36 Weeks Later

The introduction of Study Programmes with the formal instruction to include compulsory Maths and English is an ill-thought and rushed policy. Whilst its aim is true, it is a typical 'reaction' policy with little understanding of the issues and problems behind the headlines.

It is also true, as the Secret College Tutor recently wrote in the Guardian that

England lies 22nd for literacy and 21st for numeracy out of 24 nations. And recent GCSE results in the further education sector do little to reassure concerns, with a mere 6.5% of learners achieving a grade C or above in English and 7% in maths.

That is a truly shocking and unacceptable level of achievement. But is it FE's fault? NO. This is a situation which has been allowed to fester and suppurate beneath the distracting push-pull sticking plaster of hype and spin.

In FE, we want all our students to achieve highest grades in their subjects, and that includes Maths and English, but to push through the edict that 'it MUST be achieved' without proper thought, preparation and planning condemns the students and staff to years of misery.

For what? Headlines and more FE bashing?

As Geoff Petty writes in the article comments "... Of hundreds of factors that influence achievement, students retaking a year they have failed (called 'retention' by researchers) is one of the very worst educational strategies known. Hattie calls it a 'disaster'. Students retaking a subject, or subjects, must be very similar to retaking a year. If a strategy has failed why repeat it exactly expecting a different outcome? So much for an evidence based approach. Geoff Petty author 'Evidence Based Teaching'."

It is almost too late to address the problem when students arrive in FE. This should be tackled much earlier in schools, and at age 14 and again at 16, with clear and effective Careers advice, together with an overhaul of the Qualifications offered by the Awarding Bodies and an overhaul of policies that constrain FE from delivering first class education to the students in a way that really meets their needs.

We need an overhaul of Funding and Policy Constraints in FE

The Programme of study is too blunt an instrument to deliver improvements in Maths. Funding cuts have forced FE to utilise every spare moment of a lecturers timetable. Inevitably, this has caused lecturers to teach subjects for which they are not qualified.

It has also reduced the amount of and quality of CPD and opportunities to up-skill and retain in new areas.

Identified issues with the Programme of Study

• FE teachers work long and hard to try and help the students learn maths
• Many of the people teaching English and maths in FE don’t have a grade C themselves and haven’t been properly trained to deliver these subjects
• Funding cuts are causing Colleges to fill up timetables with other subjects to maximise efficiency

We need a complete overhaul of Qualifications

We need to work with the Awarding Bodies and ensure that the vocational qualifications have sufficient maths and English embedded into the Learning Criteria and Objectives, so it becomes an inherent part of the subject, not a bolt on. The Secret College Tutor writes:

Often they only come to the college to learn their trade and have little interest in studying a subject that has caused them so much stress and anxiety. To give you an idea of the scale of the problem, 50% of people join a college without a grade C in English and maths. That is a lot of people who the state education system has let down or been unable to help.

That maybe true, but it doesn't mean they can't learn some form of Maths and more importantly, learn how to apply it to their selected trade. Without maths they would be unemployable:

Bricklayers use maths to measure and weigh, they use angles, temperature, mass, estimation and a raft of other mathematical topics, up to any including Trigonometry and Pythagoras. They can use tessellations for laying patio slabs.

Child Care students use maths in the assessment of the health of a child, (measurement), gm or ml of medicine per Kg of baby weight, same with Health and Social Care students.

Animal Care students need to understand stocking density of livestock per acre or hectare, medicine or additives for animal feed.

Equine students can use Pi to work out lunging circles for horses in dressage, calculating heights of jumps, strides between jumps

Mechanics and Engineering students are overloaded with opportunities to use maths, so are IT students, starting with basic Binary Code of 010101 and conversions to Hexadecimal, screen sizes for programming, disc and memory size - thousands of opportunities.

Vocational teachers teach these skills without naming it 'maths', but when the students take 'maths', they take qualifications that are generic, without any subject association.

This year there were 297 qualifications for Maths and English

Why so many? Is finding and funding the right qualification for your learners a bit like the old sleight of hand game of 'Find the Lady'? GCSE is a pointless qualification and not fit for purpose, nor will the new changes of grading and content be any more suitable.

We need to review Maths Qualifications and overhaul them, in a way that works for FE and the learners, not the Government or the Awarding Bodies. We understand all too well the importance of Maths and how limiting it is not to have that important knowledge, but does it have to be a separate qualification?

We need one qualification that measures Maths achievement. It could be a form of Applied Maths at Entry 1, 2 and 3 and at L1 and L2 that allows students to take a maths qualification that is tailored to their subject. If we already have 297 variants, surely they could be stripped back to cover the main sector areas of FE and one additional paper that is generic for those who do not yet have a speciality or wish to demonstrate proficiency in maths for University, without too much difficulty?

We need to build maths and English into the Vocational Qualifications and make sure that they are mandatory Learning Objectives.

Students need exceptional Careers Advice

We need a review of how Maths is taught in Schools, when choices are made by learners and staff as to which maths course they should take.

To achieve this, we need much better Careers Advice for students at 14, their choices then should dictate which maths courses they take, not force them all through the GCSE sieve and hope that some tumble out of the holes with a qualification.

Students could take part of the vocational qualification in schools either a L1 or L2 and then complete it in FE, taking their L2 and/or L3 in FE. Academic students could continue with GCSE Maths and other GCSE's for preparation for A level.

If they changed their mind at 16, then they would still have the qualifications needed on entry to FE to take a Progression Course to move them forwards or move directly onto a Vocational L3 or an Academic A level. Both are equally valuable and equally useful and one should not be pushed at the expense of the other.

Lack of Value

Historically, Maths was of no interest at all to the Government. Students were not enrolled onto GCSE courses if they were unable to pass it. It was recognised that it was a waste of everyones time and could only serve to cause misery to the student. Those who were close, e.g. a good D grade were encouraged to retake and gain a C, others were put on Basic or Key Skills, neither of which were of much use. Too many with a D grade ignored the GCSE and used a proxy to bypass the vocational part of Key Skills and take a short on-line test and emerge with a L2 qualification.

That didn't prepare them either. Too many students were leaving colleges with insufficient knowledge of the application of Maths and English. Key Skills turned into Functional Skills and again, many students were enrolled onto those courses in an attempt to get them a L2 qualification. But L2 Functional Skills isn't really the same as a Grade C GCSE, no matter how many times the Government insist it is. 

Time

The Programme of Study will not achieve miraculous improvements in thirty six weeks. Whole cohorts of learners will not magically raise themselves up from their E, F and G grades to emerge with a C or B, simply because they have been told to attend Maths. 

Change takes time; good teaching, well qualified and experienced staff and supportive, committed Senior Management combined with a government which recognises at last, that 'quick fixes' cause more damage than they purport to fix.

Moving Forwards

GCSE and Functional Skills L2 and the other 295 qualifications demonstrate the lack of consistency and care that has been paid to Maths and English qualifications. If it were a dartboard, even I could hit a qualification, blindfolded, with both arms tied behind my back. The problem is, we never seem to hit the right qualification at the right time. We just lurch from change to change without ever stopping to solve the underlying issues.

It is time to change this, but change will not happen by shifting the blame to a sector that has already shouldered more than its fair share of the blame over recent years. Change can only come when the Government, the Policy Makers, the Awarding Bodies, the Schools, the Career Advice Service, FE and Industry all sit down together and listen to each other.

Students deserve a first class maths qualification and education, whilst FE continues to do its best, we are like the crew of a boat, frantically rowing and baling at the same time.

Rosetta 21 years in the making, just like FE

#STEM, we do bang on about it, heck, even Nicky Morgan waded in with a frankly unbalanced view of its importance (and I say that as a literal #STEM fanatic). She was wrong to deny the importance of the arts and literature. Few appreciate beauty more than a scientist; we look up, out, backwards and forwards with poetry in our hearts.

Today though #STEM really revved up its engines and showed us why it is a subject students should be studying. @El_Timbre showed the live feed in her Further Maths class, they said it was ‘riveting’ and it was.

Rosetta demonstrates the value we want our students to have; team work, planning, determination, motivation, persistence and collaboration. It began in November 1993, when the Mission was approved as a Cornerstone Mission in ESA's Horizons 2000 Science Programme. That’s 21 years ago and planning began earlier, just as we underwent Incorporation with the Further and Higher Education Act 1992.

This is a mission that has been underway as long as FE has existed. That is dedication.

Since then, scientists and engineers from all over Europe and the United States have been combining their talents to build an orbiter and a lander for this unique expedition to unravel the secrets of a mysterious 'mini' ice world – a comet.

Rosetta is the first spacecraft to orbit a comet’s nucleus.

It is the first spacecraft to fly alongside a comet as it heads towards the inner Solar System. Rosetta is the first spacecraft to examine from close proximity how a frozen comet is transformed by the warmth of the Sun.

Shortly after it arrived at Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, Rosetta despatched a robotic lander (Philae) for the first controlled touchdown on a comet nucleus.

 

The Rosetta lander’s instruments will obtain the first images from a comet’s surface and make the first in situ analysis to find out what it is made of.

Did you know the comet ‘sings’? https://soundcloud.com/esaops/a-singing-comet

The comet seems to be emitting a ‘song’ in the form of oscillations in the magnetic field in the comet’s environment. It is being sung at 40-50 millihertz, far below human hearing, which typically picks up sound between 20 Hz and 20 kHz. To make the music audible to the human ear, the frequencies have been increased in this recording.

Why do it?

A project like this produces so many benefits. New technologies, new ways of thinking, leaps in engineering knowledge, new ways of working together.

Scientists will be eagerly waiting to compare Rosetta’s results with previous studies by ESA’s Giotto spacecraft and by ground-based observatories. These have shown that comets contain complex organic molecules - compounds that are rich in carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen.

These are the elements which make up nucleic acids and amino acids, the essential ingredients for life as we know it.

Did life on Earth begin with the help of comet seeding? Rosetta may help us to find the answer to this fundamental question.

Other missions have looked at:

·         Exploring nature, studying the effects of weightlessness and radiation in space.

·         Observing the earth, mapping phenomena such as the ozone layer and monitoring climate change.

 

·         Improving health, carrying out human physiology experiments on astronauts to study the effects of weightlessness on the human body and to contribute to solving health problems on Earth.

·         Innovating technologies and processes, studying materials science and fluid physics to help develop new technologies and materials.

·         Caring for the environment, developing life support systems for use in the spacecraft that can also lead to technologies for waste treatment and recycling.

Space exploration serves a cultural and inspirational purpose by fulfilling a deep need to understand the world, address questions about the origins of life and the nature of the universe. Comets could be the link.

As a friend pointed out today as we were watching the feed and waiting for the telemetry “100 years ago, we were fighting and killing each other in Europe, today, we are collaborating and celebrating this great project”.

 

Tomorrow, discuss it with your students. Is it money well spent, what are the advantages, are they inspired? Use Rosetta for Art, Religion, Humanities, Music, History, Literacy, Maths, Engineering, Health and of course, Science.

 

Most of all, celebrate this very human achievement with those who are our future.

 

 

 

Every little helps

Recently I wrote in the TES that Principals of FE Colleges were more effective, better suited to FE than those ‘fast-tracked from industry’. I stand by that, utterly, FE should be run by those who, if you sliced them open would have “FE” running through them, like Blackpool rock. That doesn’t mean we can’t ‘borrow’ ideas or copy their practice, if it both suits and benefits FE.

In the Guardian recently, the new boss of Tesco’s, David Lewis said he is sending thousands of head office staff, including himself and his senior executives, on to the shop floor as part of a campaign designed to win over disgruntled customers.

Just as Tesco is losing shoppers to discount rivals Aldi and Lidl as well as cheaper mainstream rivals such as Asda, FE needs to not lose prospective learners to UTC’s, and other threats. Lewis also unearthed a £250m hole in profits expected for the first six months of the year.

FE hasn’t inflated its figures but it is in trouble. As Nick Linford writes funding cuts of up to 35% to date, and 16-18 providers are now facing a rate reduction that in its first year is specifically targeting 18-year-olds. This leads to bigger classes, fewer staff and a narrow curriculum offer with increasing numbers of disadvantaged learners.

In an over-stretched, over-supplied market, those who underperform are in grave danger of vanishing as other providers wait to take up the disaffected. This is a business plan with a bumpy ending.

So, we have two large, successful organisations; FE and Tesco, both suffering from a reduction in finances (us income and them, profit) and seemingly a surfeit of management staff who, in some cases, lack the experience of ‘regular customer contact’.

In the same article, Kantar Retail analyst Bryan Roberts, who makes regular visits to Tesco supermarkets around the country, argues … “Store managers need to get out of their ivory towers and start walking the shop floor,” he says. “From some of the stores I’ve been to in the last six months you get the impression that the managers are not getting their hands dirty enough.”

We don’t have the financial clout or buying power of Tesco, but we can adopt their best ideas; senior management on the ‘shop floor’, engaging with the staff and students in real environments, not the artificial & stage-managed events so prevalent in many colleges, is one of their best and we should utilise it.

Senior Management Teams have a lot to do, I know that, but if Lewis and his 4000 Head Office Staff can do it, we can too.

This is now a fight for our very survival. The colleges that succeed, flourish, retain current customers, gain new ones, get outstanding results for the learners, and frankly, are still open in two years’ time, will be the ones where SMT has got down on the shop floor, rolled up their sleeves and got their hands dirty.

 

Lewis and the new finance director, Alan Stewart, will be among those spending alternate Thursdays and Fridays in stores for the next three months. If they feel this is time well spent, shouldn’t we?

Many already do; they are completely involved in the life of their college and it’s no coincidence that their colleges are vibrant, lively, profitable places. This isn’t a ‘Secret Shopper’ style Lesson Observation Spying mission, but a way, the only way I think, of knowing what’s really going on and putting things right, before they fester into fatal issues.

 

FE is fabulous, it is the beating heart of our future generations success and happiness; that’s much more important to me than the fate of a few tins of beans, but if beans are worth such focussed attention, then so are our staff and learners.

 

 

Principals or Captains of Industry?

To succeed in running an FE college, business leaders must recognise their shortcomings

Historically, further education principals were the slightly intimidating grandfathers of education. They had earned scars and respect as lecturers before climbing the management ladder. Their experience enabled them to act in the best interests of the college. They knew every student, every member of staff and understood the challenges faced by each.

Modern FE principals do not necessarily fit this mould. They are just as likely to have been brought in from industry as from the ranks of teaching staff. This presents two problems.

The first issue is contextual knowledge. The traditional principal started as a lecturer, amassing years of knowledge and experience before rising through the ranks to the highest office, learning every aspect of the FE curriculum and every policy that shaped it. They were experts.

Leaders parachuted in from non-education sectors cannot hope to have a similar grasp of the decisions they will be making. Successive governments have relentlessly bullied FE into meeting their latest whims with ever-decreasing resources, but replacing principals with business people is not the answer. Staff need to respect their leaders, to have faith in their judgement and know that essential sector knowledge guides their decisions.

The second issue is that the head of an FE college has to put education first. This used to be the case. Funding cuts forced principals to adapt, to learn or hire in new skills and explore new, vocationally focused opportunities for learning, as well as economic opportunities for income. But education was still at the core. The same cannot be said for some of the principals being hired in colleges today.

A different breed

New leaders are now more likely to be business leaders or chief executives than owners of leather-patched jackets and PhDs. They have knowledge of “just-in-time” production schedules, sharp negotiation skills, economic efficiency and manufacturing intelligence. But they don’t have much of a clue about education beyond their own experience of it. They will be less likely to make education-first decisions, especially at crunch moments.

Of course, FE is not alone in this; the leadership evolution has happened in all sectors of education. But it seems to be more pronounced in our sector, where the lack of educational experience is more readily accepted.

I am not advocating banishing this new brand of principal. But they do need to understand the concerns their presence creates. Here is a selection of potential problems:

• Respect: if the world’s greatest tractor driver was put in charge of the Bank of England, would we, as bank employees, respect our new leader’s choices?
• Change management: New leaders bring new ideas. FE traditionally copes well with change. But has that been because of the educational experience of our principals and the breadth of their talent?
• Market knowledge: FE is unique – it requires a vast range of skills to lead a college. Removing the need to have education as part of that skill set negates its importance.
• Business: new revenue streams are essential to support education, but it is the business of education, not the business of business, that is paramount.

Key questions

These problems are not insurmountable. They simply require a would-be principal to be more considered about accepting an FE leadership role and to understand what is required of them. This starts at application. A potential college leader should ask themselves five key questions below before applying for a role:

1. What are the basic goals of the college?
2. What is the strategy for achieving these goals?
3. What are the fundamental issues facing the college?
4. What is its culture?
5. Is the college organised in a way that supports its aims?

Prospective principals should ask themselves if they would honestly be able to understand the answers to these questions. If they feel they could, they need to communicate that understanding to the college immediately and be willing to show how the answers will be interpreted.

Asking for help and opinions from staff and providing opportunities for those staff to influence key decisions is essential if principals from the business sector hope to succeed. We can accept they don’t have contextual knowledge if they make efforts to use the know-how that already exists on staff.

Most of all, would-be leaders must understand that colleges are not manufacturers and that commercial success does not equal educational expertise. Many fall into this trap and it is a sure-fire way to dismantle everything that FE stands for.

Published in TES 17th October 2014 http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storyCode=6446892

Staff aparheid

Learning support assistants provide a valuable service yet they receive precious little thanks for it – and enough is enough.
 

Colleges are collaborative, supportive places. Teaching staff share resources, ideas and strategies, along with coffee and chocolate biscuits. They operate with bonhomie and improve their skills through supportive CPD and peer engagement. But although they are the visible face of learning, they are not the only ones responsible for it.

Further education colleges also employ learning support assistants (LSAs) to help the one in eight students with declared needs and the many more who require a helping hand. More than 80 per cent of LSAs are female and, amid the diverse atmosphere of further education colleges, more than 90 per cent are white. Qualified teachers make up about 7 per cent of the LSA workforce, with more than 40 per cent possessing a level 4 qualification. But nearly 12 per cent have no qualifications at all and 20 per cent have only a level 2 qualification. Most are part-time and paid hourly, have no year-on-year job security and are subject to redeployment at any moment.

Many have years of specialist experience assisting students with dyslexia, dyspraxia, mental health issues, impaired hearing or sight, emotional problems and more. LSAs’ responsibilities include note-taking, reading, enabling access to ICT, providing mobility and mealtime support, advocacy, helping learners on work experience and even covering classes for teaching staff.

And yet some colleges practise apartheid. LSAs in these institutions are not part of the teaching team, not part of the culture, not anywhere. Many don’t even have a staffroom to use, just a cupboard to hang their coat in.

In my experience, a number of staff are very reluctant even to allow LSAs into their classes. They find another “voice” distracting, as though it usurps their authority. Other lecturers find that sending the more disruptive students to the library with an LSA enables them to teach the rest of the class more comfortably. And so it might, but is that what the LSA is for?

Funding cuts over the past few years have pared staff numbers to the bone in many FE colleges, and it puts incredible pressure on the remainder when a member of teaching staff is absent. In the sepia-photograph years someone would always be available to take on a class but this is now unlikely, so the responsibility often falls to an LSA who is told to “keep them quiet”.

Frequently, lecturers do not know how to use LSAs effectively because CPD does not teach them how. Nor are LSAs given opportunities to develop their own skills. A few are paid for training but the majority are not and consequently do not attend, missing out on valuable learning and staff interaction. LSAs are often not released for training because of a lack of time or because of their low status. Their contracts usually end when the students leave and before the CPD begins. The career path for LSAs is a narrow one, and without a progression route they have little motivation to develop themselves. Yet they are often observed under similar conditions to teaching staff and graded accordingly.

Many lecturers admit they don’t have the confidence to direct support staff effectively. Many are confused about what “support” actually is – they simply stop interacting with a student when a support worker is present. This seems pretty unfair: LSAs are used to keep the “naughty ones” quiet, barely tolerated in some classes, excluded from training and development, poorly paid and have no career progression, and yet they are expected to stand in for lecturers at the drop of a hat.

Worlds apart

Discussions between teaching staff and LSAs outside the classroom are still rare. LSAs often go into classes without knowing what will be taught, what objectives are to be fulfilled, what practical work will take place or even what the course is.

Is FE like Downton Abbey, with lecturers and teaching staff on a higher tier than LSAs, who must be kept in their place? I can’t believe that is how anyone in the sector wishes it to be. We listen to students and request “stakeholder” views at every turn, yet a significant proportion of the staff are effectively treated as a stopgap.

Where is the equality in that? And what will be the impact if this keeps happening? Training all staff to reach the highest standards is surely a no-brainer. Despite the government’s best efforts, most colleges still insist on employing qualified staff to teach students, so why not extend that investment to the learning support team?

It is easy to talk to LSAs, to listen to them, to take a skills audit and match their strengths to relevant areas. It is simple to define their training needs, to include them in team meetings for the areas they work in and to value their insights. I’m incredulous that so many colleges don’t.

We present an image of collaborative harmony to the world, working in partnership with employers, parents, stakeholders and schools – pretty much anyone who comes our way, in fact. But we do not, it would seem, include a key part of our workforce, who find themselves marginalised and too fearful of losing their jobs to say so.

Building a qualified, experienced and truly collaborative workforce must be our first priority if we are to continue to enable all learners to achieve. And yes, that includes the LSAs.

Published in TES http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storyCode=6442389

Selling our learners short

Extra funding was intended to boost maths teaching in FE, but a topsy-turvy approach to using it could lead to a ruinous skills void.

 

Concerns about the sorry state of literacy and numeracy in England – from CBI surveys and Alison Wolf’s damning 2011 report, for example – have spurred the government and educationalists to push for improvements in further education. More qualified staff, better embedding of numeracy into vocational subjects and a greater emphasis on maths and English as career essentials are among the strategies.

To this end, funding has been allocated for the employment of new maths graduates as expert teachers, and many institutions have applied successfully for this extra cash. Although the money may have been conceived as a “golden hello” to encourage talented mathematicians into the teaching arena, in my experience many college leaders are using it to pay the salaries of non-specialist recruits, thus saving on their wage bill.

This is not the only way that colleges are dealing with the challenge of trying to meet the Wolf recommendations with reduced funding. To make timetables financially efficient, and to save on salaries, hundreds of unqualified staff are now teaching maths and English. The functional skills part of the course is often taught by vocational staff, who are well qualified in their own areas but have no experience of teaching maths.

Meanwhile, qualified staff find themselves redundant or “fractionalised” as their subject is broken up and distributed to others in order to save cash. And those others are now teaching subjects outside their comfort zones. Was this really the desired outcome of the drive for mathematical excellence? As with many strategies, it looks good on paper: move a few bodies around, plug the gaps and off we go. But the ramifications for learners and staff are ignored.

On the road to nowhere

Most colleges buck the Pareto principle when it comes to maths qualifications: 80 per cent of learners study functional skills and 20 per cent study GCSE, but that 80 per cent requires more than a 20 per cent investment. It may well be the case that staff costs are at a premium and funding at an all-time low (with the prospect of a further fall), but that does not justify what we are doing. Fewer and fewer learners are enrolled in GCSE maths and are instead signed up to a level 2 functional skills course – a “safer” qualification that can be taken as many times a year as necessary until they pass.

Is this the best option for students and their future employers? What happens when that learner wants to take an HND or a degree and needs to know Pythagoras’ theorem? Functional skills has no content that will allow for this: no Pythagoras, no trigonometry and no value in a huge range of careers, from healthcare and medicine to engineering and research.

Adults wishing to return to education are refused entry to GCSE maths and enrolled on stand-alone functional skills courses that they must pass before taking their course of choice, which they are paying for. Nineteen-year-olds who were never advised to retake their maths and English GCSEs and have progressed to level 3 cannot move on to the next course. They do not have the opportunity to obtain funding for retakes. They are cast adrift.

But financial needs must be met, so changes are instituted. Functional skills is allocated even fewer hours on the timetable – just one hour in some cases – and this is blamed on “more embedding” in vocational subjects and greater demands on vocational staff because of the new BTEC requirements. Is one hour a week enough, even when taught by an expert? No. And the outlook is worse for students taught by a non-expert.

Vocational staff are uneasy, too. They are concerned about their lack of expertise and their ability to help learners achieve. They fear the impact on their departmental results and the subsequent threat to their own careers. As many have noted, vocational maths in context is one thing but the exam has no single vocational focus, so it is the application of maths that is key. These staff do not have the expertise or confidence to enable students to absorb and then apply mathematical constructs in a variety of situations, much less an exam paper. They need training and support to take on these new challenges, if this is how it is to be.

FE colleges with poor finances are now in a bind. They must save money to survive but must also deliver learning, achievement and success to a high standard. The impact on their futures is clear: colleges without well-qualified maths and English teaching staff and good results are unlikely to thrive, leading to funding gaps, a lack of learners and reduced staff numbers. Poor and potentially dangerous choices are thus being made in the name of financial efficiency. FE colleges are once again prioritising their own survival over the needs of learners.

The requirement for students to achieve a level 2 qualification is the driver. But I fear that this journey, with a blindfolded man at the wheel, will lead only to a horrendous crash. We will again clash with or be run over by the funding juggernaut. Chased by a Wolf, we are behaving as sheep, blindly following the funding formula into a future skills void of our own making.

Published in TES http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storyCode=6439843

Maths; time for a new recipe

 

Gosh there’s a lot of ‘education’ on TV now; it’s almost as popular as baking/cooking shows, which in a way is what schools do. Take a wide range of raw ingredients, treat them to a series of processes and expose them to new experiences, and voila … a Victoria Sponge, the finished product.

Except, it isn’t. The ‘product’ is never finished.

The GCSE Victoria Sponge; that most English of sweet treats, so admired by governments, sprinkled with Govian icing sugar and the merest hint of Morgan vanilla, is then the basis for a global range of courses that are sweet, savoury, salty, sour and umami in FE. A menu of such complexity, Matthew Norman would faint with gastronomic gluttony.

Taster menu’s at L1; short, spicy fast food to develop your senses at L2, longer, more complex dishes to season the palate at L3, then delicious puddings at higher levels, each specialising in individual ingredients, developing and focussing on a core skill. FE would surely hold at least three Michelin Stars in the restaurant world.

The GCSE Maths Victoria Sponge, a fine and traditional recipe though it once was, is, whisper it, no longer fit for purpose in Maths. The two layers, Foundation and Higher, glued together with the sweet sourness of the Grade C raspberry jam centre, no longer works. Nor does its flashier cousin, the Functional Skill muffin. Dressed up as a more accessible, smaller bite of sweet achievement, it is actually just a less calorific, saccharin laden bun, decorated and sold as a multi-function, vocational catch-all, but scrape off the distracting toppings and underneath it’s still a flabby sponge.

Flabby sponges, no matter how well decorated are not the basis for a healthy diet. GCSE maths and Functional Skills are no longer the basis for a healthy, successful education.

Yes, basic mathematical skills will always be required; adding, multiplication, subtraction and division are sacrosanct but teaching these in isolation, crammed into a 34 week sugar-fest with only one final product allowed is senseless.

The application of maths, in a range of employment opportunities, fully embedded into vocational courses and included in the grading criteria is desperately needed and shamefully overdue. Maths as a pure subject should always be available for those who wish to pursue it but for the majority of vocational students, that isn’t their aim. They need maths, applicable to their lives and their subject specialism not academic purity, but they do need to be stretched, mathematically.

Treating maths as a punishment … ‘you can’t have any fun until you’ve done your maths’, reinforcing the stereotype of maths as a separate, additional burden on their learning, continues to damage both the reputation of the subject and the enthusiasm of the learner for a subject which is not  just fundamental to higher career aspirations but also to everyday living.

Following my tweet that only 7% achieve the ‘C’ raspberry, from the TES http://news.tes.co.uk/b/news/2014/09/11/just-seven-per-cent-get-gcse-maths-or-english-when-retaking-it-after-age-16.aspx#.VBKzF0mGLX1.twitter David Russell of the ETF asked me “@fossa99 Always was huge issue. Now focus is on it. Massive challenge for the country to support FE sector in tackling this. Can we do it ?

Well, yes David, we can but that Victoria Sandwich and the Muffin, need to be broken down to their molecular level and then rebuilt, to suit the market we work in; the future.

It needs the input of vocational teachers and industry partners to identify the skills students will need to be effective in the workplace; as employees and future innovators.

It needs the input of maths teachers who have long and bitter experiences of watching those sponges deflate in the white heat of the post 16 exam oven.

It needs exam boards to work harder to develop mathematical fluency as gradable criteria in their Pass, Merit and Distinction ladders of success.

It needs mathematical competency built into Initial Teacher Training and PGCE’s.

It needs focussed, trackable, monitored Maths delivery of CPD for all teaching and educational support staff, which should be compulsory and a condition of Professional teaching status.

It needs a realistic, vocationally focussed framework of maths skills for apprenticeships, not 'bolt-on' qualifications.

It needs time. Thirty weeks (when term starts in September and exams in early June) of 2 or 3 hours a week, with a range of abilities stuffed into an end of day class cannot work. The replacement for the GCSE should be a two year, 16-18 stand-alone course, run alongside the vocational qualification and supplemented by the higher and examined maths content of vocational qualifications.

Most of all, it needs the will and the drive of those who represent FE to call a halt to the twenty one years of 7% achievement and in tandem with those of us who despair of the current situation, and we are legion, work together, quickly to put this shameful, abhorrent failure in the past and start preparing our learners for the futures they deserve.

Can we do it?