In recent years, there has been a renewal of interest in food education, particularly in secondary schools. This is partly encouraged by celebrity chef television shows, the surge in obesity, growing unease about our environmental impacts, and the diverse, multicultural nature of contemporary Australian food. This range of interests is reflected in what is being taught in Australian schools.
An associated venture is the Food Teachers’ Centre in London. This provides in-school professional development for food teachers.
How is food education taught in Australian secondary schools?
The current Australian curriculum splits food education into two streams: the health and physical education (HPE) stream and the design and technologies stream. Nutrition principles are taught in the HPE stream and food skills (such as cooking) are taught in the technologies stream. If a school is fortunate enough to have a year 7 or year 8 home economics course, the two streams may be combined in the one course.
The duration of food education courses in secondary schools varies a lot, from none to one or two hours a week, often for a year or less. At senior levels (years 11 and 12) elective subjects are offered in the various states and territories such as Food Technology or the new food studies curriculum in Victoria.
Research with home economics teachers in Queensland and elsewhere in Australia suggests time and resources are often inadequate for teaching the diverse knowledge and skills associated with food.
Aspects of food may be taught in science (such as food chemistry) or in humanities (such as cultural foods and environmental issues) or in PE. But most food education happens in home economics, and contrary to many people’s opinions, it is alive and well in many parts of Australia.
Food education takes place in preschools, primary schools and secondary schools, though in different ways and to different degrees. Programs like the kitchen garden scheme have been well received.
Many teachers deal with food, in all its aspects, across the school years. These include activities like growing food in school gardens, cooking it, analysing its nutritional properties and environmental impacts, exploring local farms, shops and food markets, taking part in BBQ or Masterchef style competitions and catering for schools and Fair Food Universities.
Research in secondary food education
A growing evidence base, mainly in the US, Canada, western Europe and Australia suggests food literacy and skills education programs lead to greater confidence in performing practical food skills, such as planning and preparing meals, interpreting food labels, basic food safety, food regulations. This, in turn, is associated with healthier dietary choices.
Australian research in this area has grown strongly over the past ten years. It has provided evidence for the establishment of several food literacy frameworks with focuses on food gatekeepers and families as well as broader environmental aspects of food systems.
Understanding how to read food labels can help people make healthier choices.from www.shutterstock.com
Recent research has shown many secondary school food teachers tend to favour practical domestic skills and associated knowledge. They express less interest in broader historic, social, environmental and ethical issues. Food and health professionals remain strongly supportive of food education – especially for acquiring practical skills – as does the general public.
Our recent work has also examined the views of parents and recent school leavers who live independently. Although they hold a broad spectrum of opinions, around two thirds see food education as an important life skills subject. Most think it should be compulsory for between one and three hours per week in each of years 7 to 10. These views contrast sharply with the priorities of most secondary schools.
Current and future challenges
Food education in Australian secondary schools is now facing several challenges. These challenges are related to changes in population health status, changing food patterns, food technologies, food and beverage marketing and environmental impacts.
The fundamental question is: Does it meet the present and future life needs of students and their families? At present, food education tends to be patchy, with some emphasis on students’ acquisition of food preparation skills but lesser coverage of environmental and social issues, marketing practices or family dynamics.
Possible solutions include providing more intensive education about food in university teacher education programs and continuing professional education for food teachers. These teachers also need more adequate timetable allocations and resources.
A comprehensive food education framework from pre-school to senior secondary school is required to prevent repetition and reinforce skills learned in the early years. This has begun in the UK and in the RefreshED program in Western Australia. A more focused curriculum across all years of education is required. This should be accompanied by continuing evaluation of the impact of food education on students, their families and the wider population.
Source of the notice: https://theconversation.com/why-we-need-to-take-food-education-in-australian-schools-more-seriously-106849
Over the past two decades, income inequality has been increasing in Indonesia, leading to growing worries about disparities in living standards and education.
A particular concern of economists in this environment of climbing inequality is the issue of intergenerational mobility – the extent to which parents’ education or income affects the socioeconomic status of their offspring.
Scholars have described a strong relationship between inequality and social immobility – meaning that the greater the inequality in a country, the greater likelihood that someone will inherit their parents’ socioeconomic status. This finding has been dubbed the “Great Gatsby curve”,(link is external) in reference to the way that the book’s title character defies this relationship and overcomes his simple upbringing.
Educational attainment is one of the most common measures used by economists and sociologists to determine the extent to which socioeconomic status is transferred from one generation to the next. Indonesia has invested huge amounts in education and implemented several progressive policies designed to promote mobility.
In fact, government spending on education has more than doubled since the New Order period. Since 2009, more than 20 per cent of the state budget has been spent on education, in accordance with the Law 20 of 2003 on the National Education System (although there is some debate about how this 20 per cent figure is calculated). These funds have been used to implement a variety of progressive policies, ranging from scholarship programs for poor students to elimination of school fees and school grants.
As the first member of my Betawi family to pursue higher education, I wondered how many other Indonesians had a similar experience to me. What is the relationship between parental education and children’s schooling in Indonesia? Are the government’s efforts to expand education making it any easier for people from families without high levels of education to attain higher levels of schooling?
To explore these questions, I examined the results of four waves of the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS), from 1997, 2000, 2007 and 2015. I examined the educational achievement (in terms of years of schooling) of young people aged 16 to 27 at the time of the survey. My study examined the educational achievement of young people against their father’s education. This is because although many studies have shown only slight differences between whether a mother or father’s education level is used in these comparisons, some(link is external)studies(link is external)argue that the father’s education can be more important for the outcomes of their offspring.
The results showed some interesting findings. First, the average years of schooling increased from 9.21 in 1997 to 10.71 in 2015. Both boys and girls increased their total years of schooling. Average years of schooling for boys improved from 9.2 in 1997 to 10.53 in 2015. Girls fared slightly better, with average years of schooling increasing from 9.2 in 1997 to 10.9 in 2015.
Significantly, the study showed an increase in educational mobility from 1997 to 2015. To examine mobility, I calculated an “intergenerational persistence” coefficient – a measure of the degree to which a father’s education affects children’s education. This coefficient decreased from 0.53 in 1997 to 0.44 in 2015. Notably, there was little change from 1997 to 2007, when the coefficient decreased to 0.51, suggesting that most improvements in mobility have occurred over the past decade.
Despite the improvements observed, however, parental background still plays a major role in shaping children’s futures. In fact, the coefficient of persistence is still considerably higher in Indonesia than in most other nations, with Latin American countries the only close match for Indonesia.
Further, my study somewhat surprisingly showed little difference in intergenerational persistence between urban and rural areas. Living in an urban, developed area seemingly does not automatically promote greater opportunities for educational mobility compared to rural areas. In fact, my study showed that although mobility has improved in urban areas over recent years, historically, mobility was greater in rural areas than in urban ones.
Finally, the intergenerational coefficient declined from 0.55 in 1997 to 0.45 in 2015 for women, and from 0.51 in 1997 to 0.43 in 2015 for men. These findings suggest that female students are less mobile than male students, a finding that is common to many other studies. However, in the Indonesian case, the gap between males and females has narrowed significantly over recent years, and there is now little difference in mobility between genders.
What explains these results? Given the decline in intergenerational persistence over the past decade, there are suggestions that the government’s hefty investment in education may be starting to improve mobility. In 2007-2008, the government spent about 16 per cent of the state budget on education. Since 2009 it has consistently allocated more than 20 per cent.
Past studies have shown that total public expenditure on education has a positive relationship with mobility – the more a government spends on education, the more mobile students become. Public investment in education can compensate for a lack of investment in education by poor families.
One of the most prominent educational policies over the past decade has been the implementation of the School Operational Assistance Grants (BOS). These grants are provided directly to schools every three months on the basis of the number of students at the school. They are designed to increase the enrolment rate by reducing the costs of education borne by parents. Schools can also use BOS funds for activities such as personnel management, infrastructure and professional development.
In 2012, the government also introduced a new regulation that prohibits the charging of fees in primary and junior secondary schools but allows for voluntary parental contributions to maintain the active engagement of parents in school development.
On the demand side, the government has expanded its assistance program for poor students, the Indonesia Smart Card (KIP). Through this program, students are provided with a cash-transfer based on school attendance. The funds can be used for education fees, or other costs associated with attending school, such as transportation, books and uniforms.
In addition to increases in educational expenditure, the government has also put considerable efforts into promoting early childhood education over recent years. The enrolment ratio of children in early childhood education has increased from 15 per cent in the early 2000s to 47 per cent in 2012. Improvements in early childhood education could have also played a role in increasing mobility.
My small study suggests that parental education is still a major determinant of educational outcomes in Indonesia. Further studies are required to confirm my findings, but government investment in education does appear to be making a difference.
Kinsley Academy may officially be less than three years old, but its redbrick buildings stand as a reminder that there has been a primary school here, serving this rural, former mining community in West Yorkshire, for well over 100 years. Jade Garfitt didn’t hesitate to send her son, aged five, to the school: Kinsley born and bred, she felt she’d got an excellent education there herself.
But since he started she has become increasingly concerned. “He’s received one piece of homework this academic year,” she tells me over a cup of tea in the community cafe across the road. “He’s only done PE once since November. At one point, his class went two weeks without having their reading books changed. If you tried to say, ‘Look, there’s issues here’, you’d be shooed away.”
She says her son was for months taught by a revolving door of supply teachers. “They never introduced themselves. We never knew their name. The children were really unsettled, crying, not wanting to go to school.”
Kinsley is part of a wave of schools that have converted into academies – state-funded but independent of local authority control. In 2015, it left the auspices of Wakefield council to become Kinsley Academy, joining one of the hundreds of charitable companies the government calls “multi-academy trusts”, which between them run thousands of schools across England. This is a key plank of the government’s schools strategy under which high-performing schools in each trust help the struggling ones improve.
But in Kinsley, the reverse has happened. Lauded by Ofsted a few months before it joined the Wakefield City Academies Trust, Kinsley has seen standards plummet to well below the national average. “I’ve had to go to teachers to ask for homework. I’ve had to argue with them to change my son’s reading books. I’ve taught him all his times tables at home,” Sarah Jones, who has two children at the school, tells me.
Jade and Sarah are just two of thousands of parents in West Yorkshire affected by a large-scale educational failure, whose ripples have been felt far beyond Kinsley. In fact, their worries are being echoed across England amid growing concern that something may be seriously amiss with the government’s academies experiment.
In July 2016, the Education Funding Agency investigated the trust. Its draft report, leaked to the TES, found that its interim chief executive, the businessman Mike Ramsay, had paid himself £82,000 over a three-month period. It concluded that the trust was in an “extremely vulnerable position as a result of inadequate governance, leadership and overall financial management”. Later that year, it was reported that the trust had paid almost £440,000 to IT and admin companies owned by Ramsay and his daughter.
The trust was nevertheless allowed to carry on. Then, in September last year, it suddenly announced it would be looking for new sponsors for all 21 of its schools – but not before it had transferred more than £1.5m of reserves from its schools to its central coffers, entirely permissible in the current system. Some of this was funds raised by parents. It’s not clear whether any of this money will be left when the trust winds up, or whether those schools will see it again.
Kinsley Academy a member of the Wakefield City Academies Trust, West Yorkshire. Photograph: Gary Calton for the Observer
“The collapse of Wakefield City Academies Trust has sent shockwaves through our area,” says the local Labour MP Jon Trickett, who has for months been seeking answers from the government. “For many parents, it has been disturbing to find that their children’s futures could be threatened by the recklessness of people with very limited educational experience.”
Wakefield City is one in a series of high-profile failures of trusts forced to give up all their schools. The magazine Schools Week reported just last week that Bright Tribe, the trust with the lowest-performing secondary schools in the country, would also be closing and handing back its 10 schools.
Are these failures the inevitable consequence of a quasi-market system, predicated on the idea of takeovers? Or a sign of something deeply rotten at the heart of the government’s flagship education policy?
Academies have been a jewel in the education policy crown for both Labour and Conservative governments in the past 25 years. According to Professor Becky Francis, director of the Institute of Education at University College London, Labour’s academies programme was “focused on the revitalisation of schooling as an engine of social mobility in deprived areas”. She says the idea of bringing in business and philanthropic sponsors – including big names such as the London-based French financier Arpad Busson – “not just for money but for expertise” was controversial from the start.
But although the Labour government hugely talked up its academies programme, there were only around 200 of them – 1% of all English schools – by the time it left office in 2010. It was Michael Gove, the incoming Conservative education secretary, who put turbo boosters under the policy. By the time he left the job in 2014, the number had rocketed to almost six in 10 secondary schools, and one in five primaries.
What drove this? Not the evidence, according to Francis. Even as the explosion was taking off, “the DfE’s own evidence showed there was hardly any difference in outcomes between academies and local authority schools, once you controlled for their pupil intakes,” she says. She puts it down to “a strong ideological dislike of local authority influence, and a faith in autonomy and marketisation”.
The first academy chains were born out of the Labour government’s effort to introduce more stability into the system when it realised that there were significant risks to setting up independent, state-funded schools. They were embraced by the coalition government for similar reasons.
Mark Lehain, interim director of New Schools Network, is a champion of this model. “In Bedford, where I used to teach, there were failing local authority schools left to fail generation after generation of kids,” he says. For him, a big advantage of academy chains is that you can remove a school from a failing trust and give it to one better placed to turn it around.
There’s also an intuitive advantage to the chains: if someone is running one school brilliantly, isn’t it a waste not to get them involved in running more? “If you’ve got a school that’s functioning well you can develop a group of schools that can learn and build from that,” says Sam Freedman, a former special adviser to Gove.
That’s the theory. The problem is that it hasn’t quite happened like that in practice. There have been several studies in the past few years that have invariably reached similar conclusions: there doesn’t appear to be an inherent benefit to a school being run by an academy chain instead of a local authority. “There are a handful of trusts achieving amazing things, but a much longer tail of trusts performing really poorly,” says Francis. Her analysis shows six in 10 academy chains have below-average attainment for children from disadvantaged backgrounds.
What’s gone wrong? “I think there was certainly a mistake in the early days of the coalition, where we let so many schools convert at once, and allowed some chains to build too fast and unsustainably,” Freedman says of his time at the DfE. According to the Commons public accounts committee, there were simply too few checks on schools wanting to become academies: the government rejected just 13 out of more than 2,000 applications in three years. Trusts haven’t had to prove themselves before taking on new schools in difficult straits: Wakefield City Academies Trust took over 14 schools in special measures in under three years. “There was a period after 2011 where the academy system felt like the wild west, with big personalities coming in and changing things with little educational justification,” says Francis.
Some of those personalities took big financial liberties, paying themselves far in excess of what a local authority head could earn, and spending taxpayer cash on services provided by companies linked to themselves or family members.
President Barack Obama and David Cameron at Ark Globe Academy in south London, 2011. Photograph: WPA Pool/Getty Images
“In the case of Wakefield City Academies Trust, related-party transactions look like a convenient way to sidestep laws that prevent people profiting from schools,” says Trickett. “If the reports of financial problems at other chains are true, the government may find its plans to give trusts millions to expand have the effect of pouring water into a leaky bucket.”
Once a school joins a trust, there’s no going back: its reserves and buildings are absorbed into the legal entity of the trust. “If a school thinks it is getting poor services from its academy trust, there isn’t much it can do about it,” says Laura McInerney, former editor of Schools Week.
The only way out is in the case of serious failure. But that can take a long time to get noticed. Parents are often the first to spot it, but it can be hard for them to be heard. Even MPs can meet a wall of silence. “A culture of secrecy prevailed,” says Trickett. “The letters I wrote to the trust elicited wholly inadequate responses.”
Even when failure is eventually recognised, finding a trust to take over struggling schools can be difficult. The government has no power to compel trusts to take over schools. Lots of these schools will also have serious financial problems, whether as a result of mismanagement, falling pupil rolls, or long-running unmanageable PFI contracts. This makes them an unattractive proposition to other trusts, who themselves have to stay afloat at a time when schools funding is getting tighter.
But takeover regardless remains the main school improvement game in town: since 2016, the government has required all schools rated “inadequate” to become academies. The pipeline of schools in limbo is growing: over six in 10 rated inadequate by Ofsted in 2016-17 had not opened as an academy nine months later.
The takeover process is overseen by eight regional school commissioners. “Parents have no right to a consultation on who should sponsor their school, let alone any kind of veto or vote,” says McInerney. “The meetings where decisions are made are secretive, with only the barest of minutes.”
Potential conflicts of interest abound within opaque, interconnected circles: the Conservative peer Lord Nash was for years a schools minister while chairing an academy chain accountable to the government department he helped to run.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that an incredible amount of time and energy – not to mention at least £745m, according to the National Audit Office – has been invested in a huge reorganisation that has delivered patchy benefits at best. “I fear this exclusive focus on structures has led to policymakers taking their eye off the ball in relation to the most important element of the education system, quality of teaching,” says Francis.
There are plenty of fixes on the table. McInerney thinks there should be a clampdown on high pay, a lock on school assets, and that local authorities should be able to spin out their own academy trusts. Others have suggested banning related-party transactions. The question is whether Theresa May’s government has the inclination or bandwidth to do any of this against the backdrop of Brexit.
As the summer holidays begin in Kinsley, Jade and Sarah tell me they are hopeful things will improve now that their children’s school has transferred from Wakefield City Academies Trust to a new trust. But could it all happen again somewhere else?
“No lessons have been learned,” says Laura McInerney. “Pressure is still being put on academy chains that are too small and fragile to take on board tricky schools. There are no consequences for people who flout financial regulations. It’s not a case of whether there’ll be further collapses, but simply of when and where.”
Trusts that failed the test
Ever since Tony Blair opened England’s first academy, the Business Academy Bexley, in 2002, these schools have been the Marmite proposition in education: loved by some, hated by others. It was under a Tory education secretary, Michael Gove, that their numbers really took off. In 2015, David Cameron, then prime minister, told his party conference that he wanted every school in England to be an academy by 2020. But the past two years have been marked by a series of high-profile failures.
July 2016
The Lilac Sky Schools Academy Trust is forced to give up its nine schools. Its accounts reveal that it used public funding to pay consultants more than £1,000 a day even as it was drawing on emergency public funding to ensure classrooms could open with basic equipment and furniture.
March 2017
The Education Fellowship trust, founded by Sir Ewan Harper, a key influencer of Tony Blair’s academies policy, says that it will be giving up its 12 schools. The move follows a series of damning Ofsted judgments and serious financial problems.
November 2017
The Wakefield City Academies Trust makes a shock announcement that it would be is pulling out of all 21 of its schools, having been plagued by questions over its finances. Revelations include the payment of more than £400,000 for services to companies connected with its chief executive and his daughter.
January 2018
The Perry Beeches Academy Trust, which David Cameron once praised as “a real success story”, says it will hand over its five schools after reports of financial mismanagement. The trust paid an additional salary of £120,000 over two years to its former chief executive on top of his £80,000 annual salary.
Source of the article: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/jul/22/academy-schools-scandal-failing-trusts
Parents attack ‘consequence rooms’ where pupils are made to sit alone in silence for hours
Parents have criticised the use of isolation booths at secondary schools across the country, after concerns were raised about the “zero-tolerance” behaviour policies run by some academy trusts.
Guardian analysis found this week that 45 schools in England excluded at least 20% of their pupils in the last academic year. The Outwood Grange Academies Trust – which runs 30 schools across Yorkshire, the Humber and the east Midlands – ran nine out of the 45.
Outwood Academy Ormesby in Middlesbrough topped the list, with 41% of its pupils receiving at least one suspension in the last academic year.
Parents with children at schools in the trust raised concerns that, as well as the high levels of exclusions, many schools were also using “consequences rooms” – small booths in which a child sits alone and in silence for hours on end as punishment for breaking school rules.
The booths have been described as “internal exclusions” and parents called on academy trusts to release information on the number of hours of education children were missing while in the booths.
According to Outwood Grange Academies Trust’s behaviour policy, “the rule when in detention and in the consequences room is occupy and ignore”.
“Students cannot sleep or put their heads on the desk. They must sit up and face forward,” it adds.
When in the booths, children are not allowed to “tap, chew, swing on their chairs, shout out, sigh, or any other unacceptable or disruptive behaviour”.
“You will be allowed to go to the toilet up to a maximum of three times during the day (maximum five minutes per visit),” the policy reads. “You must use the closest toilet and go directly there and back. You will be escorted to get your lunch, but you must stay silent.”
Pupils may complete work they have brought themselves but they do not have to.
One mother, whose son goes to an Outwood Grange school in Wakefield, said her son had lost days of his education sitting in a consequence room. “It’s a small booth. They can’t look left or right, they can’t look behind. They have to focus in front all the time. They can’t speak to anyone for the whole day. It’s basically an internal exclusion. It’s barbaric,” she said.
Another mother, whose son goes to a school in Yorkshire run by the DeltaAcademies Trust, said he was “just a regular kid” and there had never been serious concerns raised about his behaviour before the school’s new discipline policy was introduced.
“Then he got 22 hours in an isolation booth in one week and he was just an absolute mess,” she said. “He came out at the end of the day and he didn’t look well. His legs were shaking and he could hardly string a sentence together. He looked completely done in.
“My concern is they’re not using other methods that actually keep the children in the classroom. Eight hours is far too long to keep a child in isolation. I don’t think they want to put the resources into other ways of dealing with behaviour. They are multi-academy trusts and I think they want to try and keep costs down.”
In March, delegates at the National Education Union conference in Brighton voted unanimously to oppose “the move towards ever more punitive behaviour policies in schools”, saying it was feeding a mental health crisis for children.
The motion read: “The increasing use of detention, isolation and exclusion, often talked of as being ‘zero -tolerance’ approaches, usually mean ignoring the varied difficulties children have, in favour of punishment. We believe that, above all else, children need support, respect and love.”
A spokesperson for the Outwood Grange Academies Trust said: “The use of isolation booths and rooms allow students to calm down, reflect and often self-correct their behaviour that may have led to that situation.
“The trust employs all reasonable adjustments for students with special needs within their behaviour policy and invest in the pastoral and welfare support of all our students.”
The trust added: “Ofsted have inspected our academies using this behaviour policy for the past 15 years and in every case found the academy to have transformed the education that students receive, with five being rated ‘outstanding’.”
Like Outwood Grange, the Delta Academies Trust, which runs 46 schools across the country, said pupils were given a number of warnings before being put in isolation and that wraparound support was provided for them.
“It is not unusual in secondary schools for students to have periods of time in isolation as a result of persistent defiance and disruptive behaviour,” said a spokesperson.
“This is the case in both local authority schools and academies and is an effective measure to reduce low-level disruption and truculent behaviour, which is widely reported as having a deleterious effect on the quality of education in our country. Obviously students who are in isolation will complain they don’t like it; that is because it is a punishment for disrupting other children’s education.”
A Department for Education spokesperson said: “It is up to schools to decide what forms of discipline they adopt, as long as they are lawful and used reasonably. If a school chooses to use isolation rooms, pupils’ time in isolation should be no longer than necessary and used as constructively as possible.”
Source of the article: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/sep/02/barbaric-school-punishment-of-consequence-rooms-criticised-by-parents
Call for government to act after Guardian investigation reveals high suspension rates in England
The government has been urged to address “deeply concerning” rates of exclusion in England’s secondary schools after a Guardian investigation revealed dozens had suspended at least one in five of their pupils.
Of those 45 schools handing at least 20% of their pupils one or more fixed-period exclusion in 2016-17, the overwhelming proportion were academies, with one of them, the Outwood academy Ormesby in Middlesbrough, excluding 41%. Five were run by local authorities and six were free schools.
Fixed-period exclusions are when a pupil is formally suspended from school for a set time, usually up to three days. A student may have multiple exclusions in the same year.
Nine of the 45 schools were part of the Outwood Grange academy trust, a multi-academy trust that runs 30 schools across Yorkshire, the Humber and the east Midlands.
The national average of pupils receiving at least one suspension in the last academic year is 4.6%. Outwood academy Ormesby excluded 41% of pupils, giving out 2,405 fixed-period exclusions to 274 pupils in a single year.
Outwood academy Bishopsgarth, a 10-minute drive away in Stockton-on-Tees, had the second highest rate, excluding 34% of pupils last year. This amounted to 1,268 fixed-period exclusions given to 182 pupils.
A spokesman for the trust said it had taken over “some of the toughest schools in England” and repeatedly turned around their performance. He said that in many cases, the schools it had taken over had previously been excluding high numbers of children informally, meaning the increase in the number of official exclusions was misleading.
The trust said pupils at Outwood academy Ormesby had beaten the school’s GCSE record for the last three years and that the school was oversubscribed. It pointed to an Ofsted report that praised the school for“bringing about change and improvement successfully, and at remarkable speed”.
The trust also said Outwood academy Bishopsgarth had seen a 7% increase in what were already record GCSE results this year.
“Fixed-term exclusions are never issued for ‘minor’ incidents, but may result from a student’s poor choice of reaction or response to a reasonable request,” it said.
Angela Rayner, the shadow education secretary, said the fact that some schools were recording such high rates of suspension “should be a matter of huge concern to the government, and to the schools affected”.
Some people believe schools are increasingly “playing” the system – getting rid of students who might do badly in their GCSEs and compromise the school’s performance in league tables.
In June, an Ofsted investigation into the practice of “off-rolling” – where pupils disappear from the school register just before GCSEs – found that more than 19,000 pupils who were in year 10 in 2016 had vanished from the school roll by the start of year 11, the year when pupils sit their GCSEs.
Figures published by the Department for Education last month found that there were more than 40 permanent exclusions a day (total of 7,700) during the 2016-17 school year, compared with a little over 35 a day the previous year. Fixed-term exclusions increased by about 40,000, to a total of 382,000, meaning nearly one in 20 pupils were given a fixed-period exclusion in that school year.
In March the DfE launched a review into school exclusions, led by the former Conservative MP and children’s minister Edward Timpson. The government said the review would “explore how head teachers use exclusion in practice, and why some groups of pupils are more likely to be excluded”, but that it would not examine exclusion powers. It is expected to report by the end of the year.
The launch of the review came after Cathryn Kirby, Ofsted’s regional director for the North East, Yorkshire and the Humber, wrote to secondary headteachers in the region to complain about the high rates of fixed-period.
“Schools should only ever use exclusions as a last resort,” she said. “If not properly applied, being removed from school can disrupt a child’s education and affect their future life chances.”
Secondary schools in Middlesbrough gave the highest number of fixed term exclusions of any local authority area in the last academic year, handing them to 11.67 pupils in 100. Doncaster and Barnsley also excluded more than one in ten pupils from secondary schools.
Yorkshire and the Humber saw the most fixed-term exclusions of any region in the country, with an overall rate of 5.8 per 100 pupils. Inner London had the second highest rate (5.3 in 100) and the north east the third highest (4.9 in 100).
South Leeds Academy, now operating as Cockburn John Charles Academy, came third on the list for rates of fixed-term exclusions, suspending 30% of their pupils in the last academic year. Outwood Academy Shafton, in Barnsley, came fourth, suspending 29.8%, and the Telford Park School in Shropshire, came fifth, suspending 28.1%.
Kevin Courtney, joint general secretary of the National Education Union, said that it was deeply concerning to hear that so many schools were excluding such high numbers of pupils.
“Real-terms funding cuts have forced schools to make behavioural and specialist learning support assistants redundant, many of whom supported pupils at risk of exclusion, including those with special educational needs or disabilities (SEND),” he said. “Alongside this, schools have lost external support because of the funding cuts to local authority specialist support services.
“The reasons for a huge variance in rates of permanent and fixed term exclusions need to be examined carefully. However, it is clear that the competitive and fragmented system produced by the academy reforms encourages schools to compete for the pupils most likely to get high grades and increase exclusions of pupils who may be more challenging to teach.”
A spokesperson for the Department for Education said the decision to exclude should be reasonable and fair, and that permanent exclusion should only ever be used as a last resort. “Statutory guidance also states that schools should consider the underlying causes of poor behaviour before excluding a pupil,” they said.
“While we know that there has been an increase in exclusions there are still fewer than the peak ten years ago. We have launched an externally led review to look at how exclusions are used and why certain groups are disproportionally affected.”
Source of the notice: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/aug/31/dozens-of-secondary-schools-exclude-at-least-20-of-pupils
United Kingdom/ March 27, 2018/Source: https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk
A promise of “jam tomorrow” will not cut it with the profession, parents and voters who that know any further delay will be devastating.
I have a sense that the tide is turning on school funding.
The latest wave rolled over last Friday when the influential Education Policy Institute reported that the proportion of local authority maintained secondary schools in deficit has nearly trebled. They said that over sixty percent of these schools spent more than their income in 2016-17.
Whilst this report focused on maintained schools, a national report by a firm of accountants a day or so later showed that 55% of the 450 academy trusts that they had audited up to August 2017 were in deficit.
As reported in the Waugh Zone, NAHT’s own survey of members was published as a report this week, with 71% of members expecting to have to set a deficit budget in 2019/20 and 79% by the following year. In this year, 80% had made cuts to teaching assistant roles and 37% had cut teaching roles in order to secure a balancing budget.
If you watched ITV News recently you will have seen the incredibly powerful testimony of our member Michelle Gay, who runs Osborne Primary School in Birmingham. She was in tears as she warned of the dire consequences for her pupils if the school funding crisis was not urgently addressed.
And the government appears to acknowledge that they have work to do to regain the confidence of voters. At the weekend, in a speech to the Conservatives Spring Conference, Theresa May said: “…some people question our motives. They wonder whether we care enough about our NHS and schools.” She also said: “…we might think that the public’s doubts about us are unfair. But they are a political fact which we must face up to.”
Damian Hinds has also said that school funding is ‘tight’.
However he was reprimanded by the UK Statistics Authority for claiming that “real-terms funding per pupil is increasing across the system”. The claim is incorrect because although per-pupil funding will increase in cash terms in the next two years, it will not take into account inflation and cost pressures and does not therefore represent a “real-terms” rise.
But of course, for school funding to truly rise, Phillip Hammond must start taking notice.
I’ve written to The Chancellor to say that: “Education is often allowed to fall behind matters of health, social security and policing as these are headline issues with the electorate. However, we believe that continuing to push education to the back of the funding queue is damaging to the nation. The children in the education system today are the generation that will ensure the United Kingdom is a success in a post-Brexit world. To fail to provide them with the education and support they need will short-change the nation in the long term.”
I’ve asked to meet with him to discuss our concerns but in the meantime, we’re also determined to continue to reveal the true effect of the funding situation with a focus on both mainstream and high needs funding.
When the government talks about using education to improve social mobility I know they are genuine in their intent. I also acknowledge that the rhetoric of “there has never been so much money in education” is a device used to align priorities.
But the truth that education funding is now as much a funding priority as any other call on the public purse can no longer be denied. I am quite happy to trade statistics on this one but the stories of cuts to teaching posts, to teaching assistant posts, cuts to the number of subjects schools offer, cuts to support services and dilapidated buildings paint the real picture that rising costs have far outstripped the budgets schools are given.
There is simply not enough money going in and we are in danger of failing a whole generation. Governors know it, parents know it, and parliamentarians are beginning to get it. We have many supporters. You only have to look at the massive activity this week from the parent-led @SaveSchoolsUK campaign.
Of course, the contribution of school leaders remains absolutely critical. They should not be coy about the pressure they face. It’s their pupils that we’re campaigning for.
Education needs money now. A promise of “jam tomorrow” will not cut it with the profession, parents and voters who that know any further delay will be devastating.
The more they speak up, the quicker the tide will turn for good.
Once upon a time, parents encouraged their children to work hard in school to secure a better future. As a young boy, life was a simple reductive. Good grades begat a good life and more options. This remains partly true, but in modern Kenya making the grade is not just about career and choices. Getting the right grades has become symbolic of social status and a tool for both maintenance and negotiation of one’s position within complex social class categories.
There was a time when a poor boy or girl from Nyamakoroto could top the exams amid a punishing routine of tea picking, rearing goats and being a pupil. Those days are gone. As the recently released Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) results indicate, the new heroes of our examination system are the urbane, privately schooled children of middle and upper-middle class families.
A similar trend is likely to be repeated when the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) results are released. Of the primary schools that featured in the top 100, I could barely identify a single public school. Being poor and possessing a lower social-economic status is now officially the greatest hurdle to academic success in Kenya.
Kenya’s poor are having a raw deal right through to universities. Scholars define education inequality as the extent to which supply of education as a good, and the benefits that accrue from it favour certain individual(s), group, generation, race or region.
I shall restrict my focus to the social class divide and how it impacts higher education in Kenya.
Kenya is a most unequal society. This inequality partly draws from a colonial project that rewarded and privileged specific ‘railway line’ administrative outposts over outlying areas. The colonial regime later bequeathed newly independent Kenya with an education system that was set up to offer unequal treatment based on racial or ethnic criteria.
Over time, the exaltation of a capitalistic dispensation in successive post-colonial regimes only made worse the inequality. With the entrenchment of political tribalism and moral ethnicity, access to political power further accentuated this divide along ethnic fault lines. While counties in the former Central Province have 100 per cent access to primary education, in the former North Eastern Province the figure stands at around 34 per cent, despite primary school education being free. In the ‘80s, counties in the former Rift Valley Province had low literacy rates. This radically changed under former President Daniel Moi’s reign. The link between political power (whether real or imagined) and quality education is significant.
Poor quality
Experts also cite the advent of free primary education as a contributor of poor quality, and the reason for the flight from public to private schools by parents who value quality over massification of learning.
The popularity and spread of private schools and ‘academies’ deep in the rural areas is an indictment of the publicly offered free education, and evidence of a hunger for quality even among less endowed households. But how does such inequality affect the texture of higher education in Kenya?
Private primary schools constitute about 10 per cent of all primary schools, but about 60 per cent of pupils from these schools are admitted to national secondary schools and over 75 per cent of access university education. However, in the ‘90s universities admitted students from more socially diverse backgrounds than they are today.
Programmes like Medicine, Engineering and Law comprised a mix of individuals from diverse social-economic backgrounds.
Today, owing to the nature of pupils in primary schools securing places in elite secondary schools, these programmes are socially homogeneous. The students who attend private primary schools eventually end up dominating the more competitive programmes in universities. As such, growing up in a poor home in a rural area is a handicap.
When relatively economically disadvantaged students end up in university, there is a greater chance of them getting admitted in those programmes perceived to be unpopular. Most of these programmes are often those that comprise huge classes, are superficially taught and are usually the easiest for universities to mount as they require little physical or financial resources. And because of the limited agency that socially disadvantaged students have in making a choice of both the university programme and campus of choice, it is mostly this category of students that often act as sites of experiment for far-flung university campus or newly established ‘political’ university campuses that need students to start off.
The situation is even more complicated for graduate studies. It is no longer possible for ‘sons and daughters of peasants’ to access graduate studies. For the past 10 years, graduate studies in local universities have more than tripled.
Meanwhile, most universities no longer offer scholarships to bright but needy students. A graduate study has become an elitist preoccupation. The higher education system now rewards more the paying rather than the capable student.
To address the inequality in education, the government must stop politicising education, and move from articulating provision of education as a political freebie, to provision of free education as a basic right. This means heavy investment in public education.
Public education should not be allowed to suffer the same fate as the public health sector. Further, there is need for proper resource based devolution of the education function to counties. In Germany, where education is completely devolved to the states, healthy competition has improved quality.
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