The history of Kibworth is The Story of England

Good news. The BBC is repeating Michael Wood's series The Story of England, which uses the history of the Leicestershire village of Kibworth to tell that story.

The first episode will be on the red button at 4pm tomorrow and shown on BBC4 on Wednesday at 8pm. The first episode is already available on the BBC site. I own the DVD of the series but will probably watch it on Wednesday.

Let's end with a bit of trivia.

I remember reading long ago of a Manchester Grammar School production of King Lear in which Lear was played by Robert Powell, the fool by Russell Davies and Cordelia by Michael Wood.

There is partial confirmation of this online.

I'm going to make an example of you, Mr Tompkins

View image | gettyimages.com

I am not a parent or a teacher, so no doubt I take the problem of unauthorised absence from school too lightly.

But I have always been uneasy at the idea of headteachers having the power to fine parents over this issue - and there are those who would like to see this power applied more widely.

I also note that a system that has rather retreated from punishing children in recent decades has taken happily to punishing parents.

"Have you washed your hands, Tompkins?" CCTV in schools

Big Brother Watch received a lot of publicity this morning for its report Class of 1984: The extent of CCTV in secondary schools and academies.

That link will take you to the full report, and there is also an article about it on the Big Brother Watch website:

This report highlights an issue that has not been subject to any real public debate and we hope by highlighting the scale of the situation a proper debate can now take place about not only how to regulate CCTV, but also why surveillance continues to increase unchecked when there is still no academic research that suggests it is having a positive impact. 

We make three key recommendations in the report, which are: 

- The Home Office code of practice for CCTV cameras should apply to all publicly funded bodies 

- The Surveillance Camera Commissioner must have the power to enforce the code of practice and penalties for breaching the code must be available 

- The Government should commission an independent review of CCTV use in schools to explore the evidential basis upon which cameras have been installed. This should include ensuring any school using CCTV has appropriate policies in place so teachers and parents are fully aware of why surveillance is being used, when footage can be viewed and by who. 

The surveillance experiment of the past twenty years has failed to reduce crime or improve public safety. As schoolchildren across the country are now expected to accept surveillance for the formative years of their education, it is time for a different approach.

Why have you gone blue in the face, Tompkins?

Oh for God's sake:

Clip-on ties are replacing knotted school ties, as schools worry about health and safety worries, says a survey of school uniform suppliers.

The Schoolwear Association says 10 schools a week in the UK are switching, because of fears of ties getting caught in equipment or strangling pupils.

There are also claims that clip-on ties can stop pupils from customising the size of the knots in their ties.

"Worry about health and safety worries"? Now that is worrying.

House Points: Speaker Martin and the Five Members

Today's House Points column from Liberal Democrat News. In the event, Mr Speaker did not surprise us.

Open House

Settle down, class. Open Calder’s History of England and we shall read about Charles I and the Five Members. Tompkins, you start:

Parliament then passed a law that gave members control over the King's ministers. Charles I was furious and decided it was time to take action. On 4 January 1642, he arrived at Westminster with a great company of armed men to arrest Arthur Huggl… Hig...

"Haselrig," you ignorant boy.

Arthur Haselrig, John Pym, John Hampden, Denzil Holles and William Strode who were all MPs whom he regarded as troublemakers. The five men managed to escape before the soldiers arrived.

When the king demanded to know where the Five Members were the Speaker, Michael Martin replied: "Help yourself, laddie. They are hiding in yon stationery cupboard." He then rolled on his back, waved his paws and asked: "Is there any chance of a peerage just now?"

That will do, Tompkins. Sometimes I wonder about the headmaster’s choice of textbooks.

Because, of course, Charles encountered not Speaker Martin but Speaker Lenthall. And Lenthall famously replied: "May it please your Majesty, I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as this House is pleased to direct me, whose servant I am here; and humbly beg your Majesty's pardon that I cannot give any other answer than this to what your Majesty is pleased to demand of me."

If the current Speaker had shown a thousandth of that courage and independence when the police asked to search Damian Green’s office last week he would have redeemed his reputation overnight. He would have gone from being seen as an undignified and faintly partisan figures to being greeted as a hero of British liberty.

Now that reputation may be beyond salvage. By the time you read this he will have made a statement to the Commons explaining his part in the affair. But another leak suggests the line he will take has been thrashed out at a meeting to which only Labour politicians were invited.

Mr Speaker may yet surprise us. I hope he does. But I fear that, for the rest of his time in the chair, he will not be sitting comfortably.

And nor will Tompkins if I see him poke Ellsworth-Beast Minor again.

It's called an iceberg, Tompkins

You may think that responding to every headline with a public inquiry and changes to the school curriculum is a modern habit.

Not a bit of it.

I was talking the other day to someone whose son attends the London Nautical School. She said - and the school's website confirms it - that the school was founded in 1915, as a consequence of the official report into the loss of the Titanic. It was set up to teach better seamanship to London's youth.

Today it is a foundation school and sports college within the Borough of Lambeth, and displays an individuality that is often lacking in the state system. But truly there is nothing new under the sun.

I am receiving your blazer loud and clear, Tompkins

I do hope this is just a silly season story.

The Guardian reports:

A school uniform maker said yesterday it was "seriously considering" adding tracking devices to its clothes after a survey found many parents would be interested in knowing where their offspring were ...

Trutex ... commissioned an online survey for 809 parents and 444 children aged between nine and 16. It said 44% of the adults were worried about the safety of pre-teen children and 59% would be interested in satellite tracking systems being incorporated in schoolwear. While nearly four in 10 pupils aged 12 and under were prepared to go along with the idea, teenagers were more wary of "spying".

Clare Rix, the marketing director, said: "As well as being a safety net for parents, there could be real benefits for schools who could keep a closer track on the whereabouts of their pupils, potentially reducing truancy levels."

Maybe it is just another meaningless survey, but it is also a reminder that the push towards a surveillance society does not come only from government. There are plenty of commercial interests only too happy to play on people's fears too.

That will do nicely, Mr Tompkins

A couple of years ago the BBC reported a trend for British-Caribbean parents to send their children back to the West Indies for a more traditional education.

Today's Leicester Mercury reveals a novel twist on this phenomenon:

A man who sold cannabis to pay for his children's education in Jamaica has won a cut in his jail term.

Judges at the Court of Appeal in London were told that Robert Cecil Taylor was determined that his children would have a better start in life than him.

He had no formal education during his childhood in a Jamaican village and cannot read or write. To pay for their schooling, he sold cannabis to about 20 people in Melton Mowbray

Thinking about it, the real villains here must be the schools in Melton Mowbray.

The fingerprinting of children in schools

Today's House Points column from Liberal Democrat News. I mention Leave Them Kids Alone. Action on Rights for Children is very good on this issue too.

Being fingered

A few months ago a Liberal Democrat press release announced: “Sarah Teather opposes school fingerprinting”. If you thought she meant messy art lessons, think again.

For, as Greg Mulholland told the Commons on Monday, 3,500 primary and secondary schools now use biometric data to run libraries and canteens. To this end, around 750,000 children have been fingerprinted.

Should we worry? Do we need this Mulholland campaign? (Call it a Mulholland drive if you prefer.)

Listening to Jim Knight, the minister who replied, the answer is no. Schools databases don’t store fingerprints. Technology turns each print into a number, and that is what is kept.

Visit www.leavethemkidsalone.com/ and you find a different story. The databases store 300 bytes of data that form a map of each child's fingerprint. So you can see the danger that children’s data will be stolen or haunt them years later.

On the day of Greg’s debate, the government announced guidelines for schools. They say prints should only be used for the declared purpose, must not be passed to anyone and should be destroyed when the child leaves the school.

But they are silent on parental consent. Many of the 3,500 schools took prints without consent. Children as young as five have had their dabs taken on the pretext of a game of spies.

Given how efficient children are at losing things like swipe cards, you can see the attraction of using fingerprints. But we should not encourage schools to do so, despite the pressures from industry. (There millions to be made from kiddyprinting.)

Defending the fingerprinting of his pupils, one Yorkshire headteacher said: "All the measures to do with ID cards will possibly invade their privacy even further … and I would see us as getting them ready for the world in which they will have to live."

In much the same spirit schoolmasters used to say “You’ll thank me for this one day, Tompkins,” while reaching for a favourite cane.

It is easy to conclude that fingerprinting is the future and we are powerless to resist it. Labour makes just this mindless equation between that computers and modernisation. But if we do not use the institutions of government to shape society as we want it to develop, what is the point of politics?

Will you take a cheque, Tompkins?

Joining the Ancient and Worshipful Order of Bloggers involves swearing a sacred oath that you will never use the phrase "political correctness gone mad". That can present a problem when you come across a story like this one from today's Leicester Mercury:

A boy who broke into a primary school and injured himself swinging on a gate was received £5,700 in compensation.

The secondary school pupil, who was trespassing at night on school grounds, was hurt when the gate collapsed.

Leicestershire County Council had to pay money to the boy because they say they could not prove the gate had been maintained properly.

It is not as if a landlord had set his estate with man traps and spring guns. It is not as if the boy wandered innocently on to private land. If the facts are as presented, he was a secondary school pupil who broke into a primary school.

And does a council really have to keep detailed maintenance records for all its properties in case a burglar injures himself?

But before you start moaning about loony council or P******** C********** G*** M**, read further. You will see who the real villains are:

A city school head teacher said no-win, no-fee insurance claim companies were targeting schools, leading to rocketing insurance premiums.

He said: "Within the first week of starting to work at my school I was told to look back at a case where a boy had been injured seven or eight years ago and was trying to get compensation.

"There was another incident where the council wanted to pay out about £5,000 to a child who had fallen in the playground.

"It was only a minor injury and we'd dealt with it really well. If we start paying out that kind of compensation we are opening up the floodgates to compensation in the smallest of cases such as grazed knee or broken fingers."

The inevitable result of such commercial pressures and judicial rulings is that councils will make schools even more of a fortress than they are now. Benign activities like children using school playing fields for kickabouts out of school hours will become impossible.

As I have no doubt remarked before, the paradox is that the more rights we give children, the less freedom they have.

Who untied you, Tompkins?

"Rowdy students are causing problems on buses. But whose job is it to control them?" asks the front page of the Guardian website.

If you read the story you find that it is not about students at all but schoolchildren. Perhaps this unwillingness to treat children as children is one of the causes of their bad behaviour?

As one of its "experts", the story quotes the director of "Belt Up School Kids". If the only way we can control our children these days is to tie them up, things are even worse than I thought.

I am going to stretch you, Tompkins

The government has announced a programme of university-run summer schools to "stretch the brightest pupils".

No doubt many youngsters will enjoy them, even if stretching sounds like the sort of thing that Flashman did to Tom Brown on a wet afternoon.

But the question we should be asking is why bright children are not properly catered for by the education they get during term time.

Don't ask me, Tompkins

Yesterday's Commons education select committee report on bullying was right to insist that schools take the problem seriously.

Most of the media coverage concentrated on the suggestion that children should be involved in suggesting suitable penalties for bullies in their own schools.

I wonder if I am alone in seeing this as a bit of a cop-out.

Yes, children are often capable of being more mature and sensible than we ordinarily allow them to be. Yes, they have to learn to take on adult responsibilities and this might be a good way of doing it.

But on the whole adults know better than children - if they didn't, there would be no point in sending children to school. So shouldn't it be adults who are making these decisions?

And isn't one of the reasons that bullying flourishes the unease that teachers and other adults feel about asserting authority? Encouraging them to slough off responsibility on to the children is not going to help matters.

You'll thank me for this one day, Tompkins

The excellent ARCH blog points us (sort of) to a worrying story from York. Schools there are taking children's fingerprints and using them to issue books from their libraries.

Depressing but not new, you say.

But what is new is one of the arguments used to defend the procedure:

Chris Bridge, head teacher at Huntington Secondary, said the system was preparing pupils for a world in which terrorism was rife, and their privacy would be further invaded.

He said: "These children, frankly, are growing up in a world where identity and being certain about your own identity is increasingly important.

"All the measures to do with ID cards will possibly invade their privacy even further, but the world has no answer to terrorism without using these things and I would see us as getting them ready for the world in which they will have to live."

Why aren't you in school, Mr Tompkins?

Red faces in Colchester last week:

A policing crackdown on truants hit a snag yesterday when it emerged many pupils were out of the classroom because of teacher-training days.

The "truancy sweep" across Colchester was a joint initiative between Essex Police and educational welfare officers from the county council.

All very amusing. But later on the East Anglian Daily Times report says:

Pc John Meacock and educational welfare officer Justine Musk headed to Tesco at Highwoods, where they spotted a number of youngsters with parents or grandparents.

But after a friendly word from Pc Meacock, it emerged they were all out with good reason - either teacher training or in one case a kidney infection.

The idea that you can be stopped by the police and asked to account for yourself simply because you are with your children has always seemed to me outrageous. It is something that would take place in totalitarian state. But we have become so used to the belief that the state cares more for our children than we do ourselves that it goes unremarked.

Found via Fair Deal Phil (cringe).

I'm not allowed to speak to you, Mrs Tompkins

Schools are to be forbidden to interview parents when deciding which children to admit. It seems our favourite sources of news expect liberals to think this is good news. The BBC reports it under the headline: "Backdoor school selection curbed ." The Guardian reports it under the headline: "Admissions code aims to make selection fairer."

But if schools are banned from interviewing parents, doesn't that mean parents are banned from interviewing schools too? How, in those circumstances, can they possibly decide whether a particular school will suit their child or not?

This government move implies that children are an amorphous mass who can be sent to one school or another without any concern for their individual character or abilities. Yet, as I said in the Guardian (hem, hem) in April:

If liberalism is to amount to something more than socialism without the identity cards, respect for individual difference must be central to it.

And the official Lib Dem response today? Sarah Teather's press release says:

A system where applications were kept anonymous would be much more sound. It would guarantee that schools could not pick, or exclude, children because of knowledge of their family name or address.

Oh dear.

It's not fair, Tompkins

I have been know to complain about the adolescent attitudes of the teaching unions:

A skilled and confident teaching profession must be central to our education policy. But too often the teachers' voice, as heard through their unions, is the reverse. It is endlessly negative, opposing every government imitative - good, bad or lunatic. At its worst it is full of teenage nihilism. It's not fair. I hate you. You're not my dad.

Those attitudes now seem to be spreading to the National Association of Head Teachers, judging by reports of its recent conference.

That impression, it is true, may be down to the reporting by sympathetic journalists more than the event itself.

The BBC, for instance, has Mick Brookes - the Secretary General of the NAHT - warning that "healthy but boring school dinners could be encouraging children to buy their lunch from chip shops instead". The complaint that healthy food is boring sounds like something you would expect from the children not the head, but the word "boring" comes from the BBC reporter and not Brookes.

Or take the Notebook column in today's Education Guardian (which does not appear to be on the paper's website). There Rebecca Smithers writes:

Readers might recall this time last year ... when the little known education minister Derek Twigg was booed and jeered (Patricia Hewitt-style) at the same event in Telford after a particularly boring and ill thought out speech.

Again that childish word "boring".

If we expect anyone to defend the principle that visiting speakers should be politely received however tedious they, surely it is headteachers? Yet here we have a liberal/left journalist implicitly advancing the idea that one should not expect a gathering of them to be any more mature than a group of badly behaved children.

I fully expect to live to see the collapse of civilisation - possibly before the end of this week.

Is this all your own work, Tompkins?

There is a good article by Frank Furedi in today's Guardian. He looks at the factors that have led to an increase in plagiarism and cheating in schools and universities:

From day one in primary school ... [parents] are told that the performance of their children is intimately linked to how much support they get at home. In a desperate attempt to improve standards of education, parents' concern for their children is manipulated to draw them in as unpaid teachers. The outsourcing of education by schools encourages a dynamic where many parents become far too directly involved in producing their children's homework.

Surveys suggest that parents spend on average six or seven hours a week on homework duties.

This article is also discussed by Scott Burgess. And see Furedi's own website for more of his articles.

Bring it out here, Tompkins

There were many stories in the papers last week that have been forgotten after Thursday's events. One of the sillier ones was The Times' claim that "One schoolboy in 10 has carried some kind of gun in the last year".

The story itself has disappeared behind the Times' firewall ("The undiscover'd country from whose bourn/No traveller returns"), but there is a neat dissection of it on The Law West of Ealing Broadway:

The headline suggested that up to a million kids have gone about tooled up, and the reality is that a few hundred, or even a couple of thousand teenage boys have claimed to be dead hard - probably even more claimed to have shagged Billie Piper.

And you will play Ophelia, Tompkins

Liam Fox has called for a reconsideration of the case for single-sex schools. Already two Lib Dems - Chris Ward and Peter Black - have made fun of the idea. But I wonder if they have blogged too soon.

The evidence suggests that, paradoxically, coeducational schooling tends to reinforce gender stereotypes rather than break them down.

As this campaigning American site says:

Girls in all-girls schools are more likely to study subjects such as advanced math, computer science, and physics. Boys in all-boys schools are more than twice as likely to study subjects such as foreign languages, art, music, and drama. Those boys might not get better grades in those subjects than comparable boys get in more gender-typical subjects. Studies which focus only on grades and test scores won't detect any difference in outcome.

So while you may not agree with Fox's idea, it is hard to see why it should be treated with such contempt. We Lib Dems should be welcoming diversity and experiment in education. Too often we act as a conduit for the voice of the professional establishment.