Archive for March 2008

Government and teachers views on bullying

30/03/2008 by Tony Attwood.

The Secretary of State for Education has accepted recommendations that all secondary schools should join behaviour partnerships. He also announced new plans for a White Paper to change the alternative provision for pupils who have been excluded from school. He also announced plans to tackle cyber bullying of teachers.

According to speakers at the NASUWT Union conference this Easter disruptive pupils are ruining thousands of students’ life chances and are the biggest cause of stress among teachers. One speaker said that diagnosing students as having ADHD was used as a reason not to exclude that student from school. Others said that behaviour was becoming increasingly “audacious” including abuse on the street, harassment by email and pupils standing outside teachers’ homes shouting abuse.
As a result of legislation passed since the 2005 Report of the Practitioners’ Group on School Behaviour and Discipline, schools now have:

• statutory power to discipline children and impose sanctions for breaches of school rules;
• statutory power to confiscate;
• statutory power to impose discipline beyond the school site, for example for bad behaviour on the journey to and from school;
• a completely new power to search pupils for weapons including knives;
• statutory power to use physical force to restrain unruly pupils; and
• new rules on exclusion appeals panels.

the Secretary of State now intends to go further, in these areas…

• accepting that all schools, including all new academies, should be required to be part of behaviour partnerships - all existing academies have also now agreed to be part of behaviour partnerships, and the overwhelming majority of LEA schools are in partnerships.
• plans to write to all Directors of Children’s Services to make sure that the additional £109.5 million for Parent Support Advisers is targeted at schools with the highest need; and
• plans for a White Paper to see a transformation in the quality of alternative provision, including plans for more voluntary and private sector provision such as high quality vocational training and studio schools.

Also a Task Force, which will be chaired by Kevin Brennan and will have representatives from social networking sites and teachers, will develop ideas for preventing and dealing with such abuse. The Secretary of State is asking the Task Force to report its conclusions by July. In particular he has asked them to consider:

a - What more we can do to ensure all school staff and heads are aware of the powers available to them and use them effectively;
b - What more we can do to ensure that all schools have discipline policies that minimise abuse of teachers and anti-bullying policies that protect all their staff from cyberbullying;
c - Whether we should establish a national point of call where school staff can direct complaints about abusive material;
d - Whether we should have specific guidance for staff who have experienced internet abuse;
e - How we can best work with industry to address cyberbullying of teachers;
f - How best to explain the impact of cyberbullying to parents and their responsibilities to ensure that it is treated as seriously as other forms of bullying. Where cyberbullies are found guilty, their parents should be shown what the offence was.

Background notes

1. In the Children’s Plan there was a commitment to ask Sir Alan Steer to review progress since his 2005 report and to look at making behaviour partnerships compulsory.

2. Alan Steer’s initial response can be found at: http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/behaviourandattendance

3. The 2005 Report of the Practitioners’ Group on School Behaviour and Discipline, chaired by Sir Alan Steer, can be found at: http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/behaviourandattendance/about/learning_behaviour.cfm

4. The additional £109.5 million for Parent Support Advisers was announced in November.

5. Later this spring DCSF will be making a curriculum resource pack called Let’s Fight It Together available to schools. The pack is being produced by Childnet. Vodafone and O2 are helping to fund it, which is clear evidence of support from the industry. The pack, which include a short film, will help teachers work with pupils in lessons and assemblies to develop their understanding of the impact of cyberbullying and how to prevent it. Lets Fight It Together emphasises that pupils are not the only victims. The internet can also be used to harass, bully and abuse teachers and other school staff, and we are determined to take decisive action to stop this.

Tony Attwood

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Diplomas - the major opportunity

19/03/2008 by Tony Attwood.

If ever there was a development that offered opportunity to almost everyone selling into schools it must be diplomas with their radical shift towards a school-business partnership.

The vast majority of schools and colleges in England will offer Diplomas from September 2009.  Around three quarters of secondary schools and 88% of colleges will teach Diplomas with the support of local universities and employers.317 groups of schools, colleges and training providers will be run diplomas  from 2009 in subjects including Environmental and Land-based Studies, and Business, Administration and Finance. They will join the schools and colleges already preparing to teach the first five Diplomas from this September. Ministers have confirmed that by 2013 all young people will have the chance to study a wide range of Diplomas.

Schools and colleges had to pass through an application process in order to be given the go-ahead.   

Around half of all universities will be working with schools to teach Diplomas from 2009, and all the partnerships have to demonstrate good links with employers.

The successful partnerships will be offered a tailored package of support including £27million of additional funding and a programme of professional development for those teaching the new qualification.
Details of the successful consortia can be found at http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/14-19 .

Background:

• The 14-19 reforms are designed to encourage more young people to continue learning for longer and gain the qualifications they need to progress into further and higher education or employment.

• Central to the reforms is the new Diploma, a new qualification for 14 – 19 year olds in England that combines theoretical and practical learning. By 2011 it will be available in 17 subject areas.

• Five Diploma subjects will be taught from this September in Construction and the Built; Environment; Creative and Media; Engineering; Information Technology; and Society, Health and Development. In 2009, these will be joined by a further five disciplines: Business, Administration and Finance; Environmental and Land-based Studies; Hair and Beauty Studies; Hospitality; and Manufacturing and Product Design. Five consortia have been approved to deliver all 10 Diploma lines: Barnsley, Kingswood, Plymouth, Sunderland and Wolverhampton.

• The Diploma will contain three Functional Skills qualifications. This will ensure that young people secure the right foundation of English, Maths and IT skills needed for progression into employment.

• The application process for Diploma delivery is known as the Gateway. Results from Gateway 1 were announced in April 2007. The 144 consortia approved through Gateway 1 are preparing to teach the first five Diplomas from September 2008.

• This Gateway announcement means that we will also know which schools and colleges will go forward to offer the first ten Diplomas in September 2009.

There are three levels of Diploma - Foundation, Higher and Advanced. A Foundation Diploma is worth five GCSEs grades D to G; a Higher Diploma is worth seven GCSEs grades A* to C; and an Advanced Diploma is worth three-and-a-half A levels.

The secretary of state recently announced a new Extended Diploma, which could be worth four-and-a-half A levels. This has been designed to recognise larger programmes of learning.

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Cambridge stops asking for language GCSE for undergrads

17/03/2008 by Tony Attwood.

Cambridge University has dropped its long standing requirement that all entrants should possess a Grade A* to C in at least one foreign language at GCSE.   Cambridge is the last university in England and Wales to abandon this tradition.

 

From next September each teaching department will be able to decide on all its own minimal criteria.

 

The change is in recognition of the fact that at the turn of the century around 80% of all school students took at least one modern foreign language at GCSE whereas that is now 50%.  However the percentage taking the foreign language in private schools has remained at around the 80%, meaning that the regulation mediates against students from local authority schools and academies.

 

The change comes soon after Cambridge announced that is was having difficulty filling the places in its computer studies department and was actively seeking students who might apply for its undergraduate courses in computing.

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Government extend plans for Diplomas

13/03/2008 by Tony Attwood.

Extended Diplomas, are to be available from 2011.  They will be designed to extend each of the 17 Diploma lines and are expected to be equivalent to 4.5 A levels at the Advanced level, 9 GCSEs at the Higher level and 7 GCSEs at the Foundation level.

The Extended Diploma will build on the blend of applied learning and theoretical knowledge that the Diploma offers to recognise a greater range of achievement, and to give young people more opportunities to add depth and breadth to their studies.

A strengthened core of English and maths will be a key feature of the new Extended Diploma at all levels.

The Extended Diploma will offer a more in-depth grounding, and more opportunity for research-intensive, independent study in each subject for those Advanced level students who want the stretch and challenge offered by a larger programme of learning. The Extended Diploma responds to calls from business and universities for more students with Advanced level maths and English skills to meet future economic demands. We will be consulting to explore how these skills can be developed.

For young people aged 14 to 16 the Extended Foundation and Higher level Diplomas will incorporate more of the core national curriculum such as GCSE-level English, mathematics and science.

• In October 2007 the secretary of state announced plans for additional Diplomas in Science, Languages and the Humanities in order to increase the options for 14 to 19 year olds. He said: “If Diplomas are successfully introduced and are delivering the mix that employers and universities value, they could become the qualification of choice for young people. But, because GCSEs and A-Levels are long-established and valued qualifications, that should not be decided by any pre-emptive Government decision, but by the demands of young people, schools and colleges.”

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Tony Attwood

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Girls move ahead of boys in working with computers

03/03/2008 by Tony Attwood.

Surveys from supermarkets are not normally the stuff of educational research, but a piece by Tesco’s under its Tesco’s Computers for Schools brand seems to raise a few interesting points - and it did record results from over 1000 pupils and students aged between 7 and 16.

It says that girls are now better at some areas of computing than boys.  They suggest that girls are more likely to know how to create a word document, put a profile on a social network site or a video on YouTube.  While only 10% of boys said they were not confident with computers, the figure for the girls was 6%.  Not a huge difference - but remarkable considering where we have come from.  But as we move on we find 35% of boys can create a social networking page while 44% of girls could.   Girls are also better at handling downloads, handling photos (although 71% of all the pupils questioned could download a photo) and using google.

The situation with parents however is as one might expect - only 40% of parents reckon they are more proficient with computers than their children in the age group studied.

Around 75%  of pupils said they use a computer each day, and 41% couldn’t do without the internet.

If all this is true then presumably we shall see much higher numbers of female students opting for computer courses at university  the near future, and there will be a bigger take-up and more varied set of demands for Diploma courses that involve computing, in the coming years.

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