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”.
