Gove'd

This is a comment I placed on the Guardian website in April, I thought it would be worth repeating here...

 How did your day start? Did you walk in form the car park and have to deal with an incident before you even reached the door. Did you find you day changed because of an issue or an extra meeting tacked on that nobody could have predicted yesterday. Did you get a phone call from a 'client' or have to deal with a fight (physical or verbal) between two angry immature protagonists which took out your lunchtime. Did you have to abandon your intended task because of changes to the day forced by a late arrival to a meeting or surly disobedience over what should be a routine task?

Remember that day when you gave a presentation, the one where the audience listened politely and you could flow through it even though you were nervous? Remember how tired you were afterwards from the strain of it, now imagine doing that five times a day, different things each time, to an occasionally delighted and attentive but sometimes disinterested and often sleep deprived trigger happy audience.

Maybe your day started slowly as you shifted work around so you could linger over that first coffee of the day or soften the impact a little, maybe change your lunch round. When is your holiday? Did you book your dates to take advantage of that super low season offer? Those precious two weeks at the start of July when its half price? Or the last two weeks of September somewhere warm...

Did you worry today because 10% of your measured output statistics slopes off every lunchtime to smoke dope in an old factory and their 'home supervisors' are ineffective, and that 10% represent the difference between you being seen as an effective worker and a failure.

Did you open the paper momentarily and wince when someone who has NEVER taught a lesson in their life decided to hack your working conditions around because everyone KNOWS, like DEEP DOWN IN THEIR SOUL, that teachers are a lazy bunch of feckless cosseted over privileged and overpaid wingers upon whose pampered shoulders sits the blame for the ills that plague society.

In the past 7 years as an Educational Consultant I have constantly challenged the 'Pub Man' view of teachers as undeserving of sympathy and praise. I have issued invitations dozens of times to take people into schools and arrange a work experience. As a teacher for 12 years I offered to do a job swap for a week with many many critical people. Only one ever took up the offer because he was investigating becoming a secondary teacher. After a week in a pretty good school with much support, just trying it out, he went back to his safe job.

There are good sound reasons for teachers having holidays, in reality they are , especially for primary teachers, used a lot of the time to plan and develop the next new ideas and cope with the often 'dropped on from on high' new initiatives that need to be shoehorned into an ever more packed, burdened and subject to random events day. I know teachers who work every evening and at least one day per weekend and still always feel there is more to do.

There are people who work harder than teachers in this country, there are people who work in more risky environments, but they are not in the huge numbers and constant pressure to conform / change and innovate that teachers are. Look at the present number of people leaving teaching, or even never starting having invested large sums of their own money in retraining or studying.

Take care Mr Gove, your legacy may be a huge shortage of teachers. Baker gave us Baker days as a common phrase (training days). You may leave us with the epithet for why a promising talented person has thrown in the towel even before they properly take up their position. "Goved"

Too close for comfort?

Strange thing happening in the world of Technology, probably something that's been creeping up on us for the past decade but now its getting more prevalent.  Being nice to sponsors.  Let me elaborate briefly and then put a sting linked to education at the end as usual...

I use a lot of Technology, known for it, and I tended to use specific review sites which started up as people like me, buying stuff, checking it out, and being honest (sometimes brutally) about its shortcomings back in the mid 'Noughties'.  Now though the sites I see seem commercialised to such a degree that products are rarely panned if bad and often artfully praised.

There are a few distinct ways this happens which usually accompany a certain scenario such as:

• We've just come back from (Insert expensive overseas destination) to test (Product that doesn't need to be reviewed there)
• This exciting new range (exciting is interchangeable with new, doesn't necessarily mean good)
• Exclusively showed us (under a tight leash about whats reported)
• Available in (unspecified dates) the autumn /winter etc
• Great for (Insert group which will want a specific trumpeted feature but rest of product is a dog)
• A great new range of (insert product that has nothing to do with the review sites focus but it was a free junket)

In the past manufacturers and PR firms had to really listen to users.  One user with a blog had enormous power to influence key decision makers to buy.  This was often highlighted as a great democratisation of the internet and how the buying public would have an influence on the quality of goods.  Unfortunately the PR machine is far cleverer and organised than individuals, and companies such as Future Publishing have bought up many of what you thought were independent blogs and review sites which they regularly publish with fawning editorials and distinctly artfully worded reviews.  When the lead story is that phone maker X has released Y in a NEW COLOUR, you know someone's snout is, or will be, in the trough somewhere.  When information becomes a commodity then the PR gatekeepers have the power to affect what is said and done.

So what has this got to do with education, with reports and strange swings in approach and marking with English GCSE's?  Nothing Mr Gove, or at least that's what your advisers and closely allied educational 'organisations' will tell you.  And like the review sites, if that's all you use to form your opinions, objective criticism will be the first casualty.

The previous post was about my decision to work mainly in ICT now rather than Technology Education and how the landscape has changed.  This one is about what and where Technology Education is heading.

Technology education is in danger of disappearing into the 'black box syndrome'. We carry, interact and experience amazingly well designed tech.  Reviews are mostly quibbles about how slow or tricky a feature is but generally we are satisfied with our technology.  Same for cars, TV's, buildings etc.

But these are to most people opaque black boxes.  We have no real idea of how they work or are made, we only touch the switches.

Design in schools is necessarily limited by students ability, time and equipment available and though we see some great stuff promoted, most projects are nothing like the items we buy in shops.  This is accelerating with every year bringing in goods that are wonderful but to most of society, unfathomable.  We have already passed Arthur C Clarke's 'Magic' definition when we interact with a monolithic metal and glass slab to see what the weather is like in Mongolia right now.

Schools will never win this arms race.  The solution is to develop thinking skills allied with practical abilities. Lego Robots and construction kits, solving small scale problems. Reducing the difficulty of making and focussing on interacting.  Programming already has this issue.  The tools and projects companies work on are so far above what is affordable and possible in schools that a coding club will always be limited in what it can achieve, so instead innovate.

Imagine a watering system for a plant.  Up till now we would have preferred a computer controlled or electronic timer version which students built and put in a box.  Innovation was the big thing but now Arduino and other platforms allow you to buy the sensors ready made and just plug it together, and the core Arduino boards are so complex, you couldn't solder a reasonable one in schools if you wanted to.  PIC systems work well but need expensive sensors and gizmo's to work and the final solution is a black box with often crudely trailing wires.  It's a proof of skill, not a product or desirable outcome.

Now imagine the project WITHOUT electronics. Imagine a student version of those watering spikes that reuse a coke bottle as a reservoir.  Students can redesign the pipes and fittings for specific uses, experiment with different spike designs, make them nestable using 3D graphics and create them with 2D and low cost 3D tools.  The focus shifts from learning about the electronics  to learning broad tools that can be applied to a variety of uses quickly.  Those tools can be combined with electronics or other systems later when students choose that career path.  These are not stupid dumbed down projects, but intelligent useful outcomes applicable to a wide range of learning scenarios.  The outcomes are usable and understandable by wider society rather than black boxes.

We probably have to shift the high tech upstream a bit, ensure our students understand how to use a restricted but effective set of tools that create real outcomes.  We did this in the past when the choice was limited to chisels planes and marking gauges, we need the modern equivalent now because otherwise, in trying to do everything, we have too little time to do much at all.

Status Change

To those who have followed this Blog assiduously, time for a change for the moment.  I have been an Educational Consultant for 8 years, changing from Teacher to Consultant was a big deal and though generally I have loved it over this time, the work has diminished enormously in the past 12 months.  I start a post linked to ICT in the next few weeks, and will relegate mostof my  consultancy to occasional projects as required. It is hard to know whether to feel sad or relieved as the work has been dipping over the past two years, but especially has become much harder to find, and taking longer to get paid for.

So this post is a history of design education since I went to school, very brief, don't worry I 'll try to keep it zippy, and the post after this will be about the future of technology education as I see it.

I was one of the first cohort to do 'Design'.  My O'level practical in woodwork was to come up with a mechanism that created a two tone chime for a student radio station and there had never been an exam like it before, baffling many teachers.  My grammar focussed school did not offer A'Level Design, I  am not sure whether anyone did then, but I did Technical Drawing and came top of the class in the final exams which mixed in questions about design.

After 5 years or so in the design industry, getting paid to think fast and work even faster, I retrained as a teacher and immediately found that all schools were not created equal.  Some had barely moved on from the idea of 'workshop' and I remember the granddad of one pupil bringing in his metal trowel to show it was identical to the one his grandchild had just made with me 50 years later.

It was the 1980's and design was big, but flashy and really about surface for the most part.  You could design a nice pattern but nice products were difficult with hand drawing and workshop tools.  Colourful 3D items tended to be wildly impractical in the main but a redesign of the curriculum around the early 90's brought in thoughtful design, the concept of thinking through a problem and realising a solution through trial and error.  Further reforms slowly migrated to this design for function approach and the availability of computers did much to enable students to experiment before making.

By 2000 when I took a gap in full time teaching to be a house husband, Technology in schools was still a little confused.  Many schools still did basic projects but at least students got to work in all disciplines, not just boys in woodwork and girls in sewing.  I was fortunate to return to teaching at a school which had recently gained technology status, along with considerable funding to make it work, and took it very seriously.  I thrived for much of the time though having more ideas than organisational skill then was a bit of a downer.  There were still schools around which stuck to dull lifeless projects but they became fewer in number each year.  I felt like I knew what was cutting edge and useful, built on the shoulders of yesterday successes and misses in education.

When I became a Consultant in 2005, Technology and prosperity were seen as hand in hand.  Many many projects were funded by Government to promote Technology education and skill the students and teachers in schools.  I was involved in setting up an Engineering centre where we hoped to develop and promote innovative creation applications of engineering.  Across the education sector many companies put their name to projects and competitions but in the main, then as now, it was Government funded.  It may have been called the green grass of home bolt initiative or something equally funky but trace the funding back through local regional arts and creativity organisations (all taking a cut of the funding available) and you eventually got back to Whitehall.

It has always been the case that outside funding has driven innovation in Technology Education where it has been successful in passing from school to school.  Teachers given time to visit others, regional excellence hubs, consultants and professional organisations all played a part but they were overwhelmingly dependent on the Government for their funding.  That funding has either dried up or been 'un ring-fenced' which means schools can use it for other more pressing needs.  Government political focus on core curriculum and other initiatives have further relegated Technology and other subjects to the sidelines.  Long gestating curriculum reforms haven't helped either.  The Internet has been one bright spark, helping people like me reach people like you, but at the end of the day someone has to pay for things to be developed and communicated and people trained.  Even if you use a current teacher, it will cost you to send them to another school by covering their time away.  Compared to a network consultant, I am cheap as chips, but I still cost...

A recent project was a fixed bid at 3 days.  I knew I could do it in this time, probably as 6 half days with a few meetings with staff.  That project has now taken 11 days because it is so hard to talk to staff.  They are keen, they are motivated but they are constantly pulled around by monthly and weekly targets and even daily changes to their intended progress.  The additional 8 days have been unpaid and will continue to do so until the project is paid off.  I was offered some new work but would be unlikely to complete it before October because of school holidays and staff free time restrictions which means getting paid in December.

Most of the consultants have gone, or repeat the same narrow band of projects over and over.  Many were older than me and semi retired heads or department heads so it wasn't a big change for them.  I have developed and delivered 200+ projects since 2000, some of them being used internationally, but someone has to pay for my time.  That funding is now in seriously short supply so I am working in ICT instead for most of my week for a while.

Don't think I am being bitter, but I am being pointed.  Most of my work was through outside agencies or organisations.  Making change is slow at first but accelerates later.  Long term relationships with school staff is best and that is not affordable at times of decreasing budgets and (wildly) fluctuating curriculum reforms.  Only yesterday Gove announced the idea of replacing core GCSE's with a new exam.  This creates uncertainty and dependence upon political whims.  The organisations with money have shrunk.  In a way the internet allows them to show a big public face with zippy ideas and lists of people, but many are now unpaid advisor's or school staff moonlighting.

With the Technology curriculum still in discussion, and I would advise those who think they see the new direction clearly to review what happened between the initial proposals and the final draft in the LAST curriculum review, there are fewer takers for developing projects and training staff in new technology when the payback is measured in years use of the project.  The ground has shifted, and so therefore, must I.