My thoughts on stuff

Minister, have you got time to answer a few questions? Yes, of course. I wanted to have a quick chat about schools Great, we are rightly proud of our school reforms. Well that is exactly what I wanted to talk about. Now please correct me if I go wrong at any stage. A few years ago we had state schools that were accountable to appointed governors and the local authority and inspected by Ofsted. A few schools judged to be struggling were converted, then schools judged to be the best were then allowed to become independent of local authorities and these were called academies. Quite right too OK, then post 2010 a new system was put in place, under a new government, where schools deemed to be failing were taken away from local authorities and given to sponsors. These sponsors were people the DFE judged to be of the right character to take over the running of a school. If new schools were to be built they would be called Free Schools and would be run free of any control of local ...

"Minister, could you spare a moment?" "Ah, yes, of course, Cuthbert isn't it? From the Institute of justifiying privitisation of state assets with a thin veneer of massively oversimplified economic nonsense?" "Yes Minister, the very institute you founded." "Great, great, what can I help you with today?" "Well it seems some of the public are starting to notice problems with our school reforms" "That's easily fixed. You know the drill. Say "you don't accept that" whenever facts are provided. Phone up the friendly journalists, you know the ones who don't point out that you work for a think tank created by the very minister who is in trouble....actually even better, get Tobes on. He'll be treated as an independent expert even though we pay him £90k to promote the system." "But Minister, I think we might have gone a little far with some of the latest changes..." "Go on...

The trouble with blogging is that very often other people have already expressed what you wanted to say far better than you can. I've had to scrap two blogs, one on what it really means to be well educated and the other on the growing trend of authoritarianism. The problem is Alfie Kohn has written the seminal essay on the former and Disidealist the perfect rant on the latter. So instead I'm going to talk about one of the most influential figures in my education; TV chef Ainsley Harriott. I know, I know, but hear me out. I think that we narrow the definition of education too readily. I believe anyone who teaches you something you didn't know how to do is educating you. And I worry that there are very loud and very influential voices pushing a line that minimises the value of non-academic education. Ready, Steady, Cook was a gameshow in which two contestants brought along a bag of ingredients they had chosen and a TV chef would turn those ingredients into a t...

20 years ago this summer I needed to earn some money before moving away to go to university. In my town that left me with two choices; factory work, or a new exciting workplace of the future - a telephone call centre. I phoned up and, after a typing test, was offered a position as a call handler. I wasn't overly pleased with this as the factory (situated below the call centre) looked a lot more fun to work in. However it did mean an extra 20p an hour! The call centre specialised in holiday brochure distribution. One minute you would be sending out bulk orders of Thompson brochures to a travel agent in Rotherham, the next a brochure to someone who'd read an advert about coach holidays to Devon in the Daily Mail. This was all powered by cutting edge technology. You would receive a phone call and the display on your phone would indicate which company you were representing and the script for the conversation would appear on the computer monitor in front of you. Most calls wer...

With news today that a MAT has asked the DFE to simply take back the 21 schools they were looking after we are once again left asking the question "What problem do MATs solve?" The MAT CEO was earning £25k a month, the MAT had been handed £5m or so to expand and yet they can suddenly say goodbye? What happens to the money they were paid? As far as we know the problem was that they were worried the schools they had taken over weren't improving fast enough. Well why would they? The problem, once again, is that the rules of the game have been accepted when anyone applying a simple amount of critical thought could see the rules are stupid. There is a massively strong correlation between pupil intake, exam results, and whether a school is judged to be any good or not. Why would sticking a new badge on the blazer, wholesale changes to the management team and disruption to the running of the school lead to sudden, drastic improvements? No doubt the basics of infrastructu...

After the runaway success of my first ever blog (34 hits, only three quarters of which were me looking for spelling errors and bots) it has become clear the public are desperate for more. But despite the obvious appetite for more blogs dealing with the crossover between football analytics and education reform in England this one is going to look at how the cult of the free market will lead to the ruination of public services. A surefire mass market hit. Imagine if you will a typical state run education system. There is a government minister, government department, a layer of local government supplying services, and headteachers each responsible for the running of their school - helped and monitored by their local authority and accountable to school/parent governors. All monitored by a government inspectorate. Now imagine I am a management consultant, probably in my mid-20s, Economics degree and a well thumbed copy of "Road to Serfdom" and "Atlas Shrugged...

Yes I know, start with the mass market stuff to grab the readers then, once they are hooked, start on the meaty topics. In the many hours I waste on the internet when I should be doing whatever it is that people who don't spend hours on the internet do (work is something I've heard mentioned) I like to imagine how I'd be much better at other people's jobs. I then supply them with handy tips about how they might get better at what they do, safe in the knowledge that I'll never have to actually do the work, and that anything I recommend, that isn't done, would have worked perfectly. With this in mind I want to write some quick thoughts down on two areas that interest me; football and education. Both areas seem to be in the middle of an analytics revolution. Or as Mark Lawrensen would no doubt describe it "attack of the nerds". Nerd being, in football circles, someone who thinks there is any value at all in looking at how things could be improved wh...