Starvation Nation

Food poverty in the United Kingdom is now a public health emergency.

But remember, according to this Government, there are no homeless people in Britain, only "people who prefer to live on the streets". 

Schoolboy Errors

"Free" schools were the Conservative Party's only policy on any subject in 2010.

Already in serious trouble following Michael Gove's acceptance of "the middle tier" (the LEA), that policy is now in complete meltdown.

And notice that apparently the only Minister in the Department for Education is Toby Young.

Plane Rude

Peter Barron writes:

It should not come as any great surprise that David Cameron overlooks the North-East. This is not the part of the country which holds the key to a second term in Downing Street and he has not been swayed by the clear evidence that the region has suffered disproportionately under his Government’s policies.

Nevertheless, he is meant to be Prime Minister for the whole country and his snub of North-East businesses during a landmark trade trip to China is shameful. Out of 131 seats on David Cameron’s plane, just two were allocated to business figures from this region, compared to 75 from London and 17 from the Home Counties.

As chief executive of the North-East Chamber of Commerce, James Ramsbotham, would have been the ideal representative for our region. He is fair-minded, well-informed, and passionate about what the North-East has to offer. When someone of his stature decides to hit out at the Government’s Southern bias being “sadly typical” it represents damning criticism.

It is not as if Mr Ramsbotham wasn’t in the frame to be part of the trip. He was sounded out, made it clear that he would like to go to China, suggested other key North-East names, and then heard nothing more. It is not only discourteous to the North-East but a missed opportunity for the country because this region has a valuable contribution to make.

The fact that Mr Cameron found seats on the plane for his own father, a wealthy neighbour and one of his former policy advisers rubs salt in the wounds.

The Prime Minister will no doubt dismiss the North’s claims of bias, but he should make it his business to listen to the frustration being voiced by honest people like James Ramsbotham.

Stockton South, Labour Gain, to be expected.

Hexham, Labour Gain, the end of the Conservative Party in the North East.

All That Is Bad

Frank Furedi writes:

The results of Pisa – the Programme for International Student Assessment – seem to be the last word on the relative state of education in 66 countries. But is Pisa really that illuminating?

A highly publicised international league table of educational performance, Pisa is presented as the best indicator of the performance of different educational systems. In reality, it provides very little insight into the way that schools work or into the quality of teachers’ efforts and children’s achievement.

What Pisa is very good at is accurately showing how groups of selected children from different countries have performed on the day of the test. It is widely recognised that the countries which dominate the Pisa league table are always the ones that single-mindedly teach their pupils to the test.

Indeed, in some societies, maintaining international appearances is taken so seriously that policymakers self-consciously encourage teachers to teach to the test so that the nation can bask in the glory of a wonderful Pisa result. Even in Britain, it has been suggested that more should be done to improve students’ scores in the Pisa exam.

There are also some important methodological problems with this two-hour-long test taken by more than 500,000 teenagers worldwide. For a start, it is unclear whether the exam, even when translated, succeeds in overcoming the difficulties of translation and cultural bias.

The attempt to reconcile examination results in a way that accounts for pupils’ varying social and cultural contexts within a nation is challenging enough. It is even more unlikely that an international exam such as Pisa can adequately capture the profound global variations between nations.

Local educators are required to submit an assessment of their pupils’ backgrounds to Pisa, but the accuracy of these assessments is questionable.

However, the real problem with the Pisa project is that it encourages policymakers to confuse education with skills training. Indeed, Pisa’s main achievement is the entrenchment globally of an instrumentalist approach to schooling.

Given Pisa’s commitment to quantifying differences in national performance, it is understandable that it is drawn towards what can be measured. And skills, unlike educational achievement, can at least be measured. This is why, for example, Pisa is interested in literacy but not in understanding the meaning of literature.

Pisa’s assessment framework is principally interested in skills rather than knowledge. This bias towards skills would not necessarily be a problem if it were not closely linked to an aversion towards the primacy of knowledge-based education.

But Pisa is not really about raising the standards of education; it is about raising the standards of training. As Andreas Schleicher, the principal OECD figure behind Pisa, explained that ‘in the past, the focus was on delivering education; now it is on learning outcomes… accumulating knowledge matters a lot less’.

In this artificially constructed league table of national educational performances, the measuring of learning outcomes trumps the intellectual challenge of ‘accumulating knowledge’.

To question the role of Pisa is not to call for complacency about the challenges facing schools in Anglo-American societies. There are some very important problems facing educationalists. And certainly there are many features of the culture of schooling in Asia, Europe and elsewhere that we in the UK could learn from. 

But we won’t learn anything from Pisa – its narrow anti-intellectual focus simply reinforces all that is bad in our system of schooling.

The Ghost of Sargent Shriver

Ross Douthat writes:

After my post yesterday contrasting the challenges the Francis era may offer to American Catholics who feel at home on the political right of center with the opportunities it may open up to their more liberal co-religionists, it’s only fair to also point out the implicit challenge that the new pope is offering to liberal Catholics as well — or at least to liberal Catholics who see their relationship to the church in terms of fidelity as well as criticism and dissent.

In my Sunday column, I had argued that the signal failure of post-1960s Catholic liberalism in the United States wasn’t a failure “to let the Vatican dictate every jot and tittle of its social agenda,” as conservative polemicists occasionally imply, but rather a failure “to articulate any kind of clear Catholic difference, within the bigger liberal tent, on issues like abortion, sex and marriage.”

There are liberal Catholics (many of whom hold high office in the Democratic Party) who would regard this as a foolish statement, because they believe straightforwardly that their church is wrong on those issues and American liberalism is entirely correct. But I know there are others in the liberal-Catholic orbit who would say something different in response. Something like this:

Yes, we concede that liberalism and the Democratic Party have become more hostile to religious ideas and more closed to pro-life sentiment than we would wish, but our church’s hierarchy has made things much worse by rushing into the arms of the Republicans and the religious right, rather than pushing the kind of “seamless garment” vision that would link abortion and family stability to social justice issues like poverty, war, the environment.

So give us more Joseph Cardinal Bernardins at the altar, more political evenhandedness from the bishops, and maybe we’d have more Sargent Shrivers in our politics, and the Bart Stupaks of the Democratic Party would be less lonely in their battles. 

Now I don’t really think this argument reads the history of either liberalism’s post-1960s trajectory or the bishops’ political positioning correctly. (For one thing, the big pro-choice swing on abortion among Catholic Democratic politicians like Joe Biden [when was that, exactly?] and Ted Kennedy occurred during precisely the era — the 1970s and 1980s — when the idea of “seamless garment” Catholicism was ascendant among the leaders of the American church.)

But the idea that the church’s “culture of life” ideals could yet find a place in a leftward-tilting, Bernardin-esque Catholic politics — as it did, till the end, for figures like Shriver and his wife — is a hope sincerely nurtured in some quarters.

And despite my skepticism, it’s one that I would dearly like to see fulfilled — for the sake of the pro-life movement, for the sake of unsettling our polarized politics, and for the sake of an American Christianity that needs to be something bigger than just the religious client of the G.O.P.

So this is the challenge of the Francis era for the political liberals in his flock: If you want a new (or a new-old) Catholic politics in the United States, if you don’t always like the Democratic Party’s approach to religion and social issues but can’t stomach voting Republican, and if you think the emphases of John Paul II and Benedict were often impediments to saving or reclaiming a genuinely Catholic liberalism, now’s the time to prove that something else is possible.

With a pope seemingly speaking their language and the secular media (perhaps temporarily) at his feet, this could just be a chance for Catholic Democrats to feel relaxed instead of embattled, smug instead of defensive.

Or it could be an opportunity to prove that a worldview that’s both liberal and distinctively Catholic actually has a future in our culture, and a chance — as it should be for Catholic Republicans — to ask more of their political leaders than a continued cold shoulder to their church’s vision of the common good.

Leaning Towers?

Nick Pearce and that erstwhile Boy Wonder, Jonathan Clifton write:

Every three years the education world is thrown into turmoil as the media report findings from the latest PISA study. This time is no different, with reports that England is ‘lagging dramatically behind’ other countries and calls to align our entire exam system with that of PISA.

PISA is a phenomenal resource. First developed in 1998 with 28 countries taking part, it now covers 65 education systems, making up the vast majority of the world economy. It takes a reasonably large sample of 15-year-olds from each country and asks them to sit a common test. In this way, it provides a useful snapshot of the performance of children from different countries.

It is particularly useful given the current vogue for policymakers to cherrypick findings from international case studies – be it free schools in Sweden, charter schools in the US, the national curriculum in Hong Kong or the exam system in Singapore.

Unsurprisingly, newspaper editors focus on the first volume of PISA findings, which ranks the performance of different countries and how they have changed since the previous study. This shows that Asian school systems – such as those of Shanghai, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea – outperform those in the west.

Australia and the US have seen a relative decline, while England’s system remains largely unchanged at OECD average. Interestingly, the Nordic countries which once dominated the tables now seem more precarious.

But these rankings have to be treated with a healthy dose of caution. A large number of the differences between countries are not statistically significant, and their scores are generally very similar, which means a change of just one or two points can lead to a country’s relative ranking fluctuating wildly.

There is also only so much that can be tested for reliably in a two-hour paper exam taken by a sample of students once every three years. And the way tests are matched with the curriculum of each country can explain some of the results (note, for example, that the UK scores much better on the other international test, ‘TIMMS’, which is designed differently and fits more closely with our own curriculum).

What is more useful to policymakers is the fourth volume of PISA findings. This analyses data at an aggregate level and give pointers about what is likely to drive improvement in a school system. Some of this is blindingly obvious: quite why the finding that ‘systems with larger proportions of students who arrive late for school and skip classes tend to show lower overall performance’ deserves a bold headline in the executive summary is unclear. But the majority of findings are useful for giving a sense of direction to policymakers.

These findings make uncomfortable reading for some of the vanity projects of the right. For those like Boris Johnson who support more grammar schools and selection PISA is clear that: ‘a school system’s performance overall is not better if it has a greater proportion of academically selective schools’. What’s more, it shows that selection is bad for equity and that achievement is the result of high expectations and hard work, not innate ability.

PISA is also dismissive of the claim that competition is the way to drive up standards, showing no correlation between school competition and attainment. In fact ‘only in the Czech Republic and Estonia do schools that compete with other schools for students in the same area tend to perform better, on average, than schools that do not compete’.

And those on the right who advocate allowing private providers to run state schools need to answer PISA’s conclusion that: ‘across OECD countries and all countries and economies that participated in PISA 2012, the percentage of students enrolled in private schools is not related to a system’s overall performance’.

But there is also uncomfortable reading for some of those on the left who advocate a return to schools being controlled and managed by local authorities.

PISA shows that ‘schools with more autonomy tend to perform better than schools with less autonomy when they are part of school systems with more accountability arrangements and greater teacher-principal collaboration in school management’. Giving schools freedoms over curricula and assessment can be a good thing – provided it is matched with sound collaboration and management.

PISA is also clear that simply calling for more money to be spent on education is not sufficient to raise standards. While high-performing systems do pay teachers more, there is a wide difference in which countries get the biggest bang for their buck. Careful thought needs to be given to raising productivity in education.

There is therefore a danger that international evidence is used to fit existing ideological positions, and both the left and right need to be honest about what PISA actually shows. There is also a danger that the media storm following the publication of PISA is used to justify kneejerk changes in education policy. We saw this yesterday with calls for England to prepare its students for the PISA test specifically, in a hope that we can teach children in a way that will boost our position in the rankings.

Rather than implementing reforms in response to panicked media reaction (and with the dubious claim that climbing PISA rankings is an end in its own right), we need a more mature response to the benefits that international benchmarking can bring to our education system. IPPR has called for a more systematic use of international evidence in education policy, on a timescale that is detached from the political cycle.

This has been done in some of the very countries that PISA itself lauds. Hong Kong and other east Asian countries, for example, have teams of educational specialists who rigorously compare everything from textbooks to exams.

Germany has also developed an effective approach by drawing inspiration from industrial benchmarking that took place in the 1980s, when manufacturers were keen to learn from their new competitors in Asia. It has established a whole institution – the Institute for Educational Progress – to carry out a similar sort of benchmarking in the school system.

Unlike these countries, England does not yet have an institutional framework for assessing and implementing international lessons on school reform. We need international benchmarks to be fixed into the English system, to ensure that evidence from other countries isn’t used in a selective way.

Without this, we will be left with ad hoc comparisons that are of little use.

Left Unity

It already exists.

It is called the Labour Party.

Ken Loach's effort is a sad throwback to the Blair years, as if those were somehow still going on.

In fact, Dan Hodges has left the Labour Party. In which case, why has Ken Loach not joined it?