Since June I have been mostly…

I had great hopes that this blog would become a reason for me to keep up to date with the world of education policy and news while I finish my PhD. As it happens, the process of ‘writing up’ seems to zap quite a bit of the energy needed to do such blogging. But here’s a brief update on what I’ve been up to since coming back to the PhD mid-June

• Getting used to my very new non-professional lifestyle that involves not showering till half way through the day, playing with the cats and making gazillions of caffeinated drinks
• Making Facebook friends with the students I researched two years ago, and envying their student lifestyles and big hair
• Finishing my Methodology chapter, and 17,000 words of my Findings chapter
• Meeting people in queues who decide to follow me on Twitter because my PhD ’sounds so interesting’
• Writing 2000 words a day
• Wishing that the Fair Access to the Professions Panel Report that the Strategy Unit worked on had been released to coincide with the publication of my journal article/book/whatever it is I might publish off the back of this baby. Their findings about the slow-down in social mobility and the closed-shop mentality of many of the professions in the UK would have been nicely reinforced by my findings about how students’ soft skills help or hinder such access
• Holidaying in France and going to weddings

Well…goddess

I would be an Ironist were it not for (3)

Ironist (n. Ironism) (from Greek: eiron, eironeia) is a term coined by Richard Rorty to describe someone who fulfills three conditions:

1. She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered;

2. She realizes that argument phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts;

3. Insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, thatit is in touch with a power not herself

– Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, p.73

And therein lies the realm of faith.

A quote

I have just finished reading ‘A fraction of the whole’ by Steve Toltz. It was a frustrating book. At times I loved it, but just as quickly I became bored with its direction and lost all concern for the characters and their lives.

But it was a fascinating portrayal of the kind of person who reads and thinks, but lacks the ability to temper their philosophising with a good old slice of banality and joy, or as the author puts it ‘thinks themselves into a corner that they can’t get out of’

I have sometimes thought myself into a corner, and thinking was the last thing that was going to get me out, despite trusting my brain more than I trust my heart quite a lot of the time. Anyway there are some great nuggets in there and one or two really jumped out at me. Like this one

“That was it.

Goodbye Dad. I hope you knew how I felt.

Ned put his hand on my shoulder. ‘He’s with God now.’

‘That’s a terrible thing to say.’

‘Your father never understood what it’s like to be part of something bigger than himself.’

That shit me . People always say ‘It’s good to be part of something bigger than yourself.’ But you already are. You’re part of a huge thing. The whole of humanity. That’s enormous. But you can’t see it, so you pick, what? An organisation? A culture? A religion? That’s not bigger than you. It’s much much smaller!” (A fraction of the whole, 2008, p. 675)

In faith, as in many other things, our ‘bigness’ is a reflection of God, and draws things together in love. Religion and organisation can often crush that bigness – the very source of our communality.

21st Century Schools White Paper

I worked with the White Paper team in DCSF as part of the Cabinet Office Strategy Unit, and it was a fascinating exercise in how policy is made. Today the results are published.

Publication dates always get pushed back but it’s a shame I left a couple of weeks ago and didn’t get to see just how tired everyone probably is, and how relieved that it’s finally finished.

I, for one, am surprised at its final form, having seen a number of permutations and our contributions disappear then reappear somewhere else within them. As it is, the sections I wrote are pretty much identical to how I left them…which is nice. And the ‘license to teach’ (the most radical proposal according to the BBC) has stayed in too.

I think I will leave judgements on the content itself for a debate over a glass of wine and for now be glad that I was able to be part of the process at all.

Faculty ‘Flections

Things that middle-aged normal-looking people say to each other when they come into the social area to get a cup of tea at the faculty include: References to their unstable mental state.

In the last two days I have heard three women exclaim to others around them,

“I’m going mad! Completely mad….crazy!…I—don’t know…” (said in a lilting sing-song voice)

“I’m going mad…I really am, i don’t know where I am” (arms thrown up in the air in good   humour)

Why do they say this? And why does it trouble me so much?

Roll on 17th April

Policy wonks of the world unite in anticipation of Malcolm Tucker’s return

Measuring relationships

The Strategy Unit runs an impressive series of lunchtime seminars, inviting thinkers, academics, researchers and other civil servants to provoke debate around the process of policy making.

Today saw Michael Schluter and John Ashcroft of the Relationship’s Foundation presenting a framework by which policy makers can incorporate relationships into their work.

Having established that relationships are key, both to defining policy goals and achieving them, they went on to outline their ‘relational proximity model’ which covers five domains of relationships.

1) Communication – how direct it is
2) Time – how much continuity there is in the story
3) Information – how deep and broad it is
4) Power – how fairly it is distributed
5) Purpose – the extent to which purpose is shared

They gave a number of examples to demonstrate how it is possible to assess the impact of a policy on one or all of these domains, and therefore on the likelihood of it creating conditions that are more or less likely to foster quality relationships.

On reflection it is easy to see the potential applications for education e.g.

Communication – we cannot rely on relationships being too heavily mediated i.e. learning online if we want to foster good long term conditions for learning
Time – It is better for a student to have repeated interactions with a small number of staff than multiple people in relation to a problem they may been having
Information – If you reduce the signals about schools to a single measure i.e. 5 A-Cs you reduce the quality of the relationship between the parent and the school
Power - there may be real issues to outwork in advance of the goal of multi-agency teams working around a child if those teams perceive themselves to be powerless in relation to each other or the school
Purpose – if politicians and teachers ultimately want different things from the school system their relationship will always be one of frustration

Clearly it is only one of a suite of things to consider around the impact of policy, but still, I suspect, an under-utilised perspective

Back to Admiralty Arch

Tuesday sees me back at the Strategy Unit for three months, working on a White Paper due to be published by DCSF in late Spring.

The PhD will be on hold as I get the chance to get into some policy research and writing around the idea of Twenty-First Century Schools that was laid out in the Children’s Plan a year ago.

So forgive me if this blog is quieter than usual; hopefully I will be able to offer some appropriately vague reflections on what should be a fascinating process

Lessons from Trollope

I’m a big fan of Oliver Burkeman (‘This Column will Change Your Life’) in the Guardian on Saturdays. Last week he relayed the writing habits of Anthony Trollope who wrote three hours a day without fail and ‘here’s the kicker: if he finished a novel midway through a three-hour period, he just started writing the next one.’

I recalled being told in a writing course that far from aiming to take a break when you had come to the end of something, it was better to leave your writing mid-sentence so that the anxiety caused by that half-formed thought would tickle the toes of your sub-conscious until you had to cut short your lunch to finish it off.

Having finished coding one document at three minutes to one o’clock I tried this out and started the next one. It didn’t make me want to return from lunch any quicker, but it did make me feel more productive and disciplined.

I think it is a Good Idea.