Background
The new government has reaffirmed a committment to supporting faith schools. Like the British Humanist Association, I am largely against the formal inculcation of religious values into education. The way to create an inclusive society is to teach about a full range of religions to a diverse spectrum of pupils, and to teach a core curriculum without it being tainted by questions of belief rather than rationality. Just before the dissolution of Parliament, for example, the Labour government managed to sneak in an undebated amendment which allows faith schools to opt out of rules on teaching sexual issues such as contraception and homosexuality. Then education minister Ed Balls insisted that:

There's no opt-out for any faith school from teaching the full, broad, balanced curriculum on sex education. Catholic schools can say to their pupils that, as a religion, we believe contraception is wrong, but what they can't do is say they are not going to teach about contraception.

The messages here - and those that will be delivered to pupils of such schools - are so confused and confusing that they surely cannot help to alleviate the problem of young pregnancies and sexual health. It's the equivalent of the school bully giving you a cigarette whilst warning that it is bad for your lungs.

Then there are the questions of manipulation of the system, so that wealthy parents "convert" to the religious faith of whichever good school happens to be in the vicinity, buying into a religion in the same way as they might buy a house in the catchment area of a good school, pushing up prices in the process and thereby excluding poorer families from those neighbourhoods.

Of course, all these problems might be just about acceptable were it proven that faith schools are educationally better than non faith schools. However, the evidence on this is hard to decipher, because pupils from a particular religious background tend to come from the better socio-economic backgrounds that are a predominent predictor of a student's educational outcomes. In 2009, a Parliamentary Report surveyed the evidence and concluded that:

Recent research on primary schools suggests that performance difference can largely be explained by prior attainment and background. The remaining differences are due to parental self-selection and selection methods used by some faith schools. Further analysis of GCSE results shows a different pattern of results for faith and non-faith schools with similar governance arrangements and control over admissions. Non-faith schools perform better in certain categories, faith schools do best in others and there is no clear difference in some.

While the national statistics cannot determine whether faith schools perform because of or in spite of the religious doctrines (or indoctrination) that underpin them, at a personal level I've just heard a true story that suggests the local problems of putting faith ahead of the education of children.

A Teacher's Story
Sarah is a young and ambitious teacher in a small, Catholic primary school in a close-knit village community. She has been through several Ofsted inspections, where her work was held to be so good that it was taken as a model for other teachers in the Local Education Authority to use. She is a very popular teacher at the school, with colleagues, parents and pupils.

So when the school's deputy headship became vacant, Sarah was not only keen to apply, she was explicitly encouraged by the school governors to do so. There was just one snag. Sarah happens to be an atheist, such that although she is allowed to teach at the school, as with other Catholic maintained primary schools she is barred from applying for deputy or headship positions.

Instead, the post was advertised externally, and two candidates came forward, neither of them ideal (as Sarah well knew, having sat on the interviewing panel). Admirably, the school has a pupil's council who also interviewed the candidates, and the one that was ultimately selected was not liked by the council - and has remained uneasy with the students ever since. One of the horrible ironies is that the new deputy, ostensibly Catholic, is not actively practising, whilst Sarah refused to succumb to the hypocrisy of "converting" to Catholicism just to secure her promotion. She is, of course, quite willing to teach the Catholic curriculum, albeit objectively rather than invested with her personal adherence to the faith.

In this small school, then, Sarah has now reached a ceiling with regards to her skills and abilities. Clearly, she is of deputy headship material, but she will have to move to a non-faith school if she wants to realise this ambition. Indeed, last year, one of her colleagues did just this in order to take up a deputy-headship at a non-faith school. All concerned in this scenario will lose out: the school will lose one of its star teachers, whilst having to take on a less than ideal deputy, whilst the pupils and parents will have to get used to another teacher (which can be disruptive in a small, village school).

In 2007, reports indicated that Catholic schools faced a crisis in recruitment of school leaders, with more than half of headteacher vacancies having to be re-advertised. Sarah's experience, then, cannot be that uncommon, and there must be many junior staff who have aspirations for headships or deputy headships in faith schools who are discriminated against on the grounds of their atheism or holding to other religious beliefs.

Catholic schools typically receive just 10% of their funding from the Church, with the remainder being provided by the state. It is unacceptable that a largely state supported school like Sarah's will be unable to educate its pupils to the best of the abilities of its available staff. Whilst the statistics on faith schools may equivocate about whether they are ultimately better at teaching children, it is important to remember that children are not statistics. In this particular case, there is no doubt that the children's education has suffered as a result of the dogmatic adherence to religious values, and that Sarah - the school's star junior teacher - will be forced to look elsewhere to reach the educational heights which she is capable of attaining.

Labels: faith schools, Politics, religion

Earlier this year, I blogged about my first impressions of teaching for the Open University from an institutional point of view. Now at the end of the year, it seems appropriate to reflect on my sense of the students I have taught, again especially with a view to the differences I perceive between OU students and those at the mainstream university at which I also teach.

As I said previously, I did not really appreciate the uniqueness of the OU until I was inside it, and the same goes for understanding the type of students it attracts. At the risk of promoting a prospectus cliché, the diversity of the students is remarkable. My groups have included young single parents juggling childcare and work with study, and retired grandparents looking to maintain their intellectual energies. Some of my students have PhDs, whilst others have only basic school leaving qualifications. Some are studying for personal interest, others to further their careers and skills. Some of my European students want to improve their standard of English language, whilst some of my UK students living abroad want simply to keep in touch with English.

The common theme uniting this disparate band is motivation. Not treading the conveyor belt of education from sixth form to university, all have opted to study at the expense of money and, more significantly, of time. Of course, keeping up their motivation has not always been easy. For some, the pressures of personal or work circumstances have forced them to stop in spite of their best wills; for a few others - who have prompted me to reflect on my own practices of support - their lack of self-confidence has outweighed their determination to continue in the face of a low essay mark. Whilst those who actually do not complete or opt to defer their course are in the minority, the motivational factor of those who remain builds a substantial quality of trust between tutor or student.

When someone struggles to submit an assignment because they are full-time caring for a disabled relative, this seems in contrast to my mainstream students who seem systematically to fall ill or break their printers at 2.00 in the morning on essay deadline day. Of course, one has to give these students - who are, I stress, the minority as well as the stereotype - the benefit of the doubt. But doubt is something I rarely have when an OU student contacts me to discuss their troubles. Having actively chosen to do the course, failing to meet its deadlines is unlikely to be a conscious choice, but one that must be viewed sympathetically and flexibly.

On the more positive side, I feel very involved in ensuring that their motivation to start the course sees them through an incremental learning process that may start slowly, but that has built to a really positive conclusion and high marks in most cases by the end of the academic year. This sort of trajectory is not one I have really encountered before in my mainstream teaching. Whilst my mainstream university students are intellectually exemplary - they are, indeed, among the very best in the country - their existing abilities sometimes make me suspect that my role is more to encourage, enthuse, and probe than actively to teach. The acquisition of knowledge is something that these students can do independently in a library, and although they respond thoughtfully to my feedback on their essays, it is the practice of writing regular essays itself that has the biggest influence in the immersive university culture. By contrast, OU students bring very different backgrounds and skills to bear, albeit driven by a motivation to succeed, and my greatest personal reward has been that I feel that I am actually teaching, exploiting their motivations to learn by making suggestions to which they will definitively respond. And although they, too, study independently of me, I am their only point of formal contact when they genuinely need help to understand something that they cannot work out for themselves.

Most evidently, my teaching impact is directed through their assignments, which I try to mark thoroughly (even, I heard one student say, jokingly, "tyrannically"!). Where an aspect could be improved, I say so. Where an essay is weak, I point this out. Where an essay is strong, I commend it. So many of my mainstream university essays are good but ultimately unspectacular pieces of work, such that is hard to pinpoint just what is needed for that elusive first which should, in principle, be within reach of any of my mainstream students given the top grades with which they arrive at university. By contrast, I rarely have difficulty pinpointing to my OU students what they could do better and, when they respond directly to that feedback in subsequent assignments and receive a higher mark, a virtuous circle is closed between myself and them. Looking at the average marks across my group, there has been a steady progression from the mid-50s in the first assignments, to the mid-70s by their final ones. This bears out my general sense of the comments I have found myself making on their scripts. At the start of the course, I was regularly explaining the need for coherent sentence structure and smooth integration of primary quotation with arguments; by the end, I find myself discussing the finer points of apostrophisation and pointing out how they could engage dialogically with secondary criticism.

Which brings me to their literacy skills which are, I suppose, the one area that has most surprised me, because I did not know what sorts of standards to expect. Of the mainstream university students I receive from A-level, I know to expect that they can write a good, structured essay, but may well have flawed punctuation and grammar - especially the dreaded spliced comma - because they have never been actively taught to use the language correctly. The literacy of my OU students does range more widely, but on the whole, I would say that they are not far behind my mainstream students in terms of their ability to structure a coherent argument in a syntactically rigorous way. Oddly enough, some of my students who speak English as a second language are better than many native speakers in this regard, since they have actually been taught the underlying rules from the ground up.

A further distinction between my OU students and my mainstream ones is that the former actively respond to my comments about their writing style, working hard to correct infelicities the next time around. It may take a while for the improvements to show through, but their increasing scores testify to the fact that the lessons I teach through marking are actually being learned. A similar sense (though this must be shared with the course teams who craft the written teaching materials) comes across in their development as literary critics. Often starting off by falling into the old trick of re-narrating or summarising the "story" of a literary work, by the end of the course most of my students approach assignments in an analytical frame of mind, able to decipher questions of style and form rather than plot and content.

This, however, marks the one predominant frustration of teaching for the OU. At this end of the course, as well as instilling a degree of critical competence across the board, I have some students who I know would excel at higher levels and into postgraduate study, whose baseline literary critical skills could (or should) be driven even further. However, the OU's modular system being as it necessarily is, my students who have more to give in English studies might next year find themselves studying the fundamentals of stellar mechanics.

One pleasure with my mainstream students is to inculcate them in level one courses that introduce them to the major genres, and then to take them to level two where they specialise in more niche areas. By this stage, they actively challenge my own views, and conduct their own research that, via essays, reciprocally educates me. With the OU, I hope I have helped students to realise their potential as writers and critics, but whether they choose to employ these core skills on more advanced work is, sadly, not a journey I get to make with them. This, then, is the end of the road - at least until a new intake comes to me in October.

Labels: Open University, teaching, University Life

No, the above title is not a reference to myself, ill-tempered though I may have been as I was buried under a pile of exam papers this past fortnight. Rather, it is a reference to a peculiar quirk of my marks' outcomes this year. When I marked last year, I noted in my post on An Examiner's Perspective that it is tempting to try to mark predictively according to the neat bell curve, that sees a few marks in the 2:2 range, more in the first, then the majority towards the upper middle. Although we may instinctively want to rail against The Mismeasure of Man by this omnipresent graph, like it or not that does seem to be the way in which students fall, even if one tries to mark without statistics in the back of one's mind.

Except this year, and illustrating the dangers of presumptuously assuming the bell curve will always appear, my marks seem strangely to have fallen more like a double-humped dromedary. They have taken on a hilly appearance, with a lump of marks around the high 2:2 or low 2:1 range, then another lump around the high 2:1 or low First range, with a body of marks missing in the middle. It is hard to know quite how to account for this phenomenon. Were it that all my marks were uniformly higher or lower than expected, it might be reasoned that I was marking unfairly or too leniently. But with them pushed to two poles, it is unlikely that I was alternately over-zealous and over-exuberant.

The only thing that can feasibly account for it is a quirk in the year group. It is hard to conceive how a year group can differ substantially from year to year at university level, such that a whole group of student consistently underperforms or performs very highly. Certainly, in the closed and fashion-pressured environment of schools, a particularly hard-working or lazy group of esteemed peers can conceivably pull an entire year along with them up or down a scale. We have all heard teachers complain about horrible year groups, and celebrate brilliant ones. However (and maybe I am being naïve here), my belief is that at university students are largely independent learners, and come with more independence to pursue their self-set aims. Whilst one is pushed into attending school, one opts to go to university, and is less likely to be subject to the pressure of a group of peers not to do as much work as one might independently want to. So why so much variance between the able and the less able, or the hard workers and the less hard workers, as apparently testified by my marks?

One other potential explanation presents itself. This is that A-Levels are decreasingly valuable as preparation for university study. Although virtually every student will be coming to my university with three As, that letter encapsulates a range of abilities, rather than the minority elite as it once did. On the other hand, being a well-established and top-ten university, it will attract people who have genuine talent and ability (as well as, more likely than not, a background in private or grammar-school education). These students might be expected to perform very highly indeed. But there might also be a tranche of students who are less capable performers, who have still got in on the back of a three A grades. (Lest we be too pessimistic, it must be acknowledged that "less capable" here still means very good indeed. Even the low 2:1 essays that fell into the first of my humps testify to very good writers and literature students.) This split in my marks might be the first indications of the inability of A-levels to discriminate between the genuinely excellent, and the straightforwardly good, candidates.

Of course, the most likely possibility is that I am simply reading too much into a limited range of data. Almost all the essays I marked fell within the 60 to 70 range, meaning that there are only a few percentage points between what I would call a "low" grade and a "high" one. Having marked less than 100 scripts (which, let me tell you, is still a damn lot of essays!), this could just be a statistical blip - and one that gives the lie to the predictive value of the bell curve, except with very large numbers of students indeed.

Labels: bell curve, essay marking, exams, University Life

I could not let David Willetts' recent comments on the funding of Higher Education pass without a very brief comment. I'll largely skirt around his comments on fees; it is quite clear her is preparing the ground for higher tuition fees to be introduced once Lord Browne's report formally recommends their introduction. Once I've ironed out a few bugs, I'll be formally launching my Tuition Fee and Contact Hours Calculator, and will say more about the relation between fees and teaching (which Willetts demanded be improved across the sector) then. Objectively he is right to say that university funding rests on "shaky foundations," but it is economically short-sighted and socially unfair to expect students to be the ones to prop them up.

What I was more struck by today was his "innovation" of encouraging students to study at Further Education colleges to gain degrees from attached universities; according to Willetts:

That means that you don't have the costs of living away from home but you do get a prestigious degree and that's actually how we spread our access to higher education. This is a way you can have more people going to university, which is an aspiration, more rewards for high quality teaching.

As someone who teaches in both a distance learning institution (the Open University) and at a conventional university, I can see both sides of the fence. And it seems quite clear to me that whilst distance learning is outstanding at broadening access to those who might otherwise find it difficult to study conventionally, it is no substitute for the experience of a residential university. Distance learning has a place in the UK's Higher Education system, and I need only refer to my post on teaching for the OU to show that I do not in any way see the OU as a limited or weaker university, just a different one.

But it simply cannot offer as rich and diverse a learning experience as can be had in a conventional university. Just this morning, for example, I received an email from a really outstanding student, who has also taken up writing plays and novels since beginning university, inviting me to a performance of his new play. Through the university's drama groups, he has been to the Edinburgh Fringe and made the contacts that will allow him to continue his writing career beyond university. If he succeeds as a writer, it will be partly in spite of, not because of, his degree work in English. Cardinal Newman's ideal of a university as a place where groups of scholars and students work in close proximity, such that a student like this can ask me to make suggestions about his novel or go see his new play, cannot be replicated by a distance or remote learning option.

I would certainly welcome a broadening of the types of learning offered by institutions. A good place to start would be by providing a fairer funding system for part time students. But to suggest as Willetts does that a degree is all that should come out of education is misguided - and the sorts of education that occur within a university's walls cannot adequately be replicated by students studying remotely from their institutions.

Labels: distance learning, Open University, the idea of a university, University Life