Navigating Education Challenges: Essentials for Success

1. We found love................. ..........................................in a hopeless place

2. Being right and being successful • Creative and compliant???????

3. A hopeless place? • Michael Gove morphs into Dr Emmet “Doc” Brown - we are all going Back to the Future • A culture of exposure and threat based on Orwellian double speak • Where challenge is equated with extraneous difficulty rather than raising standards

4. and................ • An obsession with governance • A compulsive relationship with knowledge • Assessment for categorisation and qualification • An assault on intermediate agencies • Centralisation masquerading as empowerment

5. Genuinely aiming to increase social mobility while failing to understand the complexity of modern poverty

6. Mental Health Drug Exposure Family Life Behavioural Issues Peer Pressure Legal Problems Meet Jamie

7. The Present

8. Getting it Right for Every Child

10. What makes a difference There are at least four important ingredients for improving education. The first is the teacher’s professional skills. Research has shown that factors like national or regional policies are less influential on pupils’ achievements than factors within each school Of the school factors, the teaching skills of staff came top. The most important of these was effective classroom management

11. The other factors • Third, teachers’ morale and attitude to their craft. It is hard to improve what you do through clenched teeth. • The second vital ingredient is the raising of aspirations and expectations. • Fourth is the climate within the school..a positive attitude to improvement in which people look at what is happening in classrooms, reflect on it and implement judicious change

12. Effective Qualities • Sharing the management of learning with pupils • Promoting the belief that attainment can improve • Using a wide range of sources of information • Identifying a range of needs • Responding to needs • Giving and receiving feedback • Using a range of sources of support

13. The 4 big questions • What are you going to do to improve your practice? • What help or support will you need to ake that improvement? • What outcomes will you expect your young people to achive as a result of the improvement? • What evidence will you look at to determine if the improvement has been made?

14. Professionalism • Reflection • Ambition • Courage • Tenacity • Idealism • Care • Energy

15. we have children who do not have a future, they have a destiny and that destiny is a bleak one. Our task, if we are educators, in whatever sense, or if we are simply committed citizens, is to rewrite the narrative of such lives. Ideally, it is to enable those who face a destiny to create a future.

16. Changes and Challenges • Globalisation changes everything for us – we need to be competitive • The massive challenges that we face require innovative responses • Unpredictability demands creativity • Clear links between creativity and well-being • We need to do better

17. What do employers want? • More workers with more education • Skills that allow movement between jobs • Broader competencies – numerical skills, problem-solving, communication skills, team working • Facility with ICT • Ability to learn • The potential to add to the business, not just fulfill a role

18. Eric Hoffer • In times of change, the learners shall inherit the earth while the learned will remain beautifully equipped for a world that no longer exists

19. David Cameron • And the learners who can manage complexity, innovate and create will shape that inheritance and define the future • our ambition must not simply be to enable our learners to adapt to the circumstances that they find themselves in, it must be to enable them to change and improve those circumstances.

20. So, what do learners need? • Basic skills – literacy, numeracy • The specific skills required by disciplines or vocational choices • The skills to access knowledge including the skill of questioning

21. The capacity to think, learn and adapt • The ability to innovate and create • The commitment to sustained enquiry or task • The ability to choose, and use, the tools for learning, life and work

22. What sort of learning? • It has to be active • It has to involve the quest for meaning • It has to be varied • It needs motivation • It should respect disciplines but not be dominated by them • It must be assessed in terms of breadth, depth and application

23. What does this mean for planning? • Clarity of purposes • Common recognition of the elements – skills, concepts, knowledge, activities • Analysis of what we offer now • Identifying the gaps/shortcomings • Thinking about what we do and how we do it? • Discussing and agreeing standards

24. What are the learning pathways? • Knowledge and information • Involves recognising or recalling information. When encountering a new piece of information, recalling existing knowledge and seeing how they fit together is often a vital step towards understanding.  • Understanding • Understanding goes well beyond recall. It involves absorbing ideas and informationin a way that makes them meaningful, memorable and usable.

25. Application • In many ways this is an extension of understanding where learners put what they understand into practice • Analysis • Analysis builds on understanding. Sound procedures are used to examine knowledge critically. The outcome is new ideas  

26. Synthesis • The ability to put information and ideas together and reconcile contradictions • Evaluation • Evaluation goes beyond analysis by subjecting whole processes and systems to objective examination. This often entails applying values and belief as well as cognitive skills. 

27. Systems thinking • Breadth of vision is combined with deep knowledge and understanding in order to appreciate the workings of complex real world systems and anticipate the impact on the whole of alterations in the parts. • Creation • Creation is the stage beyond evaluation. The outcomes of evaluation are used to create new processes and systems.

28. Therefore.......... • Be informed by the big picture • Keep the breadth • Understand the importance of what you do • Set the right standards and make sure that they are focussed on outcomes

29. Ask the important questions........ • What does this mean for learning and young people’s lives • and............

30. What have you done today to make you feel proud?

31. And some questions forMr Gove

32. What you need to think about • How do we best serve learners? • How do we build links and establish progression • Setting the bar for consistency in quality and then achieving it • Setting ambitions as well as providing care

33. Your choice of outcomes • Your processes • Your successes • Your plans for improvement • Your best advocates • Being assertive/controlling the agenda

34. Some thoughts “Smart kids pass tests” It’s the last question that holds the key to high achievement It is not our job to enable young people to fail, it is our task to give them the tools to succeed Aspirations are the options young people can consider with some confidence

35. The Lacuna Their white dresses swirled like froth, with skirts so wide they could take the hems in their fingertips and raise them up to make sudden wings, like butterflies, fluttering as they turned….. “Indian girls,” she spat……”A corn eater will never be more than she is”

36. The dancers were butterflies. From a hundred paces Salome could see the dirt under their fingernails, but not their wings

37. How do you want to be remembered? • She had a great inspection report • She gave something back • She was a brilliant teacher • She changed children’s lives • She was a key part of all that we achieved

39. The Real David Cameron • therealdavidcameron@gmail.com • @realdcameron • 07825654326