the consistent theme …  that they can’t think of anything useful they’re good at. This contrasts starkly with young people who underpin their aspirations with personality traits that suggest they will be able to make a positive success of them. Something positive about them has stood out to the adults in their lives, and this gives them the confidence to make firm plans about their future

“I want to be a youth worker .. they told me I was really good at taking charge of groups and stuff and I’d be really good at it
[college student]

“wherever you’re gonna work, your not gonna like it … who wants to go to work – no-one”
[current NEET age 18]

Teachers aren’t about themselves, they are about other people.

Teaching isn’t about how the students feel about me, it is about how  I can make them feel about themselves.

Learners in colleges don’t come into the sector as newbies – they have a lot of education experience behind them – and Ipsos Mori have already surveyed 2387 of them in 2008. 11-16 then, they are now 13-18, so their views will form the core of the 2009 college survey.

They were asked about the ways they prefer to learn, and what they do most often in class.

56% preferred to learn by doing practical things – though 65% listed copying from the board or a book as the thing they did most often in class.

53% said that talking to friends was one of their three preferred ways to learn – but 63% found themselves listening to a teacher talking for a long time

49% found that learning in groups was one of their best ways of learning – and 33% listed this as one of the three things they did most often in class [though only 20% often worked in small groups to solve problems]

So, young people only find themselves learning in a way that they prefer once the teacher shuts up and sits down.

Then? mismatch between what they wanted and what they got
Now? fingers crossed!

The Audit Commission knows that “all public bodies face a difficult and testing future” , that after the election financial resources could fall sharply, and  for some the strains this imposes could be too intense.In their experience, problems with money can be a symbol of wider difficulties

So they look at what organisations can do to help themselves prepare for the Glacial Age.

from presentation on http://bit.ly/978T32

Their starting point is that budget cuts of 20% would put most Government departments back 4-5 years

For further education, the budget is shared for some reason between Children, Schools and Families; and Innvation Universities and Skills.

The Universities are already aware of their reduced funding settlement , and the further education Adult Funding has also been reduced.

For young people, the further education allocation fom Children, Schools and Families has still to be made.

Interestingly, an earlier Audit Commission report in July 2009 showed the – to me, surprising – increase in expenditure during the last ten years – up 56% for primary and secondary schools.

And on teachers?

“Expenditure data reflect these increases.

Between 1999/2000 and 2007/08, expenditure on teaching staff increased from £11.2 billion to
nearly £17.2 billion, a real terms increase of 25 per cent.

During the same period, expenditure on education support staff increased by more than 150
per cent in real terms, from £1.2 billion to £3.7 billion”
Valuable Lessons; Improving economy and efficiency of workforce deployment [Page 52 #90]

A Glacial Age then, not an Age of Austerity.

But as the Audit Commission cheerily remind us -

innovation is driven by the need for efficiency so  “don’t let a good crisis go to waste”

“]

What Students think about [click to enlarge

An interesting mix of lofty learning eg Poor Law Amendment Act

“Can anyone tell me where I am perhaps going wrong, or recommend any websites or books for me to read?

Any other help would also be much appreciated.

Ill rep the most helpful and all that“

If I could, I’d help out – so that I could get “repped and all that”

And there is much more like

“found boyfriend’s profile on a dating website”

and of course “Revision Notes” which would be helpful for eg Performing Arts students doing an assignment on , say, 19th Century Theatre

and what do students think about EMA?

There are a fair number of discussion threads about EMAs -

EMA discussion threads - click to enlarge

To take one of these, and follow it through — one thread started on 11 January 2010 when Danjm08 reported that he was having problems with his EMA bonus, which wouldn’t be paid because he hadn’t ben able to hand in a piece of work on his deadline, which happened to be a snow closure day.

78 people have responded so far, giving a sample of how young people regard EMAs

RollerBall ["I got mad skillz"]  shot off an almost immediate “Boo Hoo”; and AGalloway with “put a firework in their exhaust, then the day after just hint that you know what happened, and what may happen. Extortion works”

To which Danjm08 sensibly replies “That’s not helping. Please don’t make my problem seem trivial, this money actually does mean a lot to my family. By looking at your other posts you seem to like putting people down a lot. I’m just asking nicely, don’t comment if it’s not useful”

Nick_000 is still in dismissive mode “£100 just for attending school!? **** me!”

But then the more considered discussion starts

Street_Lovin’ “Well, I am not an EMA student, but I don’t think the EMA bonus of £100 is fr just attending the school. =) It it true for ”some” school but for most of the school, you need to achieve a certain requirements – 100% Attendance, Outstanding Behaviour and Excellent Academic Progress”

Isabobble “I get EMA and it’s a LOT of hassle. If a teacher forgets to take the register for one lesson, you lose your EMA for the whole week. You then have to chase up the teacher, get them to sign a note to say you were really there, then get a head of year to countersign it to prove that the teacher isn’t lying, then hope that the EMA co-ordinator can be arsed to give you the money.

In addition you’re only ‘allowed’ three days of illness per year, and these have to be followed up with a form, letter from a parent and/or doctor and authorised by the head of year. All work must also be handed in on time and days out for school trips/extra curricular stuff always end up making you lose out on a week of EMA. Etc. etc. etc.

I’m not complaining about getting money, I appreciate it a great deal. But I think it’s unfair of people to complain that it’s ‘money for nothing’ – I know at my school it would be a whole lot easier to be one of the people who don’t get it.”

The chosennerf “To be honest, a LOT more is expected of us EMA eligible students than the others. I have to turn up for a five minute registration period when I have no lessons at all, all day. I have to stay behind every single lesson to check that I’ve been marked in. In my school, I have to attend assembly and prayer sessions when I’m likely to be the only person there. I can’t go home if I’m ill, and if I do get permission to stay off, I have to ring up every day I’m off to confirm I’m still ill. I have to go to registration during study leave, along with about six other people, while all my friends are still asleep.

My school places a huge focus on school trips which are very expensive and since my mam can’t afford to help me out with these in any way, the £30 our EMA co-ordinator dishes out when she feels like it and the two £100 a year bonuses have to cover these, along with my dinner money, bus pass, clothes, and anything else I need for the full year. Not to mention the fact that if I’m off for half term/holidays, it takes three weeks to sort out the payments again.

I’m just saying, it’s not “free money” – we have to work our backsides off to get it – and a lot of people (myself included) couldn’t attend college without it“

But Dinks169 is unconvinced “Stop whinging about not getting free money for your free education”

and then a fairly vicious argument ” It seems so very bitter when people with a higher family income berate those who earn less”

until the moderator letsdothetimewarpagain kicks in with “May I remind people that this is not a debate about EMA, if you want to argue other whether it’s good or not please do it elsewhere”

But of course, that doesn’t stop comment

Crazylady26 “As far as I’m concerned if you’re prepared to put the extra effort in to get ema then fair enough, but there’s plenty who work hard and turn up etc that don’t get extra money (even if their family is not that supportive or well off), so you cant really complain that you lose your money when to be honest, you are the one who left it to the last minute”

And DJ AgniesZKaA “Free money yes. yes it is.
a) id go to school anyway.
b) the £30 quid i get weekly means i can go out more and pay my iphone bill.
this is the same for 90% of ema people i know.
im happy to accept the free money though, because this government taxes me to **** so if its in their intention or not, il have as much back as i can possibly get my hands on, thanks”

Spaceman5000 : I don’t know why so many people are ”Anti EMA” (Would you turn it Down if you could get it?) it costs me £30 a week to get to college anyway so Im only breaking even (When I actually get it)

Hang_my_heart “it’s a bonus – it’s not “your £100″. Your teacher doesn’t have to give it to you and if it didn’t matter enough to you to get the form in before the very last minute then you probably don’t need/deserve it. The bonus part of EMA is ridiculous anyway – how can you give someone money for going to college (to benefit themselves) and then give them more money because they’ve actually done the thing they’re getting money for in the first place??? It’s like my employer giving me extra money for actually showing up!”

Mekko29: Last year we got to set our own EMA targets and one of mine was to underline my titles and bam got £100 just for stupid targets like that, its a bit of a flawed system and i always get abuse from my college mates because they arn’t elligable for it.

and then the thread fizzles out, on 14 January 2010, after 75 posts in 3 days.

EMA is a hot topic: illage started yet another EMA discussion going last week with “Do we get out EMA bonus on the 29th January?” Monalisa has the 166th post so far.

My conclusion? Many young people regard EMA  with deep suspicion.  The seemingly arbitrary and personalised way in which it is dispensed outrages some; others are appreciative of the support it provides.

And all the spectrum of the british class system is on display – from looking down your nose to cocking your snook.

Report Card will “bring together multiple data sets to provide a newly accessible way of researching and comparing schools. This product will go beyond the idea of league tables to show schools in context and provide a meaningful interpretation of what they are really like – the atmosphere, internal organisation, teaching standards, facilities, discipline and much more”

Blimey!

An achingly cool design consultancy which takes blindingly innovative approaches to design has developed the concept to this stage. One example of their work is the curved map which includes both a 3D view and a bird’s eye view of a city

Curved Manhattan : click to enlarge

So what are they doing with Ofsted stats ?

They started with the fact that people pay attention to faces – they look for faces, are used to looking at faces, and get a lot of information about what is going on from faces .

Their Flickr group “Hello Little Fella” collects the faces that we see in everyday objects, and they then applied  the concept of   Chernoff faces to sports statistics

Here the various aspects of a team’s performance is reflected in the face – the mouth position shows the number of runs scored; the hair various type of win you can have in baseball; the left eye some type of home run, the right eye the number of stolen bases.

Ok – still quite difficult to interpret – but at least it is “at a glance”, and all the information on the team is there in a format which you are interested in looking at – the human face.

and it might be better with real faces – particularly if they weren’t real faces as here but computer generated.

However, the Berg London Report Card team went down a simpler route – by representing the individual institutions as building shapes, but putting a simplified face on the end of each shape – like Thomas the Tank Engine

Here three aspects of performance – as in the pie charts – are transformed into small Chernoff faces , the idea being that ‘at a glance’  you can see what is going on.

Parents could then look for a “smiling”  school if they wanted ,say,  success over 80%; but a “red-roofed” school if they were more interested in,say, good safeguarding.

However crude this seems , it is worth bearing in mind that Channel 4 have put £100,000 into this so far.

The design agency used real data from the Ofsted Annual report 2008-09 to try to use these faces to disentangle the Daily Mail headline “ A Lesson in incompetence : 1 in 3 schools fail to provide adequate teaching”

The results are – as they say – not there yet, but they have made an impressive start with some real, and complex data.

Watch this space for Record Card as it develops further!

Teachers in Greece are going on strike thrice in the next month as Greece’s austerity programme begins [wage freeze for public sector workers  for starters]

In almost-neighbouring Romania the austerity package includes sacking 15,000 teachers, and  Gavin Hewitt [him off the telly] points out that there are four times as many teachers per student in Greece as in Finland, so ………

Finland and Sweden are the model for much current thinking on reshaping education after the 6 May election

And there is also a great deal of eyeing up of previously sacred cows.

There is, for example, some scepticism about the value of  Educational Maintenance Allowances [shadow children's secretary Michael Gove has called the EMA a flop],  although EMAs do have  solid research evidence of their effectiveness.

In colleges, EMAs seem to work, but  “How to Save £50bn” has an uncomfortable analysis of EMA

Chart 2.1 shows that while there has been an increase in the percentage of 16-18 year olds in education or training since the EMA was launched, from 75.7 per cent in 2004 to 79.7 per cent in 2008, this is negligible … also a decrease in 16-18 year olds in employment, from 14.7 per cent to 10.0 per cent.

… NEETs increased from 9.6  to 10.3 per  between 2004 and 2008.
These are poor results, and show that EMA is not a good use of money.

• Abolishing EMA would save £530,000,000 a year.
• Are the figures in Chart 2.1 valid?

and then

• Is EMA a “front line service” or is it a back office function, and therefore saveable?
• Any savings from scrapping EMA would be small beer when set against the £175bn deficit – but every little helps.
• Taking a bolder line,  could the [complicated and rigorous but existing] EMA system be harnessed as a participation-led college funding system. Young people cash in their course credit, and continue to get a cash back EMA  in return for attendance and achievement ?

Anyway, his latest newsletter arrived as the iPad was being launched, and it showed something very much cheaper – the snappily titled  OLPC XO3 ebook reader .

If Apple is behind iPad, who is behind OLPC?

OLPC is   One Laptop Per Child , MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte’s non-profit effort for putting cheap educational laptops into the hands of developing world schoolchildren, and the Xo3 is the machine which OLPC intends will replace their current X0 machine in 2012 [neatly animated here, and showcased by the designers together with their other products]
Every child in Uruguay will soon have an XO, at a cost of $260, taking into account support costs.

And the target cost for the XO3 when it is available in 2012 will be $75.

The design mockups look good – I want one!

Meanwhile, the Home Access pilots in Suffolk being run by Becta have been successful, and the Government will now “support their aspiration to connect to a computer and broadband the estimated 1 million children who currently lack such access at home in England”  – heavily splashed recently eg here on-line with the memorable headline

Gordon Brown promises free laptops for the deserving poor

The undeserving poor can just go whistle

but also elsewhere, and more soberly

To get back to “my” ebook reader – it would seem that I can buy one [or more accurately one box containing 50 XO3s]  right now from the Shanghai Jentoon Technology Co, Shanghai.

Not that they are actually made in Shanghai – the XO3 is made in American Samoa , where Doonesbury’s Uncle Duke was once Lieutenant Governor , so it must be an OK place.

The spec is detailed and the reader looks great – anybody want to share a box of 50?

And of course there is a way of doing it easily – just look at their first name.

A survey of 3000 teachers came up with the student names to look out for

First the list of names of children  they would expect to find troublesome in class

and then the list of children they expect to be bright

Of course, this is not a foolproof method of selecting students.

The various Rate Your Teacher web sites are certainly not foolproof  [example here is for Chelmsford College - average teacher rating 2.8, and other college and school ratings are on that particular site]

Students might be making assumptions based on superficial impressions,  should we Rate Our Teachers on a more rigorous basis, so that we don’t ?

I have produced some pretty dire PowerPoints in my time.

• Far too many bullet points

• sometimes with very odd bullets
• and a relentless plodding on from A to B to C to D to E to F to G and back to D then on to H ….
• • and nested lists

    • getting smaller and more bunched up all the time

• and all kinds of distracting pictures

• • and buttons   to press
    • which didn’t work

Prezi offers a white board  onto which you stick text, photos, videos, web links , whatever. You can then set a path for the presentation to click through, or you can take it as it comes, zooming in and out of the material.

Difficult to describe clearly, but much easier to see in action.

The site has some good examples which run on the net – and you can also download them.

Here is one I made and downloaded earlier.

I took as my material my blog on “How much are teachers paid?”

I made it into a Prezi, which is available on the web here

and I also downloaded it to a file – and that file is in my sidebar File Box.

So you can either access my Prezi on-line , on the web here , where you can play with it directly; then download it from that webpage and look at it offline

Or download the zip file from my File Box in the sidebar, and use it offline.

[If your network won't let you download a zip file, let me know and I will email it to you]

I think it is a winner – and there are now FREE educational licences for the off-line editor.

My bet is that young people will like this type of non-linear presentation.