Teaching is to Emancipate

David Noble set up a great little experiment today using ipadio, an audio-over-IP application server, to host a virtual end of year education conference he dubbed TeachMeet Mobile. Using the mighty power of twitter, he drummed up some speakers for a one-hour reflective which is available to hear live here and after the event here.

My own contribution rides on the back of Drew Buddie’s review of how far the use of ICT in education has come in the last ten years and is meant to be a bit of a foil to any exuberance we might feel about being so far ahead of ourselves. My simple and short point is simply this: I am not convinced that the young minds we are preparing are best served by what I see as an endemic dumbing down of the curriculum. This isn’t a Scottish problem, it’s all over the place and has been brought about by an avalanche of change – in political thinking and correctness, in public funding of state provision, in weak social (read “non”) science research, in promotion of managers of expediency to positions where leadership are required, not least the head teachers of state schools, and the very curriculum itself, diluted to the point of homeopathic uselessness by feeble regression to an exponentially weakening mean level of ability.

The words of the new curriculum are laudable: I hear paraphrases in the modern idiom of the seven liberal arts and sciences and slogans such as “science at the heart of Curriculum for Excellence”, but until a fundamental return is made to decent standards of behaviour, literacy, parenting, leadership and public service provision, no progress will be had without those of us called mavericks being heard.

… and we’ll do the job. This was a phrase often quoted at me as a project manager in industry, usually in response to some request for an explanation as to why a project was falling behind schedule, or why tasks were not getting done. Once upon a time, I was the kind of guy who could happily ask such a question, knowing that the necessary resources – time, tea, toilet rolls or tools – had not been provided properly or at the right time and place. Everything could be correlated to a cost and I knew that cutting costs could be done using the “just-in-time” model of resource provision. I learned, the hard and expensive way, that the T-shirt slogan, “make God laugh – make a plan”, just wasn’t really funny. Especially if it was your plan.

Don Ledingham falls into the same old traps of the deluded project manager in his blog post on reducing bureaucracy in education when he cites the cost of a 30-minute meeting of SMT/PT’s as something approaching £18,000 – £20,000 per year. The cost is, of course, £0.00. The financial costs of the enterprise are the same, with or without the meetings. The posts are filled, the salary bill is fixed. Whatever you want those people to do, they will endeavour to do – whether it is on your time or theirs. No, the cost of spending time is what is not achieved with the remaining time. If you want a fully-integrated, cross-curricular, child-centred, four-capacity-compliant, literate, numerate, articulate, coherent curriculum, then the time to build it must be given to the builders.

The principles are simple but missing from education: from blindness to the effect of initiative layering to the extremes of narcissism, education is driven by expedient and personal self-interest far more than it is driven by the principles of providing good value for public money, future-proofing our economy and preparing people for social, economic and political environments which haven’t been dreamed of yet.

I’ve been trying to sort out my finances over the holiday and one of those “things to do” is to resolve the niggle that I ought to have paid off my student loan by now. I remember the annual statement from last year saying that I owe about a grand, and that at almost two hundred quid a month being stopped in my wages, then by the end of April 2009, I should have it paid off and a wee rebate due. Just in time for summer, lovely jubbly.

This year’s statement came. It says I owe them about a grand. The detail says that there has been no contribution from the Inland Revenue for contributions deducted in my pay. A quick phone call to the Student Loans Company establishes that this sometimes happens and that the quick way to resolve the issue is to send them my P60, which will show the deductions for student loan taken by my employer.

One rummage later, the P60 reports zero deductions. My payslips show closer to £1800. Here’s the problem. On the phone, the payroll people advise that this is a known problem – student loans deductions were not included on P60’s this year. The Council’s policy is – get this – to take no action: to wait until the individual phones in, then to offer a statement of deductions which the employee can then use to negotiate with the Student Loan Company.

Is it me? Am I the only person who thinks that when the Public Service provider makes a mistake like knowingly misreporting statutory financial information, then the duty and responsibility of that Public Service provider is to (a) acknowledge the error, (b) correct the error, and (c) take every step to mitigate the consequences. It certainly should not be ignoring the problem and leaving it up to the employees – who are still overpaying, giving the Council funds it has no right to – to sort out?

Check your Student Loan deductions against your P60. Your employer may have failed to inform the Inland Revenue about the money they took from your salary. It’s your money, but you have to go fight to get it back.