Brexit: Racism and Education

The #Brexit vote fallout and awful racist behaviour that has been seen has many reasons, which can be put down to one thing.

Education.

Successive governments have reduced the value and range of education. They have removed Grammar Schools, reduced and restricted curriculum offers, driven teachers to tears, decimated Further Education Colleges and forced students to choose between penury or education.

Education has failed too many.

They are all at fault. Conservative, Labour, Liberals and multitudinous smaller parties. None have defended education with sufficient passion or commitment to enable it to educate our young and teach them that equality between people matters.

The data seems to show that the less involved, less educated, less enabled our people are, the more likely they are to blame the blameless. Those who come here and work hard, for themselves and their families. Those who try, those who want something better, those we should welcome.

The young seem to have not voted in sufficient numbers to have an impact. Too many are not sufficiently interested or engaged to make the effort to vote.

The young feel that they have no say.

The poor feel as if they have no say.

The disabled feel as if they have no say.

The Black and Ethnic Minorities feel as if they have no say.

The millions on benefits feel as if they have no say.

Those who depend on 4 different jobs and barely have the energy to feed coins into their electricity meter, feel as if they have no say.

Those who have a job, which depends on them not having a view, feel as if they have no say.

Those who do not think, have too much to say.

Some of those who did not get the vote they wanted have been vicious in their condemnation of others.

You may not like Grammar Schools, wide and differentiated curriculum, FE Colleges or university degrees that require thinking rather than practical work, but the broad education of students, the exposure to other ideas and cultures, tolerance and balance is essential to build a population with appreciation for others.

We have failed them all and now we reap what they have sown.

Education in the broadest sense, not in the narrow Orwellian straights of passes and fails of courses which are pointless in securing employment, is needed now, more than ever. Exposure to the widest range of thoughts and ideas, to aspire, to dream and to be tolerant of each other is needed to be a responsible citizen in this world.

Unlike Cameron, we cannot throw a hissy fit, and stomp off into the shadows of our Trust Fund, sulking that the electorate didn’t understand that we were supposed to do as we were told.

We must now deal with this, and build a future for us all, irrespective of colour, religion, origin, gender or sexual choice. We must now find a way for us to educate each other on our basic principles, points of view and integrate them into one new mandate of equality.

This casual, almost normalised hatred of anyone or anything that is different is deeply embedded in some of our countrymen. It is disgusting and before we can build a future together, we must stop it. We cannot be part of any community until we do.

We must ensure that our young are educated to value democracy and the importance of individual responsibility, of social cohesion and collective responsibility for the greater good. Above all, we must value each other, no matter who we are, what we are or where we come from.

Most of all, we must never, ever allow the lack of education to be such a shaming or defining characteristic of a nation.

Education, like a referendum is for life.

Brexit: Racism and Education

The #Brexit vote fallout and awful racist behaviour that has been seen has many reasons, which can be put down to one thing.

Education.

Successive governments have reduced the value and range of education. They have removed Grammar Schools, reduced and restricted curriculum offers, driven teachers to tears, decimated Further Education Colleges and forced students to choose between penury or education.

Education has failed too many.

They are all at fault. Conservative, Labour, Liberals and multitudinous smaller parties. None have defended education with sufficient passion or commitment to enable it to educate our young and teach them that equality between people matters.

The data seems to show that the less involved, less educated, less enabled our people are, the more likely they are to blame the blameless. Those who come here and work hard, for themselves and their families. Those who try, those who want something better, those we should welcome.

The young seem to have not voted in sufficient numbers to have an impact. Too many are not sufficiently interested or engaged to make the effort to vote.

The young feel that they have no say.

The poor feel as if they have no say.

The disabled feel as if they have no say.

The Black and Ethnic Minorities feel as if they have no say.

The millions on benefits feel as if they have no say.

Those who depend on 4 different jobs and barely have the energy to feed coins into their electricity meter, feel as if they have no say.

Those who have a job, which depends on them not having a view, feel as if they have no say.

Those who do not think, have too much to say.

Some of those who did not get the vote they wanted have been vicious in their condemnation of others.

You may not like Grammar Schools, wide and differentiated curriculum, FE Colleges or university degrees that require thinking rather than practical work, but the broad education of students, the exposure to other ideas and cultures, tolerance and balance is essential to build a population with appreciation for others.

We have failed them all and now we reap what they have sown.

Education in the broadest sense, not in the narrow Orwellian straights of passes and fails of courses which are pointless in securing employment, is needed now, more than ever. Exposure to the widest range of thoughts and ideas, to aspire, to dream and to be tolerant of each other is needed to be a responsible citizen in this world.

Unlike Cameron, we cannot throw a hissy fit, and stomp off into the shadows of our Trust Fund, sulking that the electorate didn’t understand that we were supposed to do as we were told.

We must now deal with this, and build a future for us all, irrespective of colour, religion, origin, gender or sexual choice. We must now find a way for us to educate each other on our basic principles, points of view and integrate them into one new mandate of equality.

This casual, almost normalised hatred of anyone or anything that is different is deeply embedded in some of our countrymen. It is disgusting and before we can build a future together, we must stop it. We cannot be part of any community until we do.

We must ensure that our young are educated to value democracy and the importance of individual responsibility, of social cohesion and collective responsibility for the greater good. Above all, we must value each other, no matter who we are, what we are or where we come from.

Most of all, we must never, ever allow the lack of education to be such a shaming or defining characteristic of a nation.

Education, like a referendum is for life.

Shoeless classrooms

In a recent Guardian article Stephen Heppell, professor of new media environments at Bournemouth University’s Centre for Excellence in Media Practice believes in the 'shoeless classroom' and cites many perceived benefits. He also believes that teachers should also be shoeless.

Teachers, including Tom Starkey @tstarkey1212 are more cautious.

There are, I find, a number of issues with the 'shoeless' policy; no one single 'fix' will resolve all the problems, we are complicated and subject to numerous whims and toes can still be stubbed and injured.

My main objection though is to Stephen Heppell's assumption that everyone in a classroom has a neat pair of matching feet.

Many children and adults are without one or both legs/feet/lower limbs.

Their prosthetic limbs are not always instantly adjustable from one heel height to another, so they would walk with one foot raised and the other flat, limping and more likely to fall. They may be unable to remove their shoes, quickly and easily. So they go from being the only person in the classroom with a prosthetic, to the only person in the room who has to keep their shoes on.
 
In theory, there should be no discrimination between those who are less abled, and those who are fully abled, but there is and given human nature, there always will be.

These may be small points to some, and I'm sure the majority would cope well, dealing with the looks and comments, emerging as tougher people. But not all.

Stephen Heppell needs to consider the wider impact of insisting that removing shoes in the classroom, magically makes us all more 'equal'.

Staff Apartheid

Originally published in TES https://www.tes.com/article.aspx?storycode=6442389

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.

Technology Lottery

The missing lottery ticket worth £33 million really caught my imagination. 

I don’t often buy a ticket, maybe once a year or so, and I don’t live in Worcester, so I know it’s not me. Every time I do buy one though, I photograph it with my phone, so if I lose it or accidentally put it in the washing machine, I’ve got a record of the thing.  It’s quick, simple and cheap; words beloved by Government and Financial Directors.

I’m pretty sure that this anal capturing of data is due to two things; my long career in FE (always have the evidence) and the availability of reliable technology. 

I’ve always encouraged students to photograph each other’s good work to provide them with a visual revision record and often, just photographing a screen is quicker than send to printer, then running around a building looking for the printer. 

I once worked in a college where one campus was 21 miles from the other. Driving there to get my printing because the system wasn’t properly configured was pointless.

#FELTAG has put forward many fine ideas for using Technology in Education and the government’s recent decision not to fund online learning at a lower rate should be acknowledged as a nod to understanding that online learning matters. To ‘learn online’ though requires tech, infrastructure and availability.

Tom Starkey @tstarkey1212 recently tweeted that his business cards were not printed in time for an event, and asked for help. Tom is a smart man, giving advice on using technology in education but even he needed to collaborate on technology so he could move over to using an App to electronically produce and send his business cards. 

This is the dichotomy for me; smart, technologically aware education experts and teachers that fully appreciate the value of using tech in teaching and learning don’t always think laterally and apply it to their own lives. That's why we need so much more collaborative practice.

Embedding tech into our lives, to make them easier, surely has to be the basis of our experience for embedding it into teaching and learning? That is why we need to share and keep sharing ideas, so we can learn.

If we don’t do it, how can we teach it?

Clearly more is needed than knowledge of technology and how it can be applied. There has to be an identified need and an identified solution but whilst the identification can be as simple as spotting something on a tweet, the matching process is nowhere near instant with a full teaching load and lack of equipment.

Teaching staff need time to explore the use of tech, it cannot be ‘applied’ to a lesson in a top down fashion, as you would select extra Hoisin Sauce to go with your Crispy Duck.

Students who take a test online, ticking a box to select an answer are not using technology for learning. There is no difference in ticking a box with a mouse to ticking a box with a pencil and if that is how tech is to be applied, then we are fooling ourselves and cheating the students.

Developing tech for effective learning requires patience, a supportive atmosphere and collaboration. All of which is expensive and not generally funded. Those who excel at tech such as Scott @bcotmedia do so because they have a natural talent and invest every moment of their time into the projects with unparalleled enthusiasm. We could all invest the time, but sadly few of us have his natural talent.

But given the right environment, access and support, we can learn.

One of the most popular #ukfechat topics recently was the hugely successful and much appreciated Using Digital Tools  by @ChrisLKirk which clearly demonstrated the need for more collaborative effort in using technology in TLA. People want to know how, what to use, new ideas and applications, to learn from each other and build on existing expertise and experience.

Teachers/Lecturers don’t want to see Pink computers for girls and Blue ones for boys, they don’t want to see students sat at terminals, bored and lifeless whilst they tick boxes on a test, they don’t want to have quotas imposed on their teaching to mention IT or Technology X times a lesson in order to hit an ambiguous target.

Teaching staff it would seem want the fundamental basics to be available so they can develop their skills and knowledge.

 

The opportunity to experiment with technology, to hear the learner views on our efforts and their impact, to share our results and experiences, without fear of repercussion.

They would like to have access to more than one trolley of laptops which in a one hour lesson takes 40 minutes to log onto the system and are only available on alternate months with an X in the name, provided you book them the day you start your job.

Teachers would like to have rooms that have internet access, rooms where mobile phone signals work so they can use Socrative.

They would like a computer system that isn’t based on Windows 2000

They would like a firewall that doesn’t stop Sports lecturers from accessing Middlesex Cricket Ground

They would like to have access to technology in the same way that management teams have iPads for their data management needs and feel that they have parity when it comes to the distribution and funding of technology.

They would like investment, not on paper but practically in time, support and equipment. 

Even now, there are colleges that have large areas with no computer access at all in classrooms.   

They would like to see technological opportunities for Teaching, Learning and Assessment that isn't a Lottery.

Too much technological investment has been into the ‘chalk and talk’ model, with the teacher at the front, one computer and an IWB, at the front. Teaching and learning has moved on but the technology still has a ‘buffer face’.

Technology that is simple, effective and useful should be as available as Oxygen; using it should be osmotic not just ‘embedded’'. Until these fundamental issues are addressed, Teaching Learning and Assessment that benefits from the use of technology, to enhance the TLA,  will be a long time coming.