Tag Archives: technology

Geopolitics and macroeconomics

Posted on by
1

Whether the world is a more dangerous place this January isn’t for me to say. However, to balance my short-term views about teacher supply problems I thought it worth thinking about what the combined effects of a downturn in China; tensions in the Middle East; falling oil prices and the possibility of rising interest rates might do to the longer-term teacher supply position.

An analysis of data over the past fifty years suggests teacher supply problems ease when the economy is subdued or in recession. Whether there is a direct link between these two facts may be arguable, but while there is a need to educate children there will be a need for teachers. Again, over the past fifty years, there have been massive strides in technology since the famous BBC programme of the late 1970s ‘The chips are down’ about the microprocessor revolution. Classrooms have adapted to make use of the new technology, but there has been no seismic shift away from traditional patterns of pupil teacher numbers. Indeed, in secondary schools over the past decade, pupil-teacher ratios have even improved, according to DfE data.

The recently reported growth in home schooling may be the first signs of a coming revolution, driven by parents no longer satisfied with the current model of schooling. Tablets, TVs and computers can provide more learning power than any school library of a couple of decades ago. What is needed is the means of instruction and the method of motivation to keep youngsters on task. How much more likely is that in a home environment than when youngsters are faced with the distractions caused by 25 or 30 other children: could learning me more focused and take less time in the home than the classroom?

No doubt, parents would still want children to socialise in order to learn team games, sing together and undertake risky science experiments under the control of a qualified person. However, that might mean only sending your child to school for a couple of days a week. Such a shift might also boost the market for tutors as parents just buy in specific skills where their offspring are facing issues with learning.

As the BBC recently highlighted, the spirit of enterprise is abroad in Britain at the present time. I am sure that there are many developers in both large companies and small start-ups eying what could be a lucrative market that has world-wide potential; some of which will be on display at BETT.

Such a shift in technology from a labour intensive to a technology driven learning process could have a profound effect on both the need for teachers and the spending by the State on education. However, in the short-term, the geopolitical and macroeconomic signals might suggest that if a downturn is coming then teaching might benefit from renewed interest as a career choice.

As I have said at several conferences recently, I am one of the only people that might see benefits from a slowdown in China, even if it only reduces the inflow to that country of UK teachers to work in the growing international school market.

However, with the allocations for 2016 entry into teacher preparation courses set and fewer places available on non-EBacc subjects than in 2015, none of this will matter before 2017 unless, as in 2009, any downturn in the world’s economy bring back greater numbers of returners into teaching: such an effect could dramatically alter the picture of teacher supply, even for 2016, were it to come about.

MOOCs mark technology shift

Posted on by
Reply

MOOCS or Massive Open access On line Courses, to spell the initials out in full, are a recent phenomenon. In one sense they are higher education’s answer to the social media age. For a sector that took over 500 years to recognise that cheap printing had made the lecture a redundant form of knowledge transfer the adaptation of UK higher education to the digital age in just 20 years is nothing short of a miracle.

In the mid-1990s Oxford Brookes University held an alternative learning term based around the theme of new technology. One of the events was version of the ‘hypothetical’ popular at the time where a panel of experts was quizzed by an experienced host, in this case the University’s Chancellor Helena Kennedy QC, about how the future use of technology in higher education might unfold. At that time librarians were still wedded to fixed hours and building more shelves and nobody bothered about power points, plagiarism or even the number of PCs available. The fax machine was high tech and the OHP the height of sophistication, even if few lecturers knew how to use it properly.

What is known as ‘clicks and mortar’ universities were the only option, except for those mature students who decided to travel down the Open University route. Now on-line study for free, is big business. However, like other new technology someone will eventually need to find a means of making money out of the technology if it is to survive. What starts as a means of drawing potential students towards degree courses inevitably develops a life of its own. However, the demand for high quality degree courses, probably taught in English, and with the cache that comes with association with a university known throughout the world, will undoubtedly provide a head start for some institutions.

For me, one of the key questions is when and how this technology revolution in mass knowledge transfer will spread to more basic learning? There must be a defined number of issues with learning even a highly complex language such as English, and if we can use technology to help unlock those blockages perhaps we can really start to think about abolishing illiteracy. Even now, the child who is off school with a cold could join the lessons by web cam if they wanted to, with no worries over spreading germs around the classroom.

Technology also allows for new methods of learning based upon approaches not grounded in the limitations of the printed page. One method has been called the Turing approach after Alan Turing’s pioneer work on computing. I don’t know much about it, but am interested to find out more.

What is clear is that the knowledge revolution is beginning to pick up speed and much of UK higher education is determined not to be left behind in the same manner is it was when it took the decision to create the JANET network. For schools, perhaps it is time for Mr Gove to go back to BETT and announce a Minister for Educational Technology. Closing down BECTA may not have been a mistake, but failing to recognise the importance of what it stood for certainly would be.

Do entrepreneurs go to state schools?

Posted on by
Reply

I ask this question on the basis of a BBC magazine story that successful app creators have tended to be ex-public school pupils. (Public in the sense of fee-paying schools for those not from the UK). Now the BBC article didn’t have any real research data, just a few observations on the part of the writer . It is certainly true that some recent high profile success stories of young men in the IT world, and it often seems to be men – Baroness Lane-Fox apart – that have sold apps for mobile phones for a healthy profit were educated at such schools.

It is also true that the one app company where I have an investment stake was started by three young men who all went to public schools, so many be there is something in the idea that such schools are the breeding grounds for risk-taking business tycoons. May be it is also that to start a business of this type needs time funded by someone, and parents who can afford school fees may be able to subsidise the business needs of their creative offspring. Those who have a more pressing need for money to support the family have always encouraged their children to ‘get a job and start earning’. Indeed, one of the reasons the school leaving age was raised twice after world War II was to ensure working-class children stayed at school long enough to gain qualifications. Even in the 1950s some pupils at the grammar school I attended left at 15 because the family could or wouldn’t continue to support their education.

Innovators, and entrepreneurs who are often also innovators in new fields such as mobile phone apps, are often non-conformists; school sometimes don’t like those who won’t conform because it makes the task of running the establishment that much harder.  Indeed, some schools are also often anti-risk, despite the fact that an appreciation of risk is an essential requirement for any budding entrepreneur. Occasionally, I think that working in state schools offers a job in an environment where risk has essentially be almost completely removed despite the ever-looming presence of Ofsted. One of the good things to come out of the drive for higher standards in schools is an acceptance of trying new ideas, although paradoxically that notion clashes with the opposing view of enforcing uniformity, whether in curriculum or teaching style. Nowhere is this better articulated in the debate about whether each generation should discover its own heroes and heroines or accept the choice handed down by their ancestors. I wrote in an earlier piece how this particular circle might be closed to the satisfaction of all through the sensible use of new technology, and the encouragement of public-speaking that would boast self-confidence, something else of use to entrepreneurs, and also something some state schools have not always been good at encouraging.

If our economy is to thrive again, it needs entrepreneurs, and they need to come from all walks of society, and that means all schools must play their part in encouraging entrepreneurship for the sake of the common good. In the 1980s film ‘Gregory’s Girl two cameos have remained with me; the penguins on the way to nowhere, and the boy who is forever selling things to his school mates. There is no doubt that he was a budding entrepreneur. As this was a Scottish film it seems apt to remember the travail of Robert the Brue who motto might have been ‘the only failure is to give up trying’, an apt encouragement for everyone, and especially entrepreneurs not all of whom will have the initial success of our recent young mobile phone app developers.