Teachers for Supply

Ellie Ireland’s dad works in a factory making cardboard, and her mum is a cook in a neighborhood school. Ellie, who’s head girl of her school, City academy in Norwich, sees a distinct future for herself. “i need to work in a media company,” she says. “Probably video production.” And he or she thinks a level is what she should get her there.

Until recently, Ellie could have been this kind of student higher education – despite its open-access pledge – did not reach. Before her school became an academy, after which transformed its outcomes three years ago, it was ranked the fourth worst within the country, based on school league tables. Now, Ellie says: “You could just tell it’s different. There are more opportunities. The lecturers are always happy to chat to you about your entire options.” The college strives to convince students, whatever their background, that they’re one of these folks that go directly to do further study.

City isn’t always working alone. That is a part of an experimental chain called Ten [Transforming Education in Norfolk], linking primary and secondary schools with City College Norwich. The assumption is that progression during the education system right as much as degree level, which the FE college caters for, has to be seamless and unthreatening. In Ellie’s words: “Our faculty has partnered with the faculty so when students leave, in preference to thinking, ‘I’ll get any job to make money,’ they consider doing more study to get something better.”

Dick Palmer, Ten’s chief executive, is evangelistic about what this education pipeline can achieve. “The message to oldsters is, send your four- or five-year-old to a 10 school and we’ll give them an entitlement to some extent,” he says. “Most of these kids are from three generations of worklessness, so they’ve never gone anywhere near higher education before.”

Ten school students pop into the local college very often, witnessing everything from apprenticeships to degree courses at the beginning hand. “a sense that higher education isn’t for me is reinforced by your surroundings,” Palmer says. “Because we control these organisations right the manner through, we will fight that loss of aspiration.”

This fresh brooding about widening access to degrees can be excellent news for kids from disadvantaged backgrounds, however it poses a possible threat to universities that are meant to be chasing the identical students – and, in certain cases, are struggling to fill places after raising their fees.

Professor Deian Hopkin, former vice-chancellor of London South Bank University, says: “Dick Palmer’s venture is inspiring. And it’s a reminder to the full university sector that it should look carefully at progression routes given the demographic downturn and the evidence of a lack of appetite for higher education.”

As 45 FE colleges sponsor an academy school like those within the Ten federation, the scope for more such links seems obvious.

Barnfield Federation in Luton is already on an incredibly similar path. In 2007, Barnfield FE College was the 1st to sponsor two schools. Peter Birkett, the executive executive, says: “About 30% of the youngsters every year left school without a qualifications and have become Neets. They progressed nowhere. We’ve turned that around.”

Higher education is dyed into the wool of Barnfield’s schools. “They graduate from primary school in a cap and gown,” Birkett says. “Parents love that!” Students regularly are available to speak to pupils about what they’re doing. Pupils from the talents academy cook pizzas for the pupils who decide to do extra lessons on a Saturday – and the pizza money goes right into a checking account to assist pay for his or her higher education.

But this is not about learning for its own sake. “All our courses are career-focused,” Birkett says. “It really is about getting a task. We’re not saying you should decide what you’ll do for a living on the age of 5. We say the style out of poverty is considering your future.”

Joy Mercer, head of policy on the Association of schools, argues that this vocational focus gives FE colleges an edge over many universities inside the degrees market. “Often courses are devised with employers so people can get an HE qualification that has an immediate relation to the job they’re hoping to do. That’s particularly important with graduate employment because it is.”

There is not any doubt colleges also appeal caused by their strong local links. Claire Callender, professor of better education at Birkbeck College and the Institute of Education, and co-author of a contemporary study on higher education in FE, says: “They’re attracting a truly particular variety of student, who desires to go somewhere local, familiar and cozy academically.”

She points out that many students just like the teaching environment in colleges. “Their tutors will know who they’re, as opposed to teaching them in a lecture hall with 200 other students. That private touch is what many want.” There are drawbacks, she adds. “The training resources typically aren’t pretty much as good and they’ll fail to notice broader, potentially eye-opening extra-curricular activities.”

But Callender’s research shows nearly all of HE students in FE had just one option when deciding where to head. This raises the question of whether directing poorer students right into a degree at their local college is raising their aspirations high enough.

“We asked students in the event that they knew the variation between university and faculty and sometimes they did not really,” Callender says. “They’re not always making informed choices because they don’t know what the choices are. However, a lot of them do not have gone into higher education in any respect without that school.”

It is nearly 10 years since i began writing for the Guardian. My first piece in 2003 was in terms of school admissions, and it was long. There has been much to claim a couple of subject that back then received relatively little scrutiny.

I have since written and spoken in this topic more times than i’m able to remember, that is why a feeling of groundhog day descended after I heard the headlines from the RSA Academies Commission report last month.

It was not wholly surprising that focus focused immediately at the commissioners’ remarks about school admissions. On one level this remains a dry, dusty technical subject. On another, it goes to the center of parent and pupil choice, fairness and equality.

Every parent knows and understands the sophisticated division that starts to occur as children approach reception or years 5 and six: the home moves, the church-going and personal tuition, those difficult conversations about what’s “best for my child” – coincidentally the title of a movie I made in this subject shortly after the unique Guardian piece appeared.

And while it’s true that during some parts of the rustic here’s mitigated by loss of realistic choice, in lots of other areas admissions increasingly contribute to the complex hierarchy that makes English schools some of the most segregated on earth.

Academies aren’t always the worst offenders. Many have more comprehensive, diverse and challenging intakes than neighbouring schools that either select by ability or faith, or are gifted a favourable catchment area.

But, because the then Chief Adjudicator of faculties admitted to me in 2003, as more schools become their very own admissions authorities it really is much more likely that they’re going to “drift to the luxurious”. It’s always the quickest path to league table advantage.

And academies and free schools has been given extra, unnecessary freedoms. They’re only obliged to conform with the Admissions Code via their funding agreements, which the coalition has said may be varied to permit effective opt-outs from what’s obligatory for other, maintained, schools.

So it’s likely that through the years, and as more schools convert, the difficulty of subtle selection and exclusion will persist and oldsters will increasingly be required to navigate this kind of complex local landscapes that usually benefit the knowing and well-resourced.

This government, and the last, claimed to need an admissions system that promoted equity and fair access, and allocated places clearly and objectively, in order that parents could understand their possibilities of success. The difficulty is that action never matched the rhetoric and reform remains needed in two specific areas.

The first concerns the kind of admissions criteria which might be permissible. The large beasts during this particular jungle don’t seem to be really academies, however the grammar and faith schools. But until someone has the courage to tackle those mammoth vested interests, inequalities will continue.

Less politically contentious may well be tougher, more comprehensive regulation. Since Mr Gove is in a mood for U-turns, i might also suggest that no school must have the ability to opt out of the Admissions Code. There have to be a regulatory framework that applies to all schools, and all children – including those of the founders – without exception.

But compliance with the code still rests at the willingness of people, local authorities or other schools to complain about non-compliant or bad practice.

The Office of the colleges Adjudicator doesn’t have the powers had to police the system properly, and with the decimation of local authority capacity and influence, it isn’t clear who intervenes on behalf of area people if nobody complains. In some areas of this convoluted web of accountability, parents’ only right to redress is via the secretary of state, who’s now answerable for several thousand schools.

The Academies Commission idea of stories to the OSA detailing the social background of every child who applies, and of every child admitted to each school, is an efficient one.

I would add the applicants’ prior attainment to that blend and a “navigability” rating, to spell out the obstacles faced by parents in areas where nearly every secondary school now has its own different, often impenetrable, entry criteria.

But it is not altogether clear what should and will happen next. Unless an investigation follows into why and the way some schools be capable of engineer themselves radically more favourable intakes than their neighbours, with a transparent action plan to both rectify that and provides every child an equal chance, the drift to the luxurious could become an avalanche.

Bye-bye EBCs

So farewell, then, the ill-fated English Baccalaureate Certificate exams. But we wonder where this leaves a curious contract for his or her “development”, which was awarded without fanfare before Christmas.

A government contracts database reveals that, on 5 December, the dept for Education awarded work, to be done over the period to summer 2014 and price £39,600, “to develop [the] English Baccalaureate Certificate proposals further”.

Eyebrows were being raised – even before Michael Gove’s decision last week to retain and reform GCSEs as opposed to introduce the recent EBCs – about who were given this task.

Three quarters of the funding for this contract went to the East Norfolk Academies Trust, a body that currently runs one school, with another by reason of open in September. Anything went to a expert based in West Yorkshire. One assessment source questioned where the exams expertise for what gave the look of a huge task was imagined to be coming from.

The trust also has a fascinating chairman: Theodore Agnew, who’s an education department director, a Conservative party donor and is listed at the DfE’s website as a trustee of both the perfect-of-centre thinktank Policy Exchange and of the free schools facilitators the hot Schools Network.

Rachel de Souza, of the trust, said the contracts involving work being performed by teachers with links to the trust’s soon-to-open Sir Isaac Newton Sixth Form free school, Norwich, to develop some science content. She thought this work had already been done over Christmas by the academics and other professionals. Asked what would happen to the work now, de Souza said: “i do not know.”

Divided over long division

Gove’s decision at the EBCs took attention away – initially a minimum of – from another big announcement made at the same day, as England’s helter-skelter reform programme continues: the detail of the total draft the recent national curriculum for first teaching from 2014.

But it’s a fair bet that controversy on that front won’t let up. One person seriously unhappy with one aspect of the proposed primary maths curriculum is Anne Watson, professor of maths education on the University of Oxford.

Watson was fascinated by the drafting of the document, but says that concerns in regards to the inclusion of long division within the new programmes of research, registered by her and a lot of the maths teaching community including the overarching Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education, were ignored by ministers.

Writing to the Guardian, Watson argues that long division is a “ping pong between the govt. and maths educators”, a lot of the latter believing that specifying it inside the curriculum isn’t the best way of preparing children for secondary education.

“Why on the planet is a central authority interfering at this level with the teaching of an issue” she asks, adding that there appears to was a “blatant disregard” for what’s known about how children learn maths by either ministers, their advisers, or both. The govt has defended long division because the “optimal” calculation method.

Whose line is it anyway

Suspicions among some that DfE-Ofsted relations could be a tad too cosy will hardly were assuaged by one recent nugget from the foremost high-profile controversy surrounding ministers’ move to force academy status on some schools.

As the Guardian revealed last month, the DfE has provoked a parental and community campaign against its keenness to thrust Roke primary school, in leafy Kenley, Surrey, into the arms of the Harris academy chain after a single bad Ofsted report last May.

Some some of the school’s supporters were unhappy after Ofsted took eight months to come back to the college to compare on what they suspect was good progress, during which time the DfE had already written to governors to verify ministers’ academy sponsorship plan.

One parent, Maria Gunner, wrote to Ofsted to complain. And who wrote back The DfE, informing her that “we predict it’s right that action is taken at schools which aren’t providing an appropriate standard of education to their pupils”. A campaign source asked: “Does this response give the opinion of the DfE or Ofsted”

Meanwhile, an exchange of emails in terms of a row over plans to compel another primary school into academy status reveals the DfE stating clearly its line that it’s the government, as opposed to governing bodies, that gets to select academy sponsors for schools.

A letter to Anne Kinderlerer, a hospital consultant who’s chair of governors at Gladstone Park primary in Brent, north London, from the DfE’s “brokerage and college underperformance division”, shows this.

It says, “ministers was clear that the dept should lead on brokering sponsored academy solutions … taking into consideration our knowledge of the faculty and a sponsor’s capacity and experience”.

The department’s knowledge of the college seemed to not extend, however, to getting the spelling of Kinderlerer’s name right, the letter being addressed to “Anne Kinderler”.

I may be the poster child for the merits of abstinence before marriage: i’m a member of the usa evangelical Christian community and remained a virgin until my wedding.

I’ve been happily married to a similar man for just about 15 years. We have seen quite a bit in our marriage: conceived four children, cared for 2 with severe health conditions, buried one among them, started and give up jobs, moved houses, changed churches, grieved, and battled depression. We’ve got hurt, misunderstood, under-estimated, and annoyed one another. We’re still learning to become good lovers.

On quite a lot of days, we now have barely held it together. So what’s our secret It’s that we like one another it doesn’t matter what.

To give my dearth of sexual partners credit for our marriage’s success is a ridiculous oversimplification. Unfortunately, such a thinking characterizes a good portion of the united states evangelical church’s technique to sex and marriage today.

The Christian blogosphere has written much about this peculiar quirk of the evangelical church in recent weeks. As individuals alike share their stories of saving sex for marriage or not saving it and the confusion they experience over saving it or not saving it, an important theme emerges: many evangelical churches are teaching the incorrect things about sex.

Do not misread me. it’s not that i am saying that the church is incorrect to show that marriage and sex are sacred and to be approached with reverence. One of the crucial character qualities that the church encourages Jesus followers to develop is self control, and lots of believe that saving sex for marriage is a crucial component to developing self-control. Moreover, Christianity teaches that something spiritual happens (or may happen) during sex. Consider this passage from 1 Corinthians 6:15-22:

“Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself Shall I then take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute Never! Do you not know that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one along with her in body For it’s miles said, ‘The two turns into one flesh.’ But whoever is united with the Lord is one with him in spirit. Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins somebody commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually, sins against their very own body.”

I don’t understand exactly what Paul is saying here, but i do know he’s approaching sex as something intense, personal, even mystical. It’s sacred.

What i’m saying is that the best way many in today’s church discuss sex, women and men, modesty, and marriage does an immense disservice to men, women, marriage, and sex.

The stories popping out of the so-called evangelical “purity culture” demonstrate a deep-seated distrust of human sexuality, and particularly of female sexuality. As Elizabeth Esther wrote in her post Virginity: New and Improved!, making virginity the goal “implied that a woman’s inherent worth and dignity could possibly be measured by whether a person has touched her”. Meanwhile, Preston Yancey mentioned how the evangelical church often casts men as predators: “i used to be but 13, a near decade to today, the primary time i used to be told that by nature i used to be a rapist.”

Many inside the church today have mistaken virginity for the goal, forgetting that the goal really is becoming a mature healthy individual with mature healthy relationships. It is not working: most adolescents have sex before they’re married.

These stories reveal how the over-emphasis on virginity heaps shame on those that fail (for any reason, whether someone consented or not) and conceals the fact that those that succeed will not be likely today to fall in love with someone who’s also a virgin. The “purity culture” promises phenomenal sex for those that wait until marriage. By so thoroughly squelching the sex drive up until marriage, many virgins find it incredibly difficult to “turn it back on” once the ban on sex was lifted.

The truth is that abstinence not more guarantees a healthy marriage or rocking sex life than baking with organic eggs guarantees a gourmet cake. We want the entire ingredients to accomplish human wholeness.

A person is greater than their sexual experience or lack thereof. Christians find our identity as adopted children of God, not in our virginity. We believe that God works in and with us to make us mature and full: to profit ourselves, identify our strengths and weaknesses, and develop the strength of character to maximise our strengths and minimize our weaknesses. Most critical, Christians believe that God loves us and will even bring good out of our mistakes and pain.

To evangelical church leaders, please: preach at the sacredness of marriage and sex. But don’t oversimplify, and do not exaggerate. Teach us learn how to become healthy individuals and build healthy relationships. Let us know why we have to learn self-control and the way abstinence can help. Notably, remind us that God loves us whatever.

For headteacher Sam Offord, it began with a phone call last May. She was told by a senior quality assurance adviser for Manchester local authority that the dept for Education had decided her school must become an academy.

In Offord’s five years as head, Birchfields primary had received two “good” Ofsted reports. The varsity, 93% of whose children speak English as an extra language, had always met the ground standard for progress, but had not yet reached the objective for attainment. The decision was a shock, particularly as Offord knew her school was heading in the right direction to succeed in the attainment standard within the next set of results. “I said that our results were going to be good and was told: ‘That’s irrelevant now. They’re coming’.”

Offord decided to place up a fight. “i actually didn’t believe this variation would help the youngsters in our college,” she says. “i myself thought it might make things worse for them. We had worked hard and long for 5 years and everything we had installed place was working. i believed all that could be installed jeopardy.” She set about getting advice from her union, the National Association of Headteachers (NAHT), and from specialist lawyers in an effort to resisting the conversion.

Offord is one in every of several headteachers who’ve fought back and won against the specter of enforced academisation because they believed the explanations given by the DfE failed to stack up.

Initially, the grounds for forcing primary schools to become academies were either that they were in a single of the Ofsted “categories” or that they were failing to satisfy the department’s floor targets. However, in plenty of cases, when schools or local authorities challenged the department’s orders at the grounds of the ground targets, they discovered the DfE backing off from legal challenges and every so often having their orders overturned on appeal.

Nottingham-based lawyer Laura Hughes, of Browne Jacobson solicitors, says that between last March and November she was receiving about three calls every week from primary schools being told they might become academies. “The brokers [the consultants employed by the DfE] were promoting the message that primaries needed to academise in the event that they were below the ground targets, regardless of whether or not they were an improving school,” she says.

One of those consultants came visiting Birchfields. Offord told her that during the subsequent round of Sats results, the varsity was expected to succeed in the ground targets. “She said: ‘Yes, that’s fine, but you are still going to need to become an academy’.” Offord recalls it as “a type of surreal moments”.

“That’s after I said, ‘I’ve politely accepted you getting into my school, however the rules state you should be below both floor targets for 3 years.’ We hadn’t been below floor targets for progress since 2007.” Offord explains: “If I hadn’t had that knowledge, from attending my union’s briefing sessions, I’d have just accepted what the consultant said.”

On receiving the recent and improved Sats results, Sam wrote to the broker. “I reiterated that we didn’t meet the factors. I added that, “Surely, most people would think it was ludicrous that the DfE is targeting a 93% English as a different language school it really is achieving above the national average and is heading in the right direction to take action for the foreseeable future”

Offord received an email reply from the DfE broker saying, “Providing you might be above floor and never in an Ofsted category, the college isn’t always a concern to become a sponsored academy immediately.”

According to the National Audit report of November 2012 at the expansion of the academies programme, the DfE forecast that around 600 primaries would convert last year. The particular number was just 325. There are actually 974 primary academies in England, but that’s just 5.7% of primaries. DfE projections will not be being met.

Russell Hobby, general secretary of the NAHT, says: “All the brokers has a target of more than a few they have to convert. Their job is to transform a college someway. It’s once they cope with schools which are improving under their very own steam, or with the support in their local authority, that we get most angry. It is a shadowy and unaccountable process, which doesn’t allow schools to defend themselves appropriately, and the incorrect schools often get caught up on this.” The DfE denies that brokers have quotas to fulfill.

According to Hughes, the telephone calls to her office have diminished, and never because there aren’t any more visits from brokers. “Schools are more confident and word is getting around,” she says. Some local authorities and unions are actually advising schools that every one isn’t lost simply because a broker turns up on their doorstep.

According to the DfE, just two primary schools had been forced to transform on orders of the secretary of state. But school leaders in lots of other schools feel they’ve been coerced by the brokers, without or with assistance from their local authorities. The DfE was unable to inform Education Guardian what percentage schools had successfully resisted conversion.

Mike Barnes remembers being told his school, Flakefleet in Fleetwood, was at the DfE’s original list of so-called failing schools. “Two DfE civil servants and a broker came to work out us in September 2011 and told us what a dreadful school we were and the single way out of it was to become an academy.”

He recalls the sentiments. “Headship is lonely anyway and there has been a particularly strong feeling of shame,” says Barnes. Since his appointment in 2007, Barnes had brought the college out of special measures. By 2011, it was rated “good with outstanding features” by Ofsted. The difficulty was that it was below floor targets, which, hence, have been applied retrospectively.  

“We investigated what it meant to become an academy,” says Barnes. “But we decided the appropriate thing for the kids will be to stay with Lancashire local authority.”

Barnes and the governing body sent off a “No thanks ” letter in March 2012. “We’ve never heard anything back. The governors keep asking me, ‘Have you had an email’ But there’s been nothing.” Barnes praises his local authority for its support. “They might ask, ‘Do you wish us to go looking over this’ or ‘What about getting a plan together like that'”

Lancashire council put him involved with eight other heads who were within the same boat. Of these eight targeted primaries, just one is now an academy.  

One of the eight heads was Margaret Thacker, of Walverden primary in Nelson, Lancashire, who, regardless of not meeting floor targets, fought off academisation by appealing against the warning notice. A warning notice is the trigger for the method of academy conversion. Under the 2010 Education Act, Ofsted hears appeals against warning notices, which ought to be issued by local authorities. When Thacker’s school appealed to Ofsted, it upheld the appeal. Says Thacker: “Ofsted recognised that the college had the capacity to enhance, given the school’s improvement plan and improved Sats results.”

In September last year, the DfE backed down from defending a legal challenge by Coventry council over a warning notice to Henley Green primary school in Wyken Croft, which might have triggered academy conversion. Coventry stated that the college was making good progress in an area authority partnership, and argued that the DfE had no power in law to force them to issue the warning notice. Barristers were hired and, in September, days before the case was by means of come to court, the DfE wrote to mention it was not defending Coventry’s legal challenge.

For Anne Mortimer (not her real name), another north-west head, the specter of forced academisation was also a shock. Her school’s last Ofsted was “satisfactory with good features” and it had reached your complete floor targets – facts she mentioned to the DfE consultant. She was told the cause of the DfE’s actions was “historical underperformance”, she says, meaning that “they were concentrating on data that was 18 months old, despite the fact that there has been a more current data set available”.

A week later, the pinnacle and the whole board of governors were summoned to a gathering with the local authority and told the college must become an academy. “We were told lets not leave the room and needed to decide there after which,” says Mortimer. “Lets agree immediately and select a sponsor, and if we didn’t the method would happen anyway within the next two weeks and we would become an academy without choosing the sponsor.”

“The governors were panic stricken,” she says. Mortimer refused to make a snap decision. She contacted Browne Jacobson solicitors, who’ve become specialists within the rules of forced academisation, and the NAHT. Their representatives advised the governors that they weren’t obliged to become an academy under those terms. Mortimer says the governors were shocked. “They couldn’t believe that government could mislead them, for want of a higher word, to the level that they did.”

They then wrote to the DfE declining the “offer”, and failed to receive a reply. “We were told by the local authority that the DfE weren’t bothered about us any longer.”

Mortimer believes the DfE were on a “hunting mission” for schools that were showing signs of improvement “which might then provide ‘evidence’ to support Mr Gove’s policy of academisation”.  

Last month Sir Michael Wilshaw, the executive inspector of colleges, announced that teams of inspectors would any more be inspecting schools in entire local authority areas in an end what Oftsed sees as unacceptable variations in standards between local authorities with roughly similar social and demographic mixes.

The first within the frame, Derby, has a consistent policy of discouraging academy conversion. Some, like Hobby, suspect a connection. “Any sense that that is about politics as opposed to quality will raise the suspicions of faculty leaders,” he says. “We’re concerned that Ofsted is straying from its mission to judge the standard of faculties and signing as much as the controversial ideology of replacing local authorities with chains of academies.” This can be a charge that the inspectorate denies. “Ofsted doesn’t promote ‘academisation’ or every other particular way of organising schools,” says a spokesman.  

But with inspectors descending on entire areas, a few of the schools that fought off the threat could soon have a brand new battle to stand.

• a movie by Rhonda Evans about forced academisation will also be viewed at www.academiesandlies.org.uk