When a pupil of mine, Gerry, presented me with his English Language A level coursework, I couldn’t believe my eyes.  It was A* with knobs on! “Blimey, Gerry, how did you do that?” I asked, “Your last piece scarcely scraped a D grade.” Gerry, who was a bit of ‘wide-boy’, winked at me, “I re-booted my brain sir!” I had to admire the craftsmanship of the essay;  it wasn’t a ‘generic’ copy, the work was personalised and clearly had not been copied from the internet. Much later, I was to learn that it was the work of a personal tutor. There was no way I could prove plagiarism because the tutor had re-worded Gerry’s personal responses. Furthermore, knowing that it was technically a ‘legitimate’ piece of work, I was pleased that my results would be boosted — teachers’ career are on the line if they get bad results now.

It’s fairly obvious it’s the system that’s at fault. When you have very ‘high-stakes’ testing like we do in this country, pupils are bound to find ‘quick fixes’. So much is riding on the marks for both teacher and pupil. The former’s pay packet now depends, in part, upon their pupils’ performances in their GCSEs and A Levels, while the latter’s whole career and future can hinge upon a grade.

Coursework has always been a problem because unscrupulous students can so easily cheat. In my experience, most  egregious offenders now get caught; the ‘copy and paste’ jobs from the internet are always spotted. But coursework like Gerry’s can still get through, particularly if competitive parents get involved. I’ve come across parents who have written essays for their children because their child’s grades have been more important to them than their integrity.

The last government tried to stop the Gerrys of this world with the introduction of what is termed ‘Controlled Assessment’  (CA) at GCSE whereby all ‘coursework’ is done in the classroom under the supervision of the teacher; this doesn’t necessarily weed out the cheats because notes can brought into the exam. That said, these notes have to be brief and clearly the cheating has drastically dropped from previous years. However, unsupervised coursework still forms a major part of A Levels.

However, the current government is saying that it’s going to stop coursework entirely and have only end-of-course exams. While this may stop the cheating, it’s also unfair because the vast majority of students I’ve taught have benefited from doing coursework and haven’t been crooked. Perhaps we need a more continental system of assessment where presentations and speeches are factored in to the overall marks. I think this would make our courses more educative, more fun and fairer.

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(This article was first published by The Guardian)

Plans to change the “special needs” system in schools will have a big impact upon teachers like me, as well as millions of pupils and their parents. That said, the system does need an overhaul.

Far too many pupils are judged as having “special educational needs” (SEN). Last year, an Ofsted investigation found that one in five pupils is judged as SEN – a whopping 1.7 million children – and suggested that possibly 450,000 had been misdiagnosed. The latest policy initiative is based on this report.

It’s important to appreciate how the current system works. One of the problems is that SEN has become such an all-encompassing term that it’s difficult to distinguish from “deserving” and “undeserving” cases. Under the 2001 Special Needs Code of Practice there are three main stages for a child who is suspected of having a “learning difficulty” that makes it difficult to keep up with peers. The first is called School Action; this is when the school or parents flag up a problem – whether it’s problems with literacy, organisation or behaviour, etc. The school can then give the child more help such as in-class support or a laptop. If, after some time, this intervention isn’t working, the pupil may move on to School Action Plus; typically outside agencies get involved then and the child might get more intensive assistance. However, if the parent/school may feel that a child has extreme special needs, such as a mental disability, they may opt to have a “statutory assessment” which is the first stage in having a Statement of Special Educational Needs. A statement is a serious matter and I don’t think anyone is suggesting doing away with them; they are needed to help our most vulnerable children. In January 2011, some 224,000 (or 2.8%) pupils across all schools in England had statements of SEN, while there were more than 1.4 million pupils with SEN without statements, or about 18% of pupils across all schools.

The increasing numbers of pupils on School Action and School Action Plus do seem “dodgy”; in the past seven years, the numbers have increased by 4%. I suspect this is because many more teachers and parents, desperate to do their best for their charges, have got “wise” to the system. They realise there are extra resources, attention and privileges for SEN children, and so have pushed more strongly for an SEN diagnosis. Unfortunately, as Ofsted has noted, this has created inequalities and unfairness because children with clued-up parents have often been judged to have conditions like “dyslexia” when it’s debatable whether they are sufferers.

Quackery, misdiagnosis and dissembling have crept in. For example, dyslexia has become a catch-all word in SEN diagnosis: it can mean a difficulty with spelling, or with reading; but some claim a child’s entire perception of the world can be shaped by dyslexia. Such confusion has meant that profiteers have cashed in on school and parents’ uncertainties, with a growing number of doctors prescribing drugs to “cure” pupils’ lack of concentration, after following the advice of schools and parents. A 2010 Guardian investigation has found that the taxpayer is forking out £31m to pay for these drugs, while the root causes of the problem aren’t being addressed.

So, yes, the SEN system does need an overhaul and, yes, hundreds of thousands of children do need to come off the register; however, this should mean a reallocation of cash rather than cutbacks. What is needed is more accurate assessment of our children so that if a child is poorly behaved, that’s all they’re treated for. At the moment, children who muck around are often judged as SEN but this doesn’t improve their attitude, rather it gives them an excuse for staying as they are. The SEN label can be demotivating and demoralising for some children, encouraging a “victim” mentality.

Ultimately, our whole system needs an overhaul. Behind so many problems in our schools is the fact that school league tables and our obsession with exams mean that the child gets forgotten in the hunt for good results.

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Earlier this month, education secretary Michael Gove said that top academics should reform our A-level system, implying that only the elite Russell Group universities can stop the chronic “dumbing down” going on in our sixth forms. His announcement was on top of a survey of academics that found more than half think current undergraduates can’t write or think properly.

But before we blame schools for churning out incapable students or rip up our current A-level system, a few important points need to be considered. First, scholars are always moaning about students. In 1879, a Harvard professor, Adams Sherman Hill, complained that entrants to his august university were “deformed by absolute illiteracy”. Plus ca change? Second, A levels have had a major overhaul not once, but twice since the beginning of the millennium.

That said, if there are going to be yet more changes, right now might be a good time to reflect upon the key question: what exactly are A levels for? Next year, the school leaving age will rise to 18. Does this mean that A levels will become the equivalent of the school leaving certificate? Are they a preparation for university, for work or for life in general?

There is a real worry that if academics are solely in charge of setting A levels, they may well become too narrow. At the moment, the best A levels contain a healthy mixture of the academic and the practical. Thus they can appeal to would-be undergraduates and to the less academically inclined.

In recent years, I have been lucky enough to work both as an A-level teacher and a visiting lecturer at a couple of universities. The experience has been illuminating. Increasingly, it has struck me that both sectors could learn more from each other. Yes, I certainly think that A levels could better prepare students for university than they do now, but this could be done with relative ease and without tearing up the current A levels. Making the coursework requirements for essays more stringent would be helpful; they would become more like dissertations, properly referenced and showing evidence of wider independent reading.

Equally, universities could learn quite a bit from schools; from where we have gone wrong – and right. It’s obvious to me that the “blame the teacher” culture that has existed in schools for years is now invading the halls of academia: fee-paying students are demanding top marks even if they are below par; a worksheet that explains everything is expected as a matter of course; deadlines are not taken seriously. Teachers are battling valiantly against this nonsense, but many academics are like rabbits in the headlights when confronted with such consumerist laziness; they are not used to imposing strict rules.

There is some evidence that universities could learn from schools regarding pedagogy. Many universities are still stuck on fairly Victorian models of learning: lectures, where students passively take notes, are still the cornerstone of many departments. It strikes me that things like lectures could easily be put on the internet, freeing up time for academics to engage more with their students, doing the sorts of things that A-level teachers do as a matter of course: group work, debates, role plays, simulations and so on. The Higher Education Academy has recently funded research into this indicating that many universities could sharpen the quality of their teaching.

The truth is that teaching is often at the bottom of academics’ list of priorities because they are largely judged on the quality of their research. As such, news last week that teachers from top independents and maintained secondaries may soon be sharing their successful teaching techniques with university lecturers should be welcomed. Schools and universities shouldn’t be lecturing each other, but they should certainly be having a conversation.

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In the majority of cases, though, your school stumps the cash for you to go because, even if you don’t get a copy of the forthcoming exam paper, these meetings give you a vital insight into how to improve your pupils’ grades; something your career, your pay packet and your school’s future depend upon. The main function of these seminars is simply to translate exam board jargon, often so bewildering in official documents, into friendly English.

The scales have fallen from my eyes in a few of these meetings. For example, a few years back I taught an A-level English language course and my students had been getting consistently poor results in one unit; I’d read and re-read the bumpf – the mark schemes, the examiners’ reports – but it hadn’t helped. Then I attended a meeting and was told a few key things, among which was the importance of fostering genuinely personalised responses among my pupils; and the examiner explained how to do this. I changed the way I taught and was rewarded with considerably better results.

This anecdote is significant in the light of the furore caused by the Telegraph’s undercover reporting. On the whole, exam boards are not telling teachers exam questions so that pupils can be spoon-fed the answers, but quite the opposite. They are reassuring teachers that the questions are predictable, in order to try to persuade them that students will get the best marks if they come up with their own ideas rather than producing copy-cat generic answers to what are essentially generic questions.

This “cloning” is happening because all GCSEs and A-levels are now marked by measuring the degree to which pupils meet the relevant assessment objectives (AOs); these are essentially the key subject skills. Exam questions are shaped by the AOs; this means the questions are rarely surprising. For example, in my own subjects, English and media, I feel confident about the types of questions that will be asked in the exams, even if I can’t be sure of the exact wording.

An examiner could therefore point teachers in the right direction – perhaps misinterpreted by the Telegraph as telling teachers the questions – without feeling that he or she was saying anything new; most teachers would have guessed what questions were going to come up anyway.

Exam boards have put a renewed focus upon “personal response” (somewhat ironic considering their questions are anything but). This is a noble aim but I’m not sure the current regime of exams is delivering the originality of thought that we all want. Exhaustive academic research into this area was conducted by the Assessment Reform Group in schools. Its report, Fit for purpose? seriously questions the validity, reliability and cost-effectiveness of our national assessment system, finding it to have a negative impact upon the quality of teaching in classrooms, pupil motivation and “genuine” standards. While I don’t agree with everything the group says, I think its powerful, evidence-based arguments have never been taken seriously enough by the powers that be. Let’s hope this latest debacle leads on to a more serious debate about the role of exams in our schools.

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An explanation of Exposure:

Pathetic Fallacy in Exposure:

Structure and Para-rhyme in Exposure:

Alliteration in Exposure and Spring Offensive:

The background to Exposure:

An explanation of Spring Offensive:

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This is her explanation of how she came to write the book:

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But first, a definition: to understand where I’m coming from, it helps to understand the word “yob,” which is Victorian slang for “boy,” and has come to mean anyone (usually a young man) who is loutish in his behavior, whether this is in the way he talks, his verbal abuse, or in his physical aggression.

Like many secondary-school teachers, I’ve encountered my fair share of teenage yobbery. When I first started teaching in Stepney Green, east London, not far from where some of the London riots took place, the kids at the school would run up behind me and hit me on the back of the head, frequently yelling abuse or mocking me. My classes were riotous during my first years; objects were regularly thrown, abusive language was commonplace, and, during one lesson, all the furniture was pushed out of my room. At another school, the teenage boys would often fire pea-shooters at me when my back was turned; some threw pins, other put ripped cans on my chair. Vandalism, theft, and verbal threats were everyday occurrences. As teachers, we became hardened, perhaps even brutalized, by the atmosphere; either you left, or you put up with it.

During my first decade as teacher I learned that your classic yob in school looks for “special occasions” which give permission for them to be particularly foully behaved: school trips, break-times or even certain lessons. The worst behavior I’ve seen often occurs on last days of term. I’ve just published a novel, The Last Day Of Term, which depicts one of these nightmarish days; threaded through it are things I’ve seen first-hand and stories culled from colleagues. The departing pupils shoot fireworks at their teachers, causing one of them to have a heart attack, and they smash the glass façade of their shiny new school. The chief instigators are a gang, led by a charismatic leader who stirs everyone else up to cause mayhem.

This is exactly how incidents like the London riots happen: a few persuasive yobs use a particular event as justification—in this case it was the police shooting of Mark Duggan—and exhort their mates to “kick off.” These London gangs are doing on a much larger scale what they do habitually: parading their strength. A yob, as opposed to a genuine criminal, is a dramatic figure who wants to publicly show his power; he wants the TV cameras to see how great he is. That’s the whole point. Criminals, on the other hand, are secretive, because their criminality is simply a means to an end, usually money. While yobs may want to steal, that’s not their primary purpose; their ultimate pleasure is knowing that they’re feared.

Nowadays, schools are getting very adept at dealing with these characters. The school where I first was regularly physically and verbally abused as a teacher is now one of the most improved in the country. The useless head I worked for was sacked and now it’s run by a no-nonsense, hard-line teacher who doesn’t tolerate misbehavior. He and his senior management go around the school constantly with a loud megaphone and pull any miscreants out of lessons. Above all, the head finds out why these children are being so difficult. Sometimes it’s because they’re very weak academically, sometimes it’s due to poor parenting, or, with others, it’s simply that they’re a bit wild. The academically weak ones are obliged to attend “catch up” literacy and numeracy classes; the mentally disturbed are found counselors; the “naughty ones” get long detentions. No wonder the school’s results are now on a level with some of the best comprehensives in the country. These kids are exactly the same as the ones that I encountered, and when they’re outside school, trouble still occurs. In my experience, it doesn’t necessarily follow that well-educated disaffected youths are better behaved than ill-educated ones. On the contrary, the better educated your alienated teenager, the bigger the problem for society.

You could argue that their improved education has possibly made our young people savvier — and angrier. Burdened with debt, unable to enjoy the wealth of the older generations, and with poor job prospects, our “kidults”—as the seminal film about English yobs, Kidulthood, dubbed them—yearn to be famous, sexy and successful; to be the new Tinie Tempah, Plan B, or Jordan. And yet deep in their hearts, they know this is an impossible dream. As a result, our young people are alienated like no generation before them. A resident from Clapham, Jeremy Yates, says that the youths attacking his presumably well-off part of town shouted: “you are rich, we are poor” and “we rule London tonight, not you.”

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Observer columnist Barbara Ellen and teacher Francis Gilbert debate whether children and parents would benefit from a shorter summer break

Barbara Ellen: Francis, I would always have argued that school holidays are too long. For parents, that is. A case of: “My child, I would fight a lion for you, but if you ask me to play another game of Connect 4, I may have to suffocate myself with Moon Sand.” Now, with Michael Gove proposing shorter breaks for free schools, the feeling is growing that school holidays are too long for children, too. Leastways underprivileged children, who hold their own during the academic term but fall behind every summer because they miss out on the stimulation and structure better-off parents are able to provide throughout the holidays. It’s disadvantage piled upon disadvantage – how is this fair?

Francis Gilbert: Barbara, the summer holidays are the great gift of liberty that we give to our children – and curmudgeonly parents and politicians deprive children of their liberty at their peril. The summer hols are a prolonged period in which our children can find out who they really are and really be themselves – without the restrictive rules and regulations of school to confine them.

Yes, I concede your point that we know that poorer children can suffer a “dip” in their academic performance over the summer, but this issue is much more complex than it first appears. In some boroughs, such as Tower Hamlets, where I live, the poorest children’s academic performance has actually significantly improved in recent years for a number of reasons, one of which has been the improved provision that the borough has provided during the summer holidays.

Activities such as tennis, canoeing, trips away and film-making are all now offered free of charge during this time. The point is that the activities are voluntary. I firmly believe that giving children this choice about what to do really helps them establish a firmer sense of identity and autonomy. Poorer children have benefited massively. Let’s help all areas provide this wealth of activities that raise aspirations rather than locking children up in school all summer.

BE: While I applaud the efforts of Tower Hamlets, sadly this is not the norm nationally. As a rule, disadvantaged families must fill the weeks by themselves, and cash-poor, time-poor parents cannot provide tennis, film-making or canoeing. Which is why, as borne out by US research from as far back as 1968, poorer children fall behind during the holiday period, while the better‑off thrive, both academically and in terms of hinterland. As for children “really being themselves… without restrictive rules and regulations”, this may have been true of our summers, but does anyone allow children to wander free and unregulated any more? In the 21st century, parents (or carers) are omnipresent. Times have changed, shouldn’t school holidays?

FG: I’m glad that we’re both agreed that it’s vitally important to raise the aspirations and achievements of our poorest children but I’m not convinced that shortening the summer holiday is the answer. The reasons why children from poor backgrounds do badly at school are complex; social, economic, psychological and educational factors all play a role. Pinning the blame on summer holidays is facile.

It’s also worth pointing out that 80% of our children are not living in poverty. Are you saying that they too should be staying at school longer, despite the fact that they all want to keep the summer holidays as they are? Indeed, when I discussed the issue with my pupils – rich and poor – they were so incensed by the notion that their freedom would be curtailed that they made some “protest” posters in response, saying things such as they would have nothing to look forward to during term-time and that shorter holidays would make them unhappier.

BE: Francis, well done to your pupils for their posters, and their spirited defence of summer freedoms. However, it’s all a question of framing. Children may feel “free” in summer, and that’s great for them, but for many parents, the overlong holidays are a headache and an expense.

Not only are you supposed to provide non-stop entertainment for weeks on end, now it seems there must also be an element of “home-schooling” and “self improvement”, lest your child be one of those who fall behind. Isn’t this the government backing away from the problem as if it’s nothing to do with them?

The expected result would be the more moneyed parents running around, keeping up with the tutoring, extra-reading, rural walks, library visits, chosen sports, et al. Meanwhile the stressed poorer parent hasn’t the time or the cash to compete. These parents are unable to add what amounts to “education-lite” or “holistic boost” to their summer “to do” list. So, unless you’re lucky enough to be in a borough such as Tower Hamlets, the poorer families have no chance.

I agree that there are many complex ingrained and toxic reasons why poorer children fare less well at school, and these need addressing with great urgency. I also sympathise with schoolchildren and of course their overworked teachers, who are desperate for the respite of the long summer holidays.

Then again, “Hard cheds!” as we used to say in my comp playground. Just because something has always happened one way, it doesn’t mean it’s always going to be the best way. A problem has been identified, and if there’s a chance that amending it would hugely benefit underprivileged kids, removing just some of the hurdles they face, then shouldn’t we at least give it a go?

FG: Barbara, we’re really getting to the root of the matter here because your response ultimately raises a crucial question: what are the respective roles of parents and teachers in this modern, high-octane society?

As a teacher, I do think that many parents need to stop panicking about being bad parents. Your list of things that parents should be doing with their children is depressing because underlying it is the notion that parents should be “instructing” their children – that they should be surrogate teachers – rather than providing the love and attention that our children desperately need. It’s actually abdication of responsibility because many parents substitute activities for love.

I’d like to say to a lot of parents I come across: “Forget all that nightmarish ‘hothousing’ advice that clogs up the press, and just pay some attention to your child! Talk to them about what they’re interested in, share meals with them, enjoy being in their company…”

That’s enough; the summer holidays are a great time to chill out, no matter how rich or poor you are. Leave the teaching to the teachers.

After the hols, I get my pupils to write a letter to me telling me about themselves and what they’ve done in the summer. Having done this for nearly 20 years, I can predict the life-chances of my pupils not by how “hot-housed” they’ve been, but by how happy they seem in their letter. The happiest children speak about enjoying the supposedly mundane things in life with their families: going shopping, cooking dinner, tidying up even! Their letters glow with love.

The summer holidays should be a time when parents rediscover or reaffirm their love for their children. As John Lennon sang in the quintessential summer of 1967, “All you need is love…”

A protest poster produced by my pupils

A more detailed argument about why we must save our summer hols

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