All NEETs now? A comment on the Coalition’s ‘Building Engagement, Building Futures’.

Stung by alarming rates of youth unemployment, the number of NEETs and still on the  back foot  over last summer’s riots; the Coalition government has published a ‘strategy’ document aimed at increasing participation rates of 16-24 year olds in education, training and employment.

Building Engagement, Building Futures contains few surprises. It reiterates government rhetoric that the way to improve participation in education is by increasing school autonomy, expanding the number of academies and free schools; but also by creating university technical colleges and studio schools – so helping to raise the attainment of pupils who might otherwise have disengaged from traditional schooling. It emphasises government commitment to increased attainment in English and maths and it reaffirms  intentions to give teachers more power to deal with poor behaviour, so preventing it from impacting on young people’s education.

 Continuing with New Labour’s proposals to raise the participation age to 17 and then 18; for those over 16 it promises further improvements in vocational learning and more apprenticeships. Building Engagement argues that new proposals for bursaries will be more cost-effective than the previous EMA.  It also reaffirms Coalition proposals for the new ‘youth contract’ providing subsidised employment and new work experience opportunities and to simplify   the benefit system through introducing a Universal Credit.  We should have serious reservations about the education reforms and the youth contract. We must also ask questions whether any of the initiatives can work, based on the level of funding that’s being committed. The key problem with Building Engagement however, is its overall perspective. 

The opening lines of chapter 1 argue that the ‘the majority of young people succeed in education and make a positive transition to adult life and the world of work…’ In other words, the failure of the NEETs needs to be contrasted with the success of the rest of young people ‘more than 96% of 16 year olds and 87% of 17 year olds were participating in education or work-based learning at the end of 2010 – more than ever before’.  The reality however is that more and more young people are facing a crisis of transition. As well as those officially labelled as NEETs, thousands of those who have worked hard, passed their exams and in many cases, progressed into higher education now find they have a mountain of debt and are also working in jobs which neither match their aspirations nor reflect their level of education; that is assuming they have proper employment at all. Rather than increasing skill levels and improving their chances of social mobility, as Building Engagement implies, remaining in education for a prolonged period, has been a pragmatic response to the absence of other alternatives.

 The increase in university tuition fees, Michael Gove’s policies to make academic education more exclusive (and more selective?) and the pruning of existing vocational and applied education in favour of non-existent apprenticeships can only result in education becoming more unequal. It will also increase the likelihood that many of those in the ‘squeezed middle’ – not just the NEETs, will be worse off than their parents.  Rather than a  minority of young people needing additional help to compensate for poor levels of basic skills, the most highly schooled generation of young people is finding it is  ‘overqualified and underemployed’. In the absence of any serious plan B for the economy, education faces a crisis of legitimacy. 

Martin Allen

Two Manifestos for the fight against fees

Book reviews for Post-16 Educator  by Patrick Ainley

 ‘A Manifesto for the Public University’ John Holmwood (ed.)  (2011) London Bloomsbury

‘The Assault on Universities, A Manifesto for Resistance’  Michael Bailey  and Des Freedman (eds) (2011) London, Pluto

Where are we?

As Andrew McGettigan asked on his Critical Education blog at the end of 2011, noting

‘ the government’s strategy for higher education…is wide-ranging: dispersed, piecemeal and already underway in order to rush through change by the end of this parliament in 2015.’ In the haste, he says, some things like loans have been botched, ‘but that doesn’t necessarily aid those campaigning against the reforms’.

He predicts, ‘ primary legislation in 2012 on universities… [probably] as a Higher Education Bill.’ Key measures here will be: ‘Changes to degree awarding powers and the restrictions on the use of the “university” title including the possibility of allowing bodies that do no teaching, such as Pearson plc, to award degrees. Introducing a single regulatory framework to create a “level playing field” for private and for-profit providers to compete against the established HE institutions. Allowing universities to change their corporate form more easily so as to be better able to access private finance. This will involve legislation governing the charitable status of public universities. This is most likely to allow ex-Polytechnics which are “higher education corporations” to change to forms, such as “company limited by guarantee”, that would allow them to issue bonds’

As he concludes, These measures ‘extend the new market in undergraduate recruitment by allowing more operations, while tight controls on the overall numbers of students are to be retained. More outfits fighting for the same students.’ Adding, ‘Any campaigning in 2012 has to be aware of these points of leverage. It will be a protracted passage through parliament but it is important to take these issues to a general public – and they lack the headline impact of fees.

Two manifestos, also published at the end of 2011, are perhaps symptomatic of academic resistance to the Coalition Assault on Universities.

A reasoned response

John Holmwood seeks reasoned assent to the Campaign for a Public University in seven chapters following his own introduction. With erudition and elegance his chapter draws upon the legacy of John Dewey in the development of university systems in the USA and UK to reassert ‘the principles associated with the development of mass higher education’ (p.19), ‘a university at the service of the public’ (p.25).

Michael Burawoy’s chapter, consistent with his advocacy of public sociology, also views ‘the university as a critical public sphere… organising discussion about the direction of society’ (pp.40-1). Nicola Miller and John Sabapathy similarly seek ‘a new cultural contract for universities’ (p.53) but their vision of ‘stimulating communities in which our most promising school-leavers can become thoughtful and engaged adults’ (p.55) rather follows the ‘single model of the university… in imitation of the richest universities in the West’ that Burawoy urged abandoning (p.41).

As the lone scientist in both these collections, Philip Moriarty on ‘Science as a Public Good’ opposes HEFCE and RCUK’s collusion with university management in privatising disinterested academic science by turning ‘business-facing’ universities into ‘business-led’ ones (p.58) and supports UCU’s 17,500-strong petition against the REF. Desmond King likewise opposes ESRC’s ‘shift toward funding and producing government-friendly research’ (p.76), instanced by ‘The Religion of Inequality’ described by Stephen McKay and Karen Rolinson: ‘policies aimed, not at the abatement of class differentials but at ensuring their continuation’ (p.91).

Diane Reay’s is however the only chapter to answer McKay and Rolinson’s question why the widening access in which academics invested so many illusions had such little success by showing how ‘the historic intertwining of the private schools with the elite universities… reproduces inequality’ (p.119). She therefore seeks changes in ‘The university league: from premier to third division’ (p.116), ‘disrupting notions of “the best”’ (p.120) and dispelling ‘the myth of social mobility’ (p.125). As Camila Vallejo, the Chilean student leader, has said, ‘We want to improve the educational system but not this one. We must move towards a more inclusive, truly democratic and just system.’

Instead of a manifesto to this end, Holmwood’s reasoned arguments leave Sir Steve Smith the last word to excuse the abject prostration of UUK under his Presidency as securing the best possible deal in the circumstances. However, Smith’s concluding question ‘how would those who disagree with the policies adopted by UUK have achieved those objectives?’ (p.142) is not answered by Holmwood’s contributors.

An alternative approach

By contrast, Michael Bailey and Des Freedman answer this question in 16 tight chapters divided into five sections beginning with ‘a clear vision of what the university should be: a public service, a social entitlement, a space for critical thinking and a place of discovery’ (p.10). Confronting ‘current challenges’ with ‘future visions’, their contributors draw upon student resistance and critical pedagogy to revisit ‘Student Revolts Then and Now’ with John Rees, putting what Henry Giroux calls ‘the Swindle of the Corporate University’ in a global context to ‘Re-imagine the Public Good’ (Jon Nixon).

Apart from these three, the book’s 13 other chapters are by younger lecturers and students cohered around Radical Goldsmiths and associated ideological and political currents. Yet they also share illusions in higher education’s role in ‘turning out skilled labour for British capital’ (p.35) while ignoring the mass of students for whom HE – along with the schools and FE – functions increasingly as a system of social control.

Nevertheless, their two page Manifesto advances 18 demands that Vallejo would approve but less to win the public assent that Holmwood seeks than ‘to build a counter-culture within the English university, a culture and a life which embeds a counter-rationality to neoliberalism’ (p.44). However, the grounds on which to do this will be reduced as Arts and Humanities are left to overseas students and others seriously rich enough to pay for them at elite and surviving campus universities since government has finally abolished ‘the stagnant and disabling traces of the “two cultures”’, as Miller and Sabapathy describe them (in Holmwood p.49), by funding only STEM subjects.

The majority of HEIs will thus be left jockeying for position in the manipulated market while hopes of reigniting last year’s ‘Springtime’ of student resistance have collapsed into intermittent campaigning for lecturers’ pensions – hardly a cause to excite the young! – by public sector trades unions typically and easily divided by government. Although at least one VC has confided that he is waiting for the whole shambles to collapse in two or three years’ time and David Blanchflower, the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee member has called for 100,000 more university places on the grounds that ‘You’re getting people into university and getting them off the streets’ (Times Higher 09/11/11), the Labour Party, along with NUS, now supports a graduate tax of £6000. So there are few signs of ‘the university community… developing the collective conscience’ Michael Burroway advocates (p.33).

Prospects

The prospects are therefore not good now that, as John Holmwood states, ‘It is systematic government policy… to dismantle fifty years of educational policy that sought to establish education as a social right’ (p.19). But the recent emphasis upon educationeducationeducation led to a paradoxical result in the very real phenomenon of what is incorrectly called ‘dumbing down’. This is not coincidental since education substituted itself for economic reform and tried to accommodate society to the free market, proffering illusions of upward mobility through deflated and supposedly vocational qualifications reduced towards tests of competence.

Now education at all levels returns to reinforcing more or less expensively acquired cultural capital demonstrated in the tests of literary ability that ensure entry to ‘real universities’. This reinforces the Gove-Willetts’ view that too many working-class kids have gone to ‘unreal universities’ and should return to FE apprenticeships where they belong, a view shared by many academics in ‘real unis’ and by those clinging to their research careers. It forgets that most of these students are young women and that most employers don’t require apprentices.

Meanwhile, growing numbers of young people no longer see education as a way forward to productive and meaningful lives. Instead, formal learning (and teaching) becomes performance and pretence.

Confronting this social and educational crisis through critique risks being ignored, as John Walton says in Bailey and Freedman (p.22) but unless counter-culture can find a purchase in struggle against the predictable closures and mergers that will collapse many universities into local e-training hubs it will remain isolated. Then Holmwood’s wider appeal may afford a more pragmatic way forward. Both approaches demand the ‘critical and reinvigorated vision of the social purpose of university teaching as a tool for expanding and sustaining public knowledge’ that Nick Couldry calls for in Bailey and Freedman (p.44) in a chapter appropriately entitled ‘Fighting for the University’s Life’. But this fight has to extend beyond the ‘real universities’ to which contributors to both manifestos are confined.

Book Review: Remaking the Curriculum; re-engaging young people in the secondary school

Martin Allen   Education Review  Volume 24. N0 1

Remaking the Curriculum; re-engaging young people in the secondary school.   Martin Fautley, Richard Hatcher and Elaine Millard.  Trentham Books 2011, ISBN: 978-1-85856-471-5

The very title of this book should be enough to entice secondary practitioners stuck in a daily grind; where teaching has become focussed on preparing for the next Ofsted, ensuring that students are meeting their targets and that every minute in their classroom time is accounted for.

The authors, professors of education at Birmingham City University investigate curriculum projects taking place in two local schools and designed to promote alternative approaches to learning. Using cross curricula themes and a drama-based pedagogy, the aim is to re-engage young people and re-motivate staff. In one there is an ‘enterprise’ focus, in the other, a cultural studies programme serves as the basis for the new approach. The book shows that even within the limits of the current National Curriculum it is possible to innovate, be creative and to challenge the top down  model of learning  where teachers  ‘deliver’ the curriculum to students through  predefined  lesson plans to achieve specific learning outcomes with one that is based on negotiation and  student experience.

This is not to assume that this is an easy exercise. The case studies describe how the schools had to balance traditional National Curriculum assessment recording and reporting requirements with their new classroom pedagogies. They also had to address the ‘conservatism’ and insecurities of practitioners –this does not imply these are innate, but are as much an understandable response to the climate teachers have been forced to operate in. To quote one of the participants in the study  ‘until the exam system takes account of the children learning for themselves and not just regurgitating facts, there’s always going to be a problem.’ (p.70)  This is a statement that many secondary colleagues would concur with.   In fact, Ofsted inspectors are recorded as reported as welcoming the progress made by students as a result of ‘inspirational leadership’ and a ‘new, innovative and effective curriculum.’ (p.101) 

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of the book is its discussion of the changing context in which schools are now operating in.  The authors citation  of the new 2010 Ofsted guidelines which encourage teachers to ‘guide’ rather than ‘over-direct’  pupils  and to use role play to encourage creative thinking (p.100) suggests that maybe the beast is being tamed?  More significantly, the authors also claim that the Coalition government will allow more autonomy for schools and ‘free teachers to exercise their professional judgement ‘

I  am  not  convinced that either changes to Ofsted  or the increased ‘autonomy’ that the authors consider schools will enjoy as a result of the Coalition’s  changes to education policy will allow them to move in the positive direction featured in this study.  Neither do I consider that the 2010 Academies Bill which allows the creation of ‘free schools’ is something that practitioners should welcome!

There are other issues with pioneering curriculum change. When I began teaching on an integrated humanities programme at the start of the 1980s the ‘professional space’ enjoyed by teachers did indeed allow us to ‘innovate.’ At the same time many new initiatives, particularly the coursework based CSE  ‘mode 3’  for example,  tended to be geared to ‘non academic’ students –  those taking O-levels continued to have a more standard diet.  The creation of GCSEs challenged this dichotomy to an extent, but it didn’t end it.  We have to recognise that today, while supposedly encouraging ‘autonomy’, Michael Gove is ploughing ahead with a traditional agenda and using English Baccalaureate subjects as a new benchmark for ‘success’.  

Nevertheless, regardless of any misplaced optimism, this book does try to raise spirits and send a clear message.  Providing a snapshot of what secondary education could be like,  it deserves to be taken seriously.

Casino economy no use to the jobless

ONS figures for Aug-Oct 2011

• Unemployment is 2.64 million (8.3%) up 128 000, the highest since 1994  •
• Youth unemployment (including 300 000 students looking for part-time work) is 1,027,000, up 54,000 on the quarter at 22% (14% of the youth population)
• Youth unemployment (for those not in full-time education) is 17% – up 21 000 (3%) on the quarter and 10 % of the youth population
•  600 000 16-24 year olds not in full-time education remain ‘economically inactive’

As the joblessness figure continues to rise, neither of the ‘alternatives’ coming out of the European summit last week, would appear to offer much Christmas cheer. Firstly, there is the Markel/Sarkozy invitation to sign up to a new ‘fiscal pact’ ensuring years of austerity and mass unemployment across Europe. Secondly there is Cameron’s ‘casino economy’ – where we forget any idea of ‘rebalancing’ (manufacturing output and levels of confidence have fallen again despite a ‘march of the makers’) and rely on the City and financial services industry to protect the ‘national interest’.

City leaders rushed to support Cameron last weekend – trumpeting the importance of the financial sector for growth, jobs and future economic welfare. Unfortunately, the figures do not support their arguments. Financial Services makes up 10% of GNP, still a smaller contribution than Britain’s clapped out manufacturing industries, but employs just over a million people; compared with over 2 million in manufacturing.

Over a quarter of those employed are in the City or in its Canary Wharf overspill. Even though the sector is considered to be a ‘high skills’ and ‘high earner’ less than 40% of the workforce could be considered to be in senior managers /officials or ‘professional ‘ – over a third work in ‘secretarial, administrative and sales’.

While ‘average’ salaries in London – where two thirds of the workforce are male and 50% under 35 – are about £85000, the pay of top individuals is well known. London can be contrasted with those employed in financial services in the North-East, where average pay is in the region of £27000 and where half of the workforce is over 35 and two thirds female. (FSSC AACS LMI report, Jun 2010)

The UK financial services industry, has been hit by the economic downturn of 2008 – to which it was an important contributor. As a result there has been a 5% decline in employee numbers. Industry pundits predict a pick up, but with the UK and Europe sliding into recession, this cannot be assumed. At least being out of the Euro strait-jacket however, allows a real ‘alternative’ government to promote prosperity through public spending, public investment, to plan for ‘green’ jobs and to redistribute income. Somewhat Ironically Cameron, as Larry Elliot, the Guardian’s economics editor commented (12/12/11) has made the right decision; but has done so for the wrong reasons.

Coalition policies have also meant that, rather than providing the foundation for future economic prosperity, employment in the public sector continues to fall – 375 000 jobs disappearing since the election.

Martin Allen

Dodgy examiners for dodgy exams. But what is our alternative?

Michael Gove has launched an inquiry into the Daily Telegraph’s accusations about examiners giving too much help to teachers attending their briefings. Anyone who attends these type of events, will soon recognise their primary role is about providing information about the techniques required to gain top marks, rather than improving students understanding of the subject. Maybe on these particular occasions, the examiners did go a bit too far – though it’s also clear from their reported comments, that the individuals concerned no longer considered their role as examiners as having much to do with improving the general level of education!

While the Education Secretary quickly congratulated the newspaper for its ‘responsible journalism’, like Gove, the Telegraph has a much wider brief. On the same day as it publicised its finding, the Telegraph launched another attack on the ‘dumbing down’ of education, criticised the way that schools ‘push’ pupils into easier qualifications to improve league table positions. The paper also lambasted schools for spending thousands of pounds on re-sits to improve their students’ university chances (in fact many young people have to pay for re-sits themselves).

It might seem strange that the Telegraph is attacking the privatisation and marketisation of the ‘examinations culture’ – branding it an ‘international money spinner’. Yet In doing this the paper is also giving 100% backing to Gove’s reform programme. In particular, Gove and the Telegraph want to restore the A-level to its former glory, reminding us of the time when the exam had close links with elite universities. For the Tories, A-levels are too easy and there are too many students doing them, the distinction between academic and vocational learning is now too blurred. Gove and his Telegraph supporters are intent on changing both course content and the way that it’s examined – for example by scrapping ‘modules’ in favour of traditional ‘end of course’ exams. It’s also well understood that Gove and the Telegraph consider some subjects more valuable than others and thus should be recognised in that way. For Gove  the true curriculum is of course that of the post-war grammar schools – which was in turn modeled on that of the traditional Public Schools.

Though most exam boards do still remain charities – with the WJEC, where the (now suspended) examiners work, owned by the Welsh Local Authorities, defenders of state education and teacher unions rightly attack the way commercial interests have swept into schools.  Some have now also become increasingly critical of Labour’s ‘standards agenda’ and the way in which ‘school improvements’ in the Blair/Brown days were confused with increased performance in passing tests and exams. As the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) recognises, the alleged corruption in exam boards is a consequence of a system that places ‘too high a premium on exam results and league tables and not enough on actual learning and helping young people get on’. Yet reformers urgently need to publicise their own alternatives for curriculum and assessment. At the moment, Michael Gove is the only show in town

Martin Allen