego PE so that they can cram for exams. Also in the coursework kids just went in with what they could get, now it is endless redrafts to get them up to scratch. There are many more examples of 'intervention' but I am aware that I am going on a bit about something I know something about but which gets misrepresented in the media so ridiculously.

Why are teachers doing this? Especially when they are contributing to 'grade inflation'? Cos they too are under pressure to get results which show the school heading up league tables, to stop OFSTED arriving, to keep senior managers off their backs, because the kids have been they are going to get these gardes by the predicted grade algorithm in the FFT data base.

If there was an acceptance by the government that the targets were unrealistic and generated by unrealistic data then we wouldn't be squeezed to magic up marvellous results.Or work ourselves to the point of mental exhaustion, rack up large numbers of sick days and see good colleagues go under and sign off for months on end with stress.

it is unfair and disingenuous of the government bodies (The Fischer Family Trust et al) to set targets which are unachievable. If a kid starts a gCSE and is informed, wrongly, that they can get a C then their whole career choice is based upon specious reasoning and setting them up to fail. They fail to get their college course, they fail to get their qualifications, they enter the world of NEETS through no fault of their own other than believing that they had been given a fair chance. It is all well and good offering opportunities to aspire to but be realistic - there's no good me aspiring to be astronaut at my age and with my fear of heights!
 
you

you

Well-known member
jenks said:
i'm not really sure what you mean?

the fact that schools are set targets?
the fact that stats are part of the standard language of teachers?
the fact that targets are meaningless? Or are meaningless outside of context?

Not only teachers but many other areas are aware of a set of linguistic expectations, to use a certain set of words, to mould their own discipline to a series of interchangeable abstract nouns. This doesn't mean we cannot see behind the bullshit, instead we are forced to play their game based on targets etc If we do not then we do not get to do the job we want to do.

I am surre there are others on here who work for public services and feel the heavy hand of government equally, or even more, acutely.
Click to expand...

It wasn't an attacking comment, more to highlight the absurdity of targets. Like you say, if you already have the bottom 80% of students, and they are asking you to make 92% of the bottom 80% get A-C.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-11074117

So lets be generous and presume that 75% Nat Av will get A*-C. Which leaves your bottom 80% with a remaining chunk outside of A*-C - so 70% would've been a realistic target.

take 100
20 grammar
80 with you
-25 outside A-C
=55 in A*-C
which is about 68.summat%

.....

so if you take your target of 92% presume you have the lower 80% this turns A*-C av across your place and the grammar into 94% based on the 75% target.

Basically that target is wayyyy to high.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Thanks jenks, that answer helps a lot.

Just thinking back to when I was working as a tutor a few years ago - I wonder how widespread that was 10 or 20 years ago? And I had some work in a city academy too, so it wasn't all paid for out of parents' pockets.

Funnily enough this is on the beeb news front page today: Children's reading 'pushed out' by other activities - such as, presumably, endless revision sessions, coursework reviews, exam resits etc...

That's tragic about kids being given unrealistic expectations, it's always much worse to have your hopes falsely built up and then crushed than to be given realistic goals in the first place.
 
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R

routes

we can delay.ay.ay...
that's very interesting to see it put that like Jenks, thanks.

Tea - that article doesn't mention the huge amount of time young people spend online, when they are online they are reading quite alot of the time. it's not just the endless revision sessions that have replaced reading, though that is certainly true some of the time.. in my (extremely challenging) school (near Peckham, South London) they have been pushing compulsory P4C (Philosophy for Children), which now takes up some of the timetabled hours previously assigned to reading or Religious Education. I am a P4C convert, the impact it has been having at all tiers of the school, both in the classrooms and generally around the school, has been remarkable and extraordinary. i'd go so far as to say that introducing P4C last year has saved the school from a likely intervention over the next couple of years. Gove is an idiot not to see the value of P4C.
 
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