Apartheid in UK schools: CLASS-ification and the sabotage of widening participation

For tourists and occasional visitors, one of the most attractive features of the UK is that atmosphere of the ancient that one can find in so many beautiful corners of our cities and villages. One could almost see and hear a carriage with Sherlock Holmes sitting inside when walking in certain areas engulfed by an early morning mist. What these visitors fail to see and the local population is not aware of, is the great extent these appearances can be true when it comes to class differences. The rhetoric about class is, in all modern countries except the UK, something everyone associates with the past, with the times of Marxism and the post-industrial-revolution era. In the UK, however, it is still “normal” to hear about “working class neighbourhoods” and “middle class jobs”; people being labelled according to their “class”; and politicians addressing voters from one or the other “class”. For any person regarding this from the outside, this is as strange as a pink cow. But here no-one questions the very reality of this. Many, of course, struggle against class differences, and aspire to climb the socioeconomic ladder, but just in order to be in the “upper” class and start behaving as such as soon as possible. Very few do actually achieve this, but they soon will forget that there are others in that struggle, and will begin to enjoy the privilege of having jumped the gap.  This is the only possible goal of anyone in the lower classes. Because they have been shown that class differences are part of life, this is how society works. No one from “below” and of course no one from “above” questions the existence of this weird anomaly in the world of the 21^st century.

This can easily be understood when one sees that this segregation becomes part of life from the earliest years in people’s lives. The education system is designed to perpetuate the class differences in the UK. Yes, it is designed this way. Segregation in schools is not something that happens in pockets of bad practice, it is built into the system. “Good” teachers are the ones who will be most effective in applying the disgraceful system of targets, by which children from the youngest ages are CLASS-ified according to those targets, solely based on socioeconomic and racial backgrounds. Not only through the use of postcodes to set these targets (so as to ensure that in low achieving areas the same outcomes are obtained as in the past), but even under the disguise of previous attainment – who do you think would be the low attainers other than those who do not live in wealthy, stable neighbourhoods with parents who can afford private tuition?

Young children are very permeable to quickly pick up things about how society works. CLASS-ification is part and parcel of their time in school, which is where they spend most of their time. All that time in school there will be those who are offered to attempt the more advanced questions while others are told to not even try, just be satisfied with the more basic ones, “you are not bright enough for more”. When they reach secondary schools their final scores in primary – already conditioned by the targets set initially – are automatically converted into GCSE targets and pupils are grouped according to the CLASS-ification of their targets and segregated into “higher tier” and “foundation”. So, CLASS-ification is now materialized in actual groups within a school year. There are the bright ones who will be entered to the “higher tier” exams. As these are the only ones that count for the assessment of the quality of the school, the teachers (individuals unworthy of this name) will ensure no one will be included who poses the least risk not to get high grades. Then there is the “middle class”, whose targets are to barely pass the GCSEs, and the “lower class”, whose targets are Ds, Es, Fs or Us (or their current equivalent numeric grades), and whose parents will be deceived as long as possible, hopefully until it is too late to do anything, with reports saying that their children are doing well because they are “on target”. In other words, they will be great assets to maintain the current socioeconomic class divide by ensuring that their families stay where they started.

It is hardly surprising that this apartheid is then transferred directly into society when they leave schools. They will be sold nice leavers’ hoodies and even have a prom, so they can live the dream for one night, with those suits and ties, but the morning after the CLASS-ification will continue its course. The high achievers with their triple As and A*s will go to university, the “middle class” children will have access to “middle class” jobs or further education courses that require about three Cs, and the lower class pupils, being totally on target and therefore having done fantastically well according to school reports and headteachers (“he is such a lovely boy”), will go where they belong, which is where they came from.

Then we have the laudable yet pathetically ineffective efforts to promote “widening participation”. Millions of pounds are spent by government agencies and institutions of higher education to go out to recruit students for university degrees and other courses of tertiary education from among young people who have just left school after being told for about 15 years that they are not worth to be considered for anything but low targets. Every day for about 15 years apartheid in schools has chiselled into their brains and their self-esteem that they belong to a lower class, that they are second- or third-class citizens. Is it surprising in any way that the “widening participation” efforts are mostly wasted? I once attended an academic talk on research about widening participation at postgraduate level. I commented that by then the damage has already been done, and that the widening participation target population had already been filtered out by the education system at school level. While some academics who obviously are very proud of the current education system looked at me with horrified faces (how could I even dare to put this nearly perfect education system into question?) the speaker admitted, jokingly, that maybe the best way to invest in widening participation is to take all the money and pour it into tackling the problem at school level. He may have said this as a joke, but I truly believe that this is the case. Money alone, of course, will not do the job: we need to start challenging this apartheid, which introduces CLASS-ification in society at its roots, and so stop it from sabotaging true “widening participation”.

There are even more reasons why the British education system is wrong

Tim Oates on why levels (and therefore targets) are inappropriate even for what they created for, how the UK is falling behind because it is the only nation using levels, and why they should be dropped as part of the changes national curriculum (but aren't):

Note that he mentions equity as one of the aspects where the level system and its assessment strategy is wrong.

If you have time and interest in this profoundly important issue you can watch this longer video and check out the links below.

http://www.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/insights/national-curriculum-tim-oates-on-assessment-insights/ 

http://www.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/news/tim-oates-cbe-shares-expertise-with-uk-mps/

https://evidencebased.education/podcast-tim-oates-future-assessment/

And here is his policy paper on why textbooks (currently banned from schools as they are considered not to allow for "adaptation to learners", read discrimination and segregation) are important:

http://www.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/Images/181744-why-textbooks-count-tim-oates.pdf

Excellent Analogies of the British Education System

First, watch this video. Below I will explain how this is a very adequate metaphor of the British Education system.

Let's go back to the moment of the aerial view of the race (https://youtu.be/BgdtUfzwLig?t=3m15s): as expected, the differences between all runners are mostly maintained, and those who started further behind are left behind. In other words, in the time it takes the most advantaged runners to reach the finish line, the disadvantaged only reach half, or two thirds, or three quarters of the way.

A country's education system should acknowledge the differences between runners at the start of the race and offer all students the means and opportunities to reach the same finish line by the end of their time in education. Instead, the British education system, acknowledges and puts a huge effort into measuring and quantifying the initial differences, only to make sure they stay the same by the end of their time in education.

How? If you have read or followed this blog you will have come across the answer in many different forms and examples. Here goes one more time: the willing executors of this Machiavellian classist system, known as teachers (but certainly not worthy of that name), set targets to the students that mirror and perpetuate the initial differences. Then they measure their progress against these targets and deceive the students and their parents with reports that they are doing well because they are working to target. 

This other video comes in handy: we have see it on TV before the May 2016 elections in the UK and it plays at the expected and understandable indignation anyone would feel when told that they are not allowed to do something others are. How come it is so obvious for voting and no one says anything about the identical situation, but with worse effects, that this perverse education system is putting all children into?

Setting targets is exactly the same as telling the student that he/she can't do better, and that he/she won't be allowed to have the same opportunities as the others.

Dear Teacher, you are not excused

It is quite interesting to see how a wall half way around the globe is creating such a stir over here, while we have, tolerate and even cherish far worse walls right at our doorstep. Trump's wall will be huge and made of brick and mortar, or concrete, and clearly visible to all. Our walls are invisible, much more impenetrable and right in our neighbourhoods. These walls are in every school, in every classroom where a teacher sets targets for the pupils and then sends reports home saying that everything is fine because the child is working "to target".

Targets in education are far worse than walls made of concrete. They are much more difficult to demolish. Trump may build a wall, and it may later be demolished. By then it will have affected the lives -then and there- of those who would otherwise made it across the border. Targets in education condemn people for the rest of their lives to stay in their disadvantaged socio-economic class. Trump's wall will stop anyone from crossing the border, but targets in education are selective in the worst possible way, because they make things worse for those who are already worse off.

Dear teacher, in conversations about this topic I used to excuse you, saying that, after all, you have been trained in this system, and even led to believe that using targets is a way to "adapt to learners", which in principle is something good to do. I even used to excuse you allowing for the fact that you are so young that you never experienced any other system, so you do not even know there is another way of doing things. But unfortunately, having dealt with many teachers over the years, seeing how you all embrace and actively defend the system even when challenged by numerous parents who find it outrageous to be told that their children are doing well by working towards a D in their GCSEs, I can no longer excuse you.

Let me tell you: every single time you set a child a target other than 100% of the marks, or the maximum possible grade, you are judging that child and telling them: "you do not deserve to even attempt more than this target, you are unable to understand anything above this target, you are worse than the other children in your class who get higher targets, and I judge you this way because you are black, or Muslim, or Latin american; or because you live in this low-class neighbourhood for which statistics predict that the majority of children will obtain low grades; or because you had a problematic family in your early school years, in which going to school or doing homework was low priority while you had to live in fear of abuse, or helping out to get food on your table.

Dear teacher, every single time you set a target other than 100% of the marks or the maximum possible grade, you are behaving like a bigot, a racist or a classist. If or when you have kids of your own you will certainly make sure they get the best education, you will support them at home, and in the bottom of your heart you will know that the right thing to do is to give them the opportunity to be exposed to the full curriculum and work for the best marks. They may not achieve them, but you will have your peace of mind because you have given them the opportunity - that same opportunity you are knowingly and willingly denying the children of other parents who love and care for their children as much as you do.

So please do not expect me to carry on excusing you for this - you are not excused: you are a knowing and willing accomplice of a system which has built and actively maintains walls far worse than Trump's.

Watch the video below that has recently gone viral. It is a great speech against walls like Trump's - but you should be able to see how the last 30 seconds of her speech (direct link here: https://youtu.be/46w13vjfUoI?t=325) could just as well have been said about the British education system, word by word. If you are not able to see this, then there really is no hope for education in this country.

Reinventing the wheel - has British education finally touched bottom?

One consequence of designing an education system that does not aim to educate, but to deceive parents and students, is that it involves dispensing with everything that did just that, including a whole generation of more experienced teachers, who were replaced with young ones who have never experienced anything but the perverse system they are asked to work in and perpetuate.

This is then the ideal testing bed for all sorts of crazy ideas, with whole generations of young people serving as guinea-pigs for outlandish experiments. The only requirement for these experiments to be adopted as standard procedure is that they serve, or are tweaked to support, the pretense of adapting to the learners' needs. Once this is achieved, then anything goes - 'carte blanche' is granted for a whole cabinet of curiosities in things education.

After a while, those involved in education will have forgotten the very basics of education, ideas such as that the teacher knows (or should know) more than the pupils if the latter are to learn anything, or resources like....textbooks! Yes, dear reader, if you have been brought up in any other educational system you will find it difficult to believe that in British state education it is considered bad practice to use textbooks -  the teacher should rather "adapt to learners' needs" by providing each pupil with different learning materials, according to their respective targets.

It is then impossible to know what a student should have learned at a given stage. As a parent you will never find out. The current generation of teachers don't even know what you are talking about if you ask for a 'book' for the year your child is in. There isn't a single textbook that contains everything one should learn and revise in a given year. It all depends on the students' abilities and the corresponding targets. 

This education system will not adapt to the students' needs by starting from the level they are in and bringing all to the same level by the end of their years in school. No. The education system will tell them from the start what they can and cannot do, set (and modify) the targets accordingly, and then always tell parents that the kid is doing fine, as he or she is working "to target". Even if the target is a "D", you will receive wonderful reports of how well your child is doing in working "to target".

Anyway, I digress. The point is that textbooks would spoil all this, so they are banned and forgotten, together with so many other basic educational tools and resources.

And then, inevitably, some people with a genuine concern for education discover these resources -perhaps by visiting other countries- and strive to re-introduce them as novel and innovative techniques. They reinvent the wheel and present it as a groundbreaking discovery: children will be "taught as a whole class and supported by the use of high quality textbooks". Yay!

From BBC News: http://www.bbc.com/news/education-36772954 

I wonder if this is a sign that the British education system has finally touched bottom and is starting to improve. Or is it just wishful thinking on my part?

As if it was not bad enough...

This Machiavellian target system has a few equally Machiavellian collateral consequences. Hardly surprising: once things begin to rot, all you can do with them is rotten, too.

So we have these perverse targets, used by schools to deceive pupils, parents and themselves. And now Higher Education comes into the game, with problems of its own, like the competition for students. 

It is difficult to understand as it is, that access to universities has become so complicated that applications and admissions have to be sorted early in a calendar year for a start in the following September, with students and universities having to make decisions well before school ends. The usual solution has been to  make "conditional" offers, pending A-level results. 

But targets offer an easy shortcut, as one could take these into consideration to make these offers. So instead of "conditional" offers, now we have the infamous "unconditional" offers, so many students pride themselves of having achieved. Basically, it means that a pupil's target grades, set by the schools, inspire the universities so much confidence in a pupil's abilities that they guarantee them a place regardless of their grades in A-levels. 

Yes, you have read correctly, regardless of their actual A-level grades! I will write it again, so you see I have not mistyped it: regardless of their actual A-level grades!

Shocking? Well, brace yourself - it can and does get worse. I know of higher education institutions which tell the students -off the record, of course- that they don't even need to bother sitting the A-levels. What student will resist such an offer? Isn't it a great way to ensure uptake of degrees at a university?

All thanks to the targets - aren't they wonderful?

Now schools have learned to play this game, as if what they did with the targets already was not bad enough. Now schools will give their pupils high target grades to "help" them into higher education. The purpose is of course not to help the students, but to boost the school's success rates in pupils going to university. It looks good in a prospectus to be able to say that a great proportion of pupils will become so good at this school, that most will get to higher education.

Now, this has to be done with measure, it has to look credible - so which schools do you think will find it easier to feign higher target grades? You can easily guess - those in select areas and neighborhoods, where they won't look out of place. Those in regions or areas where wealth and social class is already playing a role in pupils receiving a better education, because in this education system progression in schools has been made so dependent on the support children receive outside of school (see previous posts for more on this).

So here you have yet a further perverse way to prostitute the already rotten target system in order to widen the gap between classes. This is the "admired" and "prestigious" British education system for you, deliberately doing the contrary of what it is supposed to to, which, in case you have forgotten, is to offer all citizens equal opportunities in life.

I'm 13 - ask me how much I want to work at school

Sounds absurd, doesn't it? But this is the level of absurdity that is being reached nowadays in our schools. As part of the deception described in an earlier post, the system and its teachers insist on putting the responsibility of their education into the children's own hands. After a while teachers forget the initial purpose of this fiction and end up genuinely believing it.  

"We offer them support sessions, but if they don't attend it's their choice." "We want our students to develop personal responsibility." One keeps hearing at parent evenings. No one considers that the price these teens will pay for not "being responsible" is their whole professional future, their lives. Does this not sound like too harsh a consequence for "wrong" choices at school age? Do we really expect teenagers at he height of their hormonal levels to be concerned with working hard, if they are given a choice?

Again, those without parents with money and/or backgrounds that allow them to be on top of their children's education will suffer the most from these. Again, the educational system is working to perpetuate, instead of against, class differences.

Have a look at one glorious example. A questionnaire put to 13 year old pupils about their maths lessons. I suppose  this is a safety net in case the poor boys and girls are being stressed out too much, despite the efforts by the teachers not to set them too challenging targets, lest they be traumatized...

DON'T WORRY, YOUR CHILD IS 'ON TARGET'

In case there was any doubt we just had a clear confirmation of the disastrous malpractice common in British education. Our son was sent home to the half-term break with these grades:

These grades are obviously terrible (for those not familiar with British grading, the "projected grades" are what is meant to reflect the pupil's current work) but no one sent us a message alerting us about the need to do something about it, and no homework was set for a two-week half-term holiday in order to catch up.

This would amount to gross negligence and would be bad enough, but things are even worse: we happen to know that people who asked at the school (with our permission) how the boy wass doing were told that he "was doing well", with nothing to worry about! This is beyond negligence, this is deception, including self-deception, as they truly believe what they are saying! He is "on target" after all!

BRITISH PUBLIC EDUCATION TODAY

In education, parents and teachers have to work together for the benefit of the children. No one would argue with that. However, in modern Europe this obvious principle is in crisis. In continental Europe and the USA the alliance between parents and teachers has broken down with parents siding with pupils to challenge grades and discipline, blaming teachers and even suing them. This is well reflected in this cartoon that has been circulating in the internet for a while now.

Here in the UK this cartoon does not apply. The alliance between teachers and parents has broken down with teachers aligning – or being selected to align – with a Machiavellianly perverse system, perfectly designed to perpetuate itself, in which schools have ceased to be concerned with student learning, and instead look at their own performance indicators and reputation.

And so we ended up with a system of target levels (up to year 9) and tiered examinations (from Year 10), in which students are set targets at the beginning of a course on the basis of a convoluted and cumbersome combination of parameters related to previous attainment, destined to obscure any clear criterion. The process is so obscure that schools pay specialised agencies to do it. The students are then measured against these targets instead of objective benchmarks, and the school can boast that most of their student are "on target". Targets are naturally revised periodically and set low enough so that success rate is high. Student learning and progress come second, if they matter at all.

Under the disguise of adaptation to the students' different abilities and the promotion of personal responsibility, their own progress is left in their own hands with the predictable outcome of a vast majority choosing to work as little as possible. They soon realise that less work is rewarded with lower targets, and even the best intentioned ones soon lose interest in working when they see they can instead have a great time with less effort in studying. There is nothing surprising there - just human nature. Defending this system is at best a naive assumption that teenage students will have their professional future in mind, but, as indicated above, I am more inclined to see it as a deliberate manoeuvre designed to make up school performance.

Another sign of this strategy is that British education has done away with textbooks. Instead, parents have to look themselves for "revision guides" or "exercise books". As was confirmed by a primary teacher to us as parents, books are not just "not recommended", teachers are not allowed to use them. It all makes sense, of course: if the intention is to avoid fixed benchmarks, having books which contain everything that is supposed to be learned at a certain level would betray the lowering of standards. Again, the absence of textbooks in education is disguised under the principle of adapting to learners' needs. Teachers are supposed to prepare tailor-made materials for every pupil or small group of pupils at similar "target levels". Apart from not being practical, or even feasible, as a collateral effect of the desired blurring of benchmarks, this removes a crucial tool to provide equal education to all across "classes" and citizens of different sociocultural backgrounds.

It all comes down to a perverse coincidence of interests between schools and pupils, who side with each other against the parents who care (which is the combination missing in the cartoon above). Teachers side with students in lowering demand. With this system schools can fake their results and at the same time students can get away with working as little as possible, taking home reports full of nice paragraphs from teachers always praising how well they are doing... towards their target levels. To make the charade credible, sometimes reports contain warnings against work being below target, but both teachers and students know that there is nothing to worry about: by the time of the next report targets will have been lowered and they will again be doing brilliantly.

For example, students can be submitted to GCSE exams at foundation and higher tiers, but the school's performance is only measured against the results of those in higher tiers, so schools only prepare those students they deem to be a guarantee of good marks for higher tier GCSEs, exposing the rest to a second class education, with less content, lower demand and capped marks at a C (this is changing now to numeric marks but the principles are exactly the same).

In my own experience with one of my sons I witnessed how he was brainwashed into believing he'd never achieve anything higher than a C. He was given foundation classes, set foundation homework and explicitly advised not to even attempt higher tier questions. His achievement, his career, his life, were capped by teachers who preferred to play safe with the school's reputation than to make the least effort to stretch students little by little to their full potential. The school's walls and website are lined with phrases saying exactly the contrary, that students are there to work to their full potential, and that no one would be left behind. But the reality is quite different. Once we fought and succeeded in having our son exposed to higher tier papers, he started to get Bs, As and even an A* within just a few weeks. I expected improvement, but not so fast. And it must be said that our determination in having him exposed to the full set of contents and higher exams is not an interest in him getting higher marks, but in giving our sons the opportunity to break the vicious circle of low aspirations being rewarded with less demanding work.

Teachers who knew other ways of configuring education and would therefore be more likely to see through these tactics have long been displaced by a generation of younger, inexperienced teachers who have not known other ways to grade students and therefore do not even begin to understand what is talked about when someone speaks to them along the lines of what I have written here.

Children without parents that put the foot in the door like us are condemned to be used --in the worst sense of the word-- by schools to whitewash their reputation in the form of Ofsted reports and the like. When they later in life come to realise that they have been let down by the very institution in whose hands society had placed their education - who will then be held accountable?