Profit could hasten Gove's school reforms

Charles

If he allows profit from the outset, the vested producer interests shout "privatisation" and the reform fails (pace NHS).

If he establishes free schools, with the ability to make profits, gets people to see that the approach works and builds public support then allowing profit makers to participate becomes a natural extension of the existing policy than a huge change.

Sounds pretty clever to me.

Perry

Excellent news.

And with a bit of drive and determination from the H2B, - there should be no problem.

But, as we know with that lackadaisical individual, the wheels, - so to speak, of this valuable vehicle to move education forward may well be allowed to grind to a halt.

All the more bewildering considering the H2B tries to ape his hero.

El Sid

What Charles said.

Politics is the art of the possible - at the moment profit-making free schools are politically impossible, or at least not worth the political capital being expended, so you let the likes of Hyman and Toby Young establish the principle and then allow profit-making if circumstances justify it.

Establishing the principle on a small scale is a lot more important than some notion of "critical mass" whatever that means in this context.

And don't forget that in the literal sense the purpose of establishing a critical mass is so that the thing you've got a critical mass of will explode, destroying everything in its path. Not exactly the greatest vision for the future of our children....

DavidDP

Charles,

What you've laid out there is realist political strategy.

This is unknown at the Spectator, where the answer to everything is just to put your head down and go hell for leather as soon as possible.

ndm

James Forsyth writes:

-- But the question hovering over the policy is whether it can ever reach critical mass unless providers are allowed to make profits.

Ah, yes the old profit motive in schools. The US has, of course, found to its cost that for-profit schools don't work too well given the lack of funding for schools means there is precious little extra money lying around to become profit. Furthermore, in the tertiary sector we see for-profit companies basically milking the student-loans system by attracting student who never manage to get a degree but do get a large student loan for their troubles. The Obama Administration caused much rucus recently by suggesting that student loans could only be used at private universities where 50% or more of the students graduated.

ndm

As an addendum to my previous post.

What incentive is there for parents to fund raise for a for-profit school? None, absolutely none. It is not as if Tesco customers have bake sales for Tescos.

Mike Ward/@Schroedinger99

I wonder if these new free schools will be teaching "Newton's Laws of Thermodynamics"*

[* recent quote from Michael Gove]

Tim W

Whilst its a good idea, I see that as more of a second-term policy than a first term one. Get the foundations in place to show Free Schools work first and then once the education establishment are shown its OK then press ahead further. Gove has priorities and rightly so. Its far more important that headteachers can choose to pay better teachers more and worse teachers less. And sack the very worst.

Allan Beavis

Peter Hyman – an eloquent voice of the Free School movement. But even he makes grandiose and unsubstantiated claims.

The Sunday Times today profiles Peter Hyman and his experiences in schools both here and in New York which have shaped the reasons behind his application to run a Free School in Newham.

Unlike Toby Young and Katherine Birbalsingh, he does not court controversy, does not attack maintained schools to promote his Free School ideologies and has a genuine, perhaps even a Messianic commitment, to improve education for the disadvantaged. A former political adviser, he admirably avoids politicising the Free School debate and makes a coherent and reasonable case for them.

In that sense, he is a much more palatable face for the Free School campaign and a relief from the confusing histrionics of Birbalsingh and tiresome aggression of Young. But not even his eloquence can persuade us that the basic ideology of aiming for the best education for all is not in any way different to what LA maintained and VA schools also set out to do. And even he falls into the trap of spinning grandiose claims – “They will have smart uniforms and get good exam grades and a place in a top university”. Maintained schools do not set out to fail their children and many have not.

How can he possibly know all this when he does not yet have a school, does not have a student intake and can therefore have no idea of the challenges (cultural, social, linguistic etc.) facing him? The only way he could possibly make these absolute assertions is if he already knows he will drawing from a pool of children, each one easy to teach because they come from stable, achieving, supportive families living some way above the poverty line. The only way this is guaranteed is surely by some form of covert or overt selection?

Hyman certainly worked in a challenging school in his first job. Islington Green was notorious for its failings but many of us in Islington could not help but think that if the school had a better mix of students and the wealthier locals did not opt for selective state or private schools, then Islington Green would not have become what was a “sink school.” Highbury Grove up the road had very similar challenges but has managed, through great governance, leadership and a re-build, to become “outstanding”. Truda White, the Head, managed to do this without becoming an Academy or abandoning the school to start afresh with a Free School. Her school is now a beacon of the community, oversubscribed and welcoming back the middle classes who had left it. But the media don’t want to publicise this, Highbury Grove isn’t the only LA maintained school that is excellent and the DfE website does not list such schools as existing.

Hyman also talks of being inspired visiting a Charter School in Harlem, New York City but New York is a very wealthy state with pockets of deprivation struggling in a landscape of otherwise great wealth and privilege, not least in New York City itself. Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) gets good results but not amazing results, according to leading Education Historian Diane Ravitch. On the last state tests, 40 percent of the kids were proficient. It’s other advantage is that it is a model with amazing resources and ones not just confined to paying for teaching – it also takes care of medical issues, social problems and family problems. Geoffrey Canada’s assets of $200 million means that resources DO matter and proves that the ability to be able to address poverty matters. Our government is not addressing these with any due diligence whatsoever.

Hyman would have come back with a more realistic assessment of Charters had he visited one in Tennessee, or Ohio or perhaps Mississippi, where Charters have done nothing to improve standards and, in some cases, have made things worse, leading to litigation against the profit making organizations that run them.

They haven’t provided the magic bullet of tackling educational standards in poor rural states, especially amongst the black and hispanic communities. Unlike HCZ, philanthropy does not come knocking at these schools with bags of Wall Street or Bill Gates cash – deprived schools getting ripped off by the companies managing them are not sexy enough for the philanthropists, the celebs and the socialites.

In fact, what HCZ proves is that resources do matter because I suspect that if any all schools could have a classroom with 15 children with two teachers, they could get better results. Free School websites are keen to pronounce that they will have smaller classrooms. How will they though? Have they been promised this as part of their Funding Agreements? And if so – why haven’t governments, including the present one, extended this provision to all state schools – maintained schools, especially the more challenged ones have been crying out for this for years?

The Sunday Times repeats the “dire statistics” of illiteracy in primary schools and unacceptable GCSE grades but neither the paper nor Hyman (nor the government) have produced any evidence that Free Schools or Academies will drive up results. Gove has gone as far as to say he will basically use tables to punish schools and teachers and close schools, enforcing thereby Academy status, which satisfies government statistics (so many thousand Academy conversions! 281 Free School applications to be announced TOMORROW! Vive la Revolution!).

Civil Servant or Policy Adviser Sam Freedman’s promotion of US Edu Reformers – including one Joel Klein, whose success in re-shaping New York schools via Charter-isation has been controversial and disputed and is a model for Gove’s policy over here. Klein left his job abruptly as Chancellor of New York City Schools and is now CEO of the Educational Division At Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which owns the Sunday Times. Is this article just simple synchronicity or will the commercial interests of News Corp extend into British state funded schools?

Howard Clark

It isn't the free school issue that is exercising me it is the return of the failed targets regime. There is a great deal of evidence that the targets regime led to unintended consequences, a perfect storm that damaged education.

As a systems thinker I understand that the majority of performance is in the system, rather than just down to individuals (normally 95% to the system 5% to people). Therefore setting targets for something that teachers have no control over merely engages them to cheat. What else could they do? They do not control the system and they certainly are not bad people. The old deliverology regime forced teachers to get inventive at meeting targets. Children took softer subjects. Many children were taught how to pass exams leading to the widespread refrain ‘sir, this stuff that you are teaching us. Is it in the exam?’

Inspectors who turned up to score schools against the target and inspection criteria caused further damage. Performance became a battle of perception management. Teachers were schooled in how to manage inspections and inspectors to try and get a good score. Unruly pupils were sent away for trips on the day inspectors arrived. Some teachers were so frustrated by a system that stopped them helping children they left the profession. Some teachers became ill and stressed. Some teachers committed suicide. What mattered was what was good for the targets, tables and test regime. Despite all of the evidence the devotees of targets remain unbowed, unapologetic and unreflective.

When Michael Barber left the delivery unit he took his failed approach to Mckinsey & Co, which became deliverology 101.

The method was to travel around the world looking at exam pass rates and prosperous countries to try and find the best performing countries. Then try and find the commonalities. The thinking being if it is possible to copy and replicate these things then we will surely produce the same results. The assumption is that 5 GCSE passes are the signs of a good and sound education. The unfortunate evidence is that passing tests has been found to be a poor indicator of success in later life or of financial prosperity. Next only teachers with good qualifications should be recruited. The list continues …

This methodology has been criticised as cargo cult thinking.

In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They are doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things (some educational and psychological studies) cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they are missing something essential, because the planes don’t land (Richard Feynman & Ralph Leighton, 1985, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, New York, Norton, p. 340).

The outcomes of the re-introduction of targets, testing and tables are depressingly predictable. The introduction of cargo cult benchmarking is the same. Focusing upon targets and exam passes misses the point and the evidence. It is only when we begin to change our thinking based upon a clear purpose and evidence that we can build a new system. A new system means different performance.

There is no evidence that Barber and Ryan have changed their thinking or reflected that the evidence no longer fits the narrative.