The news yesterday of the death of Charles Kennedy, the former leader of the Liberal Democrats, at the early age of only 55 came as a bolt from out of the blue. Charles was leader of the Lib Dems when I stood for parliament as the Lib Dem candidate in the 2005  general election in the Reading East constituency .

Charles was everything I am not. He was gregarious, knew instinctively how to work a crowd, lit up any room he entered and was the perfect  person to take on a walkabout. He was the heart and soul of the Party. Charles came into politics with the rise of the SDP, whereas although I was already a member of the Liberal Party long before the early 1980s and the days of the alliance and then the merger, on many issues we had similar views.

However, education in England was not always top of Charles’ agenda, probably because he was a product of the Scottish school and higher education systems. However, he was steadfast during his period as leader about supporting the abolition of tuition fees across the United kingdom.

The news is especially saddening since on Monday evening I had chaired a meeting of the Liberal Democrat Education Association. It was an extremely positive affair, already looking forward to the part the Association can play in helping develop policies for this parliament and beyond, hopefully of the very sort that Charles would have approved. After all, education is the key to progress and to deny education to any young person is to limit their opportunities. One challenge is still to reinforce this message to those in society that either don’t want to or don’t care to hear it.

One thing that being in politics helps you face up to is that life must go forward. After a period of mourning and reflection there are new challenges to face and political battles to fight. So, on the day the Liberal Democrats again passed the 60,000 member mark I celebrate the work of those that helped us shape the past, recognise the challenges of today and step out on the journey into the future taking with me the lessons learnt from those such as Charles Kennedy who had achieved so much, but still left those remaining with yet more to strive for.

Many years ago I was travelling back from a conference in the USA on an Air New Zealand flight where the newspapers handed out to passengers were New Zealand daily papers a couple of days old. Among the articles in one paper was a review of an education conference at which a DfES official – I think it was during that period of initials – had noted that many Asian countries had larger classes than in England and perhaps we might want to consider whether or not to copy them. I passed the item on to the education press when I reached England. The resulting piece in the now long gone weekly Education duly appeared under the headline that appears at the top of this blog. I was reminded of that episode, and the unfortunate civil servant who no doubt thought going all the way round the world he would be safe to speculate on such issues without anyone back home noticing – note for younger readers, this was in TDBI, the days before the internet, when it was normally safe to say things at conferences down under without any comeback in London – on reading about a report on the BBC Education page. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-29063679

All this is by way of introduction to the new research published today by GEMS Education Solutions, but not yet seemingly available on their web site. According to the BBC Report, the researchers looked at education indicators from around the world and raked the UK – note it was the UK and not England – in 11^th place. Two of the indicators were class sizes and teachers’ pay. Assuming that smaller class sizes don’t bring better results is, as I have shown above, not a new discussion and neither is teachers’ pay and remuneration. Outside of Helsinki, I don’t know what the demand for graduates is like in the rest of Finland compared with the output of new graduates. Wages may be relatively low because demand isn’t strong or because the national labour market has narrower differentials between jobs requiring a higher degree of education and those that don’t. There is evidence here that in the past depressing the pay of teachers reduces interest in the profession. Indeed, teachers are one of the few groups that have not benefited from the extra holidays most workers now receive. Fourteen weeks without pupils does not equate to 14 weeks of holiday whatever some of the press think. Add in INSET days, the days before and after term, parents’ evenings, the hours it is generally agreed teachers work during term-time, and it soon dips below the 8 weeks many professionals receive after holiday entitlement, bank holidays and the Christmas closures.

The main argument against bigger classes is that the classrooms simply wouldn’t accommodate them in many schools. Also at the start of schooling there are already wide differences between the stages of development of many children. Making them learn in larger groups won’t reduce that gap. As the statistics show, and has been reported on this blog, average class sizes have reduced in the secondary sector over the past few years while results have improved. Does that fact counter evidence of larger classes elsewhere? How do the researchers account for the behaviour of the private sector in this respect? I believe that GEMS did have schools with different class sizes in The Gulf, but I have no knowledge of them trying such an idea here. Perhaps they might experiment with offering a school with larger classes, but lower fees than is normal in the private sector, in a UK city and examine the results. My hunch is that there wouldn’t be many takers, but I am willing to be proved wrong.

Following on from yesterday’s post about current levels of recruitment into teacher training among graduates, I have been delving further into the data. One interesting aspect is the data provided about the age of applicants. Overall, the number of applicants increased from some 23,000 to almost 44,000; an increase of around 80% between January and mid-August. However, the increase among younger candidates has been somewhat smaller at just 42% for the youngest group of new graduates; up from around four and a half thousand in January to some six and a half thousand in mid-August.  By contrast, the increase in applications from potential trainees in their thirties has been from just over three thousand to more than six and a half thousand; an increase of more than 100%. While it is good to have a mix of ages entering the profession, those that join as teachers in their 30s, and especially their late 30s, have traditionally struggled to have their previous work experience recognised and to progress in their new career, although there have been some notable exceptions to this rule.

So why has this lack of young recruits come about? Could it be that the new fee levels are something of a deterrent? After all, older entrants may have paid off their previous student debts, and be prepared to take on one year of new debt as the cost of changing careers whereas new graduates are looking forward to a fourth year of debt that may seem less attractive than a salary. As a result, the School Direct Salaried route looks a bit like a perverse incentive, aimed as it is at the career changer with at least three years of work experience. However since there have been only 2,700 of these recruited among the potential 29,000 graduate entrants they clearly aren’t making a huge difference to the total.

At present, we don’t know whether older applicants are being discriminated against in terms of the numbers being made offers. However, they are more likely to have a stake in the community and want to teach close to where they train. From that respect, it is interesting that London has attracted the largest number of applicants of ant region in England; over eight and a half thousand, compared with six thousand each in the South East and North West regions.  The lack of any London supplement in funding doesn’t seem to be putting off applicants from applying to train with providers in the capital. It would be helpful to know more about the age profile of those applying in the different regions, but that will have to wait until the annual report is published by UCAS, probably next year.

Before then, I hope that there will have been a review of the first year of the new application system. It had an inauspicious start last November, and I don’t think offering three choices through the Apply 1 route right up to August helps either candidates or providers fill the places still available just before courses start. I would add the number of training places and the number still available to the information provided to candidates, as the DfE did last year when they managed the School Direct application site.

Perhaps the Carter Review Team can have a think about the application process or UCET, NASBITT, the professional associations and the NCTL can get together with the DfE and have a frank discussion about how we can best recruit candidates into training for 2015.

Political parties are like large extended families. And, like families, every member has their own way of looking at the world even as they join together in confronting it. This week I have lost two good political friends from the Liberal Democrat family; one by choice, the other by sudden death. My memories of both are connected through education. In the case of Richard Grayson, who has publicly made it known that he has allowed his Party membership to lapse, it was initially as the author of the first ever pamphlet produced by the Centre for Reform, produced soon after Richard became its founding director in the late 1990s. Discipline in Schools, which he authored, and to which I lent my name as the joint author, was a short pamphlet about an issue that has plagued schools throughout history. Richard went on to much greater heights within the Party, including helping to write the 2001 general election manifesto, and now holds a senior academic post at Goldsmiths in London. He taught me much about the art of politics.

I am sad to see Richard leave the Lib Dem Party, but I think I know why he has reached his decision, one that was not, I am sure, reached lightly. Andrew Bridgwater’s sudden death that I leant about last weekend has robbed the Party of one if its key champions for education in general, and special education in particular. Andrew was no happier with the current direction of the Lib Dems than Richard was, and made that fact clear on many different occasions during his period of office as Chair of the Liberal Democrat Education Association, an office that only ended as recently as this year’s spring conference. He was delighted to have joined me as a Vice President of the Association. Andrew was at one time a councillor in Hackney, and I first got to know him when I joined the small group that met Don Foster regularly in the late 1990s to discuss education policy when Don was the Party’s shadow spokesperson on Education.

In recent years Andrew would often ring me up for a conversation about the state of education policy, and I knew I was in for a long and thorough discussion.  Andrew was a strong supporter of the motion Peter Downes and I put to the 2010 Liverpool Conference about academies and free schools. His most recent successes included work on the role of governing bodies and the wider need for the strong governance of schools to prevent the community being excluded from the decision-making process; a policy he was passionate about.

Despite his move a few years ago to Devon, Andrew still regularly made the long journey to Birmingham for the LDEA Executive meetings, and frequently to London for meetings of the parliamentary group. Andrew’s plain speaking was not to everyone’s liking, but that is the nature of families. He was also a strong supporter of the LDEA annual conference in Nottingham. Within the wider Party, he was recently the regional Vice-Chairman and fought the Totnes Division in this year’s county council elections, losing to the Green Candidate, and thus forming another bond, since I once lost a by-election in Oxford to a Green Party Candidate.  

I will miss Andrew’s boundless energy and determined view of the direction Liberal Democrat education policy should take, and I am especially sorry I didn’t have the opportunity to say good-bye. Andrew, thank you for everything you did for Lib Dem politics: especially for your contribution to my own thinking, particularly in the area of special needs.  I will miss you.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws. 

From Tennyson’s In Memoriam

Am I a blob, or at least an ally? Yesterday, Michael Gove wrote in his newspaper column that ‘we have given a majority of secondary schools academy status so they are free from the influence of The Blob’s allies in local government.’  By blobs’ he was referring to the 100 academics that wrote a letter to the independent newspaper last week opposing his reforms for the curriculum. So where do I stand?

At the start of my career in education I taught for seven years in Tottenham, and I know how challenging inner city schools can be. After all, I suffered being stabbed and having my nose broken in front of a class of pupils. I also taught the first pupil in my comprehensive school to win a place at Cambridge, and stage managed the first school group ever to win the adult Southgate Drama Festival. I also joined the profession as an untrained graduate, and this hampered my ability to teach effectively during my early years in the classroom.

I do agree with Michael Gove that unless children acquire the basics of literacy and numeracy they cannot progress to be effective citizens in a modern democracy. However, he is as much hidebound by ideology as those he castigates in his column. He allowed a Minister to compel intending teachers to be taught phonics as the only option during their training for teaching children to read while espousing the doctrine that a school should be free to teach as it sees fit. Overall, he doesn’t seem to pay enough attention to the primary sector where most of the work in helping to create a world class education system in England probably needs to be undertaken, especially with the pressures rising pupil numbers will bring to many of these schools.  

I have long felt that the present arrangement for training primary school teachers are not always fit for purpose, and the government’s reforms won’t help that much given we have somewhere around 20,000 new entrants to training; more than one for every primary school. Where I depart from Mr Gove is over where to draw the line between rote learning and acquisition of the essential vocabulary of any subject. I think children do need to internalise a basic knowledge of their tables for the same reason they internalise the knowledge of a basic collection of letter groupings. How they achieve that goal I am happy to leave to the professionals, providing that it doesn’t take too long, and every child without special needs can acquire the skill.  

I do, however, still believe in local democratic control of education and will resist a super-NHS model for schooling driven from Westminster. I also believe that universities have an essential role to play in preparing teachers, but that they have understated their contribution. I don’t know whether it has been mere modesty or a lack of awareness of brand marketing, but now they are largely free of  government funding they might take a lesson from Teach First’s hard sell approach to quality.

So does this make me an ally of the blobs? Well, it will do if I am elected to Oxfordshire County Council this May, even if I wouldn’t have signed the letter to the Independent had I been asked.