Sean Bailey - talking Tory tornado

Shaun Bailey’s breezes into debates like a tornado, turning things on their head and challenging orthodoxies. As the black Conservative candidate for Hammersmith with 20 years experience in working in tough environments, he has earned the right to fight the next election on issues on which he knows a great deal.

He goes for the throats of the teacher unions, blaming them for betraying the students in state education by introducing undemanding environments in schools for the very people that need demands made of them. Unions deliver benefits to teachers, not students and parents. This parental involvement is a common theme among the people he speaks but they are largely excluded from the equation. It all starts in the home – damn right it does, so why do schools ignore or patronise parents so much?

As a youth worker for 20 years he sees that nobody is being really honest with the kids and parents he knows. Middle class types molly-coddle people which leads them towards almost certain failure. Lay it on the line – tell them and their parents what the consequences of educational failure actually means. Don’t pander to their every cultural need. It’s not about immersing people in the destructive side of their culture – a strong believer in sport and competition, he regrets the culture of dependency that is rampant in his community, making young black kids less, not more, independent. He says to the boys he works with, “I’ll do nothing for you but anything to help you.”

In education he is full on when it comes to classroom discipline and home-school agreements. He sees state sector education as having dropped the ball on these issues. Make sure the parents sign a document making it clear what their responsibilities are. I’m with him here. Our home-school agreement is written in that vague institutional style and says nothing about actual responsibilities. It even includes jargon that only an educational professional would understand. Schools are ‘educational’ establishments, not holding pens. He doesn’t really buy the idea that schools are the key to Community Cohesion and every fashionable social theory that pops up.

Much as I disagree with his politics, he’s a good guy and we need people like him to stimulate an otherwise moribund debate. His straight-talking style and honesty is what’s badly needed in parliament.

OFSTED's own Xena the Warrior Princess

Zenna Atkins is the Chair of OFSTED and a force of nature. A good 6 foot in heels she tells it as it is and isn’t afraid to have a go at all of those educational moralisers who use OFSTED as an excuse for their own failures. Expelled from school with only one o-level, she’s become an experienced social entrepreneur and operator in large public sector bodies. I spoke on the same platform as her at a Channel 4 event this week and she booted things off in fine fashion. You can see her at Portsmouth games just behind the corner flag bad mouthing opposition players.

Don’t blame ofsted

She’s more than a little impatient with teachers and others who simply point elsewhere, usually to OFSTED, when people try to identify weaknesses and improve education. Sure OFSTED has its weaknesses, but who would deny that bad teaching exists, that there are too many people teaching who don’t want to be there and shouldn’t be there, that schools are poorly run fiscally? Are we really saying that they should not be inspected?

Schools infantalise parents

Her second theme was a powerful argument against blaming parents. One teacher in the audience described ‘the prejudice of parents’. The simple fact is that 60% of parents left school with qualifications we regard as being less than satisfactory. School, for the majority of parents, is somewhere they do not want to revisit, as it is where they were marked as failures. She herself describes how she feels nervous when visiting schools and often feels as if she’s being told off in conversations with staff. No wonder parents are not engaged with the education of their children. Schools infantalise parents.

Relevance

Is the curriculum relevant? Not on your Nellie. As an employer she looks for autonomy and whether the students has stuck a paper round, rather than qualifications. So much of what is taught is only relevant to the minority of students. The lack of relevance to survival, never mind employment is astonishing.

Technology

Also an advocate of technology she has no time for those who shilly shally behind excuses for not getting on with the task of using the technology that learners already use in their daily lives.

Fearless

Now here’s why I love Xena. At the end of her talk she rattled out some politically sensitive ideas around ‘kids teaching kids’, ‘ linking benefits to ‘school attendance and performance’, making the money ‘follow the kids’. I’ve never heard public servants speak like this in public and being so unafraid of the press. Xena then shot off for her appraisal, leaving a shocked audience in her not inconsiderable wake.

Give me 10,000 Xenas

We need far more people like Xena on public sector boards. She’s smart, understands her domain, has empathy with the people she’s trying to help, and is vocal. Far too many boards are packed with people who shy way from controversy or contention. We need people who scrutinise, debate and work towards change. In education there are far too many people making decisions on the state sector while sending their own kids private. Far too many who are part of some small network, often ‘London-based’. Then there’s the tokenism of diversity, focusing on equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity. The system is atherosclerotic, gummed up with the plaque of tokenism and traditionalism.

£20 million down same old drain

Hope you caught the announcement this week on boosting e-learning. My worst fears about Digital Britain are coming true. Hot on the heels of the retro Digital Britain day and visionless report, we have the first major act and it’s the same old establishment rot.

The Open Learning Innovation fund will team up established laggards with large US corporations to fritter away yet more of your money. Have they learnt nothing from BBC Jam, UKUniversities, NHSU etc etc. Having already poured well over £100 million into these disasters, the powers that be are determined to burn even more of our money.

And it gets worse. It will be chaired by Dame Lynne Brindley, the CEO of the British Library. So the future of innovation in e-learning will be in the hands of a librarian! Don’t worry though, Microsoft are also on the board (yikes!)....and the British Council (why?). Then there’s the good old BBC in as advisors. So BBC Jam has been quietly buried. The very people who frittered away tens of millions in a failed attempt to produce content (while destroying the market) are seen as the best of breed advisors. You couldn’t have gathered a more useless, backward looking bunch of laggards if you tried.

Education’s dark duplicitous secret

Despite more than doubling the spend in UK schools, only marginal, measurable improvement has been seen. Yet even this may not be down to schools themselves. Interesting data is emerging about the dramatic increase in that same period of private tuition. The Sutton Trust has found that 43% of 11-16 state pupils in London have been tutored. Could it be that schools are delivering less and that private tuition and parental support are the real causes behind the measured improvement?

Is tuition legal?

Teachers who fight tooth and nail against the influence of the private sector in schools are coining it of an evening through private tuition. And how many of those thousands of tutors declare this on their tax returns? The acceptance of middle-class 'cash-only crime has always been part of British culture. How many have done a risk assessment when they deliver this service from home? How many have a contract (as they should with the parents/carers)? How many have insurance? What would happen if there was an accusation of assault or inappropriate conduct?

Schools spend unbelievable amounts if time on this stuff (Governors meetings are largely about reading and approving such policies), yet how many tutors pay even lip service to these issues when moonlighting? How many have even checked with their employer that they’re allowed to do this, especially with students from the school in which they teach?

Duplicity?

I’m fine with teachers doing private tuition, although I’m not fine when it’s combined with complaints about long hours and being worked too hard. If you don’t have time to mark homework, or commit wholly to your main job, I’m not sure you should be topping it up with more teaching. I’m also against the anti-corporate views expressed by teachers in schools, who are quite happy to play the game themselves outside of the school gates.

Get it into the open

Wouldn’t it be better to get this all of this into the open? Why doesn’t the school openly offer these services on behalf of the teachers who want to make some extra cash? It’s all so ‘cloak and dagger’ at the moment. I suspect that it’s all a bit of an embarrassment.

Digital Britain: Carter's charter for luvvies & lawyers

You know you’re in for disappointment when the opening sentence is, “On 26 August 1768, when Captain James Cook set sail for Australia, it took 2 years and 320 days.....” Stevie boy then compares this with Google. Some comparisons are odious, this is just stupid.

The report landed in my inbox like an octopus falling from a tree. Is this the best they can do? Carter’s badly written, novel-length report is a charter for the analogue professions; luvvies, farmers and lawyers. It’skewed towards old media like TV and radio, lacks vision, focuses on the past not the future, and stinks of lobbying by the professions. Where’s the citizen in all this? Most of us will simply end up paying more and being threatened by lawyers over peer-to-peer use.

TV talk digital future, geeks create it

The London Luvvies, and press, immediately leapt on the BBC/ITV/C4 funding stuff. Who gives a toss? The BBC, ITV and C4 are TV companies. The digital future is about the web, not TV! I don’t give a damn how they slice up the licence fee among themselves. In practice this brouhaha is only of interest to London media types. The reality is that there’s been a vast overpayment to the BBC for the Digital Switchover (a mess of a project) that would be better spent elsewhere. Simple as that. The National Audit Office calculate this at around £250 million. How did that happen? It makes £75 million wasted on BBC Jam seem like a bar bill. The controversy in all of this should be incompetent budgeting, not slicing up the TV tax? TV people love to think that they’re creating the digital future, when the reality is that they’re mired in the past. Can you name a single person in TV, or from a TV background, who’s created a Google, Youtube, Wikipedia, Facebook, Myspace, iTUNES, Flikr,Twitter or anything meaningful and long-lasting on the web? Of course not. While TV people run conferences on the future, businesses and geeks create it.

Digital Radio

Again, who gives a damn? Radio’s an old analogue medium that’s not worth mentioning in this report. We’re going to scrap millions of domestic and car radios at an enormous price environmentally to replace them with expensive digital radios that give you the same thing? Radio’s an analogue footnote.

Is Carter boss of Inland revenue?

So Carter has decided he’ll slap a poll tax us urban types to pay for laying in broadband for those lovely country folk. So I pay for twats who run around in 4X4s while living off vast EC farm subsidies. If you want to live in the country for the ‘peace and quiet’ why do you want the cacophony of the internet and broadband access to play Halo? They’re perfectly happy listening to crap like the Archers. Leave them alone.

And if we do go ahead and give BT and others this money, surely we should have a stake? When we subsidised the banks, we took equity. This is public money raised by a tax, so why not demand a stake? Carter’s revealed his background here – he’s a telco business guy at heart. What’s worse this levy is likely to stick and be included in future pricing.

Criminalise customers

This was the funny bit. The government pass the buck to OFCOM who pass the buck to the ISPs who pass the buck to the rights holders who take kids to the courts. This, of course, is unworkable. It’s a charter for lawyers. “a court-based process of identity release and civil action" We’ve been through all of this. You can’t take millions of people to court, most of them children. Send them letters if you will – they’ll be ignored. Customers will be outraged that their services will be cut because of file sharing by their children from sites they’ve never heard of and over which they have no control.

IP for gardeners

“NESTA will pilot a simplified IP framework for digital media bringing together PACT, the Cabinet Office, Kew Gardens and Arts Council England.” Kew gardens? This bag of quangos will take years to get an agenda together and another couple of years squabbling and by that time the world will have moved on. On p199 there’s a peculiar paragraph on Botanical gardens and Kew. They’re a leading edge digital media organisation, allegedly!!!! Someone on the report team must be fond of gardening.

Digital inclusion

Martha Lane –Fox is our new Champion for Digital exclusion. Martha is to represent the estimated six million adults who are both socially and digitally excluded. I think not. Martha, bless her silk socks, doesn’t know any poor people. This is like appointing Wayne Rooney as Champion for Higher Education.

Digital self-exclusion

Here’s an interesting paragraph...“Among non Internet using groups a common response to “digital self-exclusion” is that they say they are living contentedly offline and see no real need or benefit to going online. Despite the advantages of digital participation, as outlined in this document, 43% of those asked in a recent Ofcom study said that even if offered a ‘free computer and broadband subscription’, they still would not choose to be online.” Wow! It pops up, is ignored, yet the whole report is premised on the idea that it’s good for them. This is an idea that needs to be explored further, but it is not.

The reports a messy, fudge that focuses far too much on old media. BBC is mentioned 169 times, Google gets 6, FaceBook 5, Twitter 3, YouTube 2, iTunes 1, Games 0, Xbox 0, Playstation 0, Second Life 0, Wikipedia 0. It’s as if the internet doesn’t really exist and that the digital future is an issue for broadcasters.

Martha Lane-Fox - digital exclusion tzar!

Where did this one come from? She’s the new “champion for Digital Inclusion”

Now just look at this picture for a few seconds. Does this look like someone who is familiar with exclusion? I can just hear those civil servants, ponder, “We need someone who understands the problems of the underclass, poverty and exclusion. Someone who gets the whole sink-estate, drugs, wrecked lives thing. Barrow Boy Sugar’s been snapped up by Mandelson. How about that well-heeled, posh bird who built a website a few years ago? Yeah, her, the private school, Oxford educated one with the double-barrelled name". Absolutely perfect.

To be fair she has kept in touch with the inclusion agenda, and poor people, as she’s set up an ‘interior design’ company ‘mydeco’ and is on the board of Marks & Sparks.

Why I’m sick of Stephen Fry

The Digital Britain conference ended with a speech from Stephen Fry. The Digital Britain report has a quote from Stephen Fry. Why Fry? Why has he become the touchstone for technical advice? Because he uses Twitter. That’s about it folks.

Well not quite. Those civil servants love meeting celebs, especially posh, foppish, Oxbridge, Footlights celebs, as it doesn’t make them feel grubby. He’s one of them. There’s no other group in the world that would see a fat, ugly, posh bloke in a bad suit as a role model. Actually, there is another group – TV types. He’s loved by Luvvies. Public broadcasting loves the ‘Fry’. He’s appeals perfectly to the Archers listening, Middle-England audience, who need to have gay issues and other risqué topics mediated by one of their own in that annoying 50s BBC English voice

I also hate the quiz show QI (is that the most patronising title for an entertainment show ever?), with the smug Alan Davies et al playing around with puns in that sneering, pseudo-intellectual style, so beloved of Radio 4 listeners. The tour of the US in a London Cab was pathetic, a truly patronising piece of junk. All of those bit parts in third rate British movies and now the awful Kingdom – a drama about a lawyer (compelling idea eh?). Then there’s that pathetic letter he wrote to himself, pretending to be some sort of modern Voltaire.

Don’t get me wrong I don’t hate Stephen Fry, it’s the idea of Stephen Fry and his sycophantic audience I dislike. What, in the end, is Stephen Fry? He’s a TV presenter and bit actor who’s written some pot-boiler paperbacks. A National Treasure they say, one I’d like to bury.