“Stories are, in one way or another, mirrors, We use them to explain to ourselves how the world works or how it doesn’t work. Like mirrors, stories prepare us for the day to come. They distract us from things in the darkness” (Neil Gaiman, “Smoke and Mirrors”)

A policy-maker is a writer of fiction. And as writers of fiction we use the same narrative techniques and tropes as novelists, poets and film makers. Because what else can we do? The fiction industry – the multi-billion dollar superstructure that exists to entertain and divert us – sets the bar so high.

The mess, the chaos and the arbitrariness of reality will never measure up to the best that the industry can offer. Therefore – we edit; we prune and we cultivate. We collect the shards of experience that suit our purpose, we downplay those that do not.

In the US, we have the American Dream. In the UK, recently, the takes of the “strivers“. The “hard-working families”. This is a story we can all get behind. Working hard, playing by the rules, going the extra mile (and maybe an enormous amount of spectacularly unlikely luck…). Leads to success.

How much of policy-making cleaves to that story? How much public money props up this clever, counter-factual myth?

Recent variants downplay everything but luck and perseverance. The Olympians. The X-factor. One shining moment of awesome. This is enough to sustain allegiance to the machines of state.

“The last page, the final strains of a chord, the curtain falling on an echo of a closing speech, living happily ever after; all that grates on me. The finality is false, because there you still are, the reader, the observer, the listener, with a gaping chasm in front of you, left out of the resolution of the story that seduced you into thinking yourself inside it. […] An ending always leaves you standing in the whistling vacancy of a storyless landscape.” (Jenny Diski, “Strangers on a Train”)

A writer of fiction can aspire to (or subvert) the closing moment of “happily ever after”. A writer of public policy has no such luxury. Or no such requirement. Policy, though it says so much about the future, really concerns nothing but the eternal present of rolling news and social media. The never-ceasing quest for the “announceable“.

Most of what you see in the media, reported as announced by the government has either already happened or will never happen. It is a compelling addiction – to present the problem, the diagnosis and the solution in one speech. Your minister does not present policy, he (and it is – still, sadly, in 2012 – nearly always a man) presents a three-act blockbuster.

In UK Higher Education, the problem was the needs of students not being met… Actually, let’s do this properly:

“IN A WORLD… where students are unable to take the courses they demand, where business cannot employ the trained staff they need – inflexible and inefficient universities, unchanged for a century, hold all the cards. [sepia shot of Senior Common Room, with glasses of port and evidence of fine dining]. But one man [slow-motion portrait of David Willetts gesticulating] had the vision and the foresight to use government funding and direction  to put… STUDENTS AT THE HEART OF THE SYSTEM [chromatic rising choral score, heavy drums, fade to black and then to…] AUGUST 2010.”

Problem. Diagnosis. Solution. Compelling, heartwarming and every single iota demonstrably and inarguably a complete lie. And any student of history will tell you that this is a form of lying as old as time – from the Virgin Queen to the Son of Man.

 “The web is in many ways an internet of attractions more than it is a medium germane to more traditional narrative forms that we have come to expect given our immersion in 20th century film, television and radio.” (Jim Groom, “An internet of attractions”)

The rise of social media as a primary policy communications channel is the first chink visible in an increasingly impregnable suit of armour for many years. The opportunity exists because the response comes before analysis. If you read parliamentary reports in newspapers (and you should, as your children will think them as otherworldly as we do public information films) you will note that so much of the skill of the sketch-writer (and just note that job title!)  is to turn a series of largely unrelated and frequently absurd events into a narrative. Social media dispenses with that.

As soon as the text of any announcement (generally made available substantially before the announcement is made, to allow journalists a head-start) is public, the ten or fifteen people who really get that micro-policy area will be tearing it to shreds – on a forum, by email, or on twitter. By the time that the details are on the page of an online newspaper, each faction will have agreed and shared a “line” (again, the language is theatrical) which will be hammered to the point of nonsense in the comments below-the-line.

This is new.

We perceive events in isolation. We expect moments of diversion, not narrative super-structures. This is why the mid-90s theories of post-modernism are once again quoted by policymakers as indicative  models of an increasingly prismatic reality.

Fox News demonstrated this well on election night, as a carefully constructed worldview was brought crashing down by the continuing liberal bias of US voters. Until this, the success of the right-wing was based on the appeal of the re-affirming narrative – if we could just get back to an imagined past (genuinely, after L.P. Hartley, a foreign country) then all of the uncertainty we face will be over.

But as society becomes more pluralistic and more tolerant, that impulse becomes less and less reliable. The new right insists on the primacy of numbers and the innumerate cousin of the number, the infographic.

There is nothing spectacular or notable about numbers – they are just another way, as open to bias and distortion as any other, of telling a story. They are a tool, not a solution. Relative, not absolute. They are a retreat into another imagined reality, another reflection of whatever truth may be.

“Red means run, son, the numbers all add up to nothing”  (Neil Young, Powderfinger)

And why limit ourselves to numbers? The world of fiction; film, music, writing, even rhetoric tell us the power of the other options we have. We know how a graph can reduce something rich and strange  into something very easily misunderstood. The fashion is for figures, but if we take policy seriously as an art not a science we owe it to ourselves to stand apart from fashion.

[see also: Mark Johnson on “Education and History“]

 

 

Again, fate and fascination draws me back to Bletchley Park. My initial stumble upon the Christopher Grey’s book “Decoding Organisation” has now been compounded by me actually reading the thing (thanks again to the good folks at Thompson Rivers University), and just this week I was lucky enough to engage with Dr Sue Black (her of Saving Bletchley Park fame) at her amazing JISCEL12 keynote.

There are many books and articles that will tell you some of the history of Bletchley, more  about some of the amazing people working there, and the astonishing intellectual and technological triumph that was the repeated breaking of ciphers and encryptions previously considered unbreakable. As previously, and not to in anyway denigrate the amazing work that was done there, my interest is in Bletchley Park as a knowledge organisation and an innovative organisation – and the parallels between Bletchley and those other great repositories of genius and intellectual labour, universities

By referring to “Bletchley Park” as an organisation, I am already making a very obvious error. The work referred to above was conducted by the Government Code and Cipher School  which happened to be based in and around the Bletchley Park estate during the second world war, itself born in 1919 of various intelligence functions within the Armed Forces and Foreign Office, and a forerunner of GCHQ. The school was technically placed under the purview, though not controlled or directed by, SIS (a forerunner of MI6) and the various subcultures within what we know as “Bletchley Park” rubbed together uneasily for much of the war.

Some of you may have spotted the unlikely use of the word “school” in the organisational title. The school was founded to support and train staff in the emerging field of “signals intelligence (SIGINT) during peacetime – primarily in the effective use of encryption and ciphers rather than decoding the signals of others.

At the time the centre undertook it’s most famous work, the following roles were implicit within the activity of the school:

• Interception of signals, at distributed centres across europe
• The delivery (via transport or transmission) of the content of these signals, to Bletchley.
• Decryption of signals
• Translation into english, and the de-corruption of this intelligence
• Traffic analysis (who sent signals, where, how often?)
• Intelligence assessment (what did it say? what can we learn from it?)
• Distribution to customers/ end users.
• Use of information (or not)

(list adapted from Grey (2012) p37)

Each of these processes had their own champions, just as each of the services and cultural tendencies within Bletchley had their  advocates. There were frequently heated disagreements concerning the value and needs of each interest group, so much so that an external review (the Van Cutsem report, conducted by Brigadier W.E. Van Cutsem ) was conducted in 1941.

Nineteen Forty-One was, of course, a year of great peril for the UK and Europe – so the conduction of a major enquiry into the organisational structure of GC&CS in December 1941, followed by a transition to a new structure by February 1942 may strike some as faintly absurd.

Certainly the kinds of arguments that were being made have an other-worldly feel to them. Nigel De Grey, himself a superb codebreaker, wrote up a review of the work of the GC&CS after the war (which Grey quotes widely from [pp58-59]):

there was never … any clear understanding about the staffing of the service stations or any uniformity of procedure between them […]

GC&CS created a most complicated structure internally violating the official ladder of command and at the same time causing an intricate and illogical series of channels of reporting…

There is an amazing amount of primary evidence in Grey’s book, which I would strongly urge the interested to take a look at, especially the first section “The Making of Bletchley Park”. Much of this is taken from National Archive documents which are sadly not (yet) available online. I particularly want to read what Grey describes as a “satirical sketch of the various organisations involved that was written in 1940” entitled “The Kitchen Front”!

As I don’t just want to re-write the entire book, I just want to give one further example from 1941. In October a group of leading cryptanalysts wrote to Winston Churchill asking for more funding, bypassing the entire management structure at Bletchley. The interesting thing is not the obvious “a few great men” narrative, but the fact that they chose to implicitly criticise one key administrator by defending the work of another – thus leading to the demotion of the man who brought the intial structure and staff of Bletchley together, Alastair Denniston. It was office politics, writ large.

Do bear in mind also that I am not telling the story of the organisational reshuffle that broke the enigma code – many forms of Enigma has been broken even by 1940 . Rather, this is the story of an organisation in transition – a research centre that needed to add production lines to meet insatiable customer demand. (because who *doesn’t* want more intelligence?)

—

I awoke on Monday to learn from our Prime Minister that we are at war. However, we appear to be at war with ourselves, with bureaucracy and our human rights. As always, universities are a microcosm of wider society, wherein we can plainly see that bureaucracy is an easy target but also an essential support mechanism. The lean, mean, fit-for-purpose, more-with-less language of business and innovation does not provide us with the safeguards and loopholes that make organisations work.

Remember, Enigma was broken whilst Bletchley was apparently in chaos. The reorganisation was primarily a way to scale up what were basically research findings into a product.  Even within the new structure (post Van Cutsen), there was a research team working amongst and within the process-driven large scale decryption functions. And even in the process driven areas – you see the tales of Hut 3 (translation, evaluation and decryption of Army and Airforce intelligence) descending into near mutiny in 1942.

If you are lucky enough to work in an innovative organisation, you will see these tensions simmer and erupt again and again. Precisely because people care so much about the value of what they are doing, different conceptions can lead to heated argument. And then (hopefully) new understandings and new links forged.  Often the complexities of these organisations are founded on the fractures and reformations of the positions and people involved.

—

I was lucky enough to revisit the Hawthorn Building at DMU recently – it was my “first” university building, wherein I studied (and failed) pharmacy for a year in the mid-90s. If you were going to build a set of rooms to teach Pharmacy, you wouldn’t design the Hawthorn Building. Huge windows (a former arts college), a medieval archway preserved in the basement, a main lecture hall where Hendrix once played, rooms in turrets accessible only by hidden external staircases…

You wouldn’t design it like that, but you wouldn’t undesign it from that either. It is beautiful, ungainly, inspirational and the faculty doesn’t so much inhabit the building as colonise it. But in doing so it has adapted the building to suit needs passing and long term, in a way it could never do with a purpose-built facility. Organisational structures can be self-adapting and self-nurturing in the same way.

 

 

I’m still thinking about (and digesting) the “Decoding Organisation” book that the good folks of TRU decided to buy me. But this quote from another source made me sit up in recognition:

In the early 1970s [sociologists] carried out a large survey of superintendents, principals, and teachers in San Francisco school districts. The initial reports indicated that something was amiss in these organizations. Reforms were announced with enthusiasm and then evaporated. Rules and requirements filled the file cabinets, but teachers taught as they pleased and neither principals nor superintendents took much notice. State and federal money flowed in and elaborate reports went forth suggesting compliance, but little seemed to change in the classrooms. Studies of child-teacher interactions in the classroom suggested that they were unaffected by the next classroom, the principal, the district, the outside funds, and the teacher training institution.

Or so quotes Robin Hanson, from a paper he can’t be bothered to cite properly(!). He sees this as a “dictator-like teacher autonomy”: “Schools are designed to, and do, stifle student imaginations. So why would we care much if teacher imaginations get stifled in the process? Do we care if prison guard imaginations gets stifled?”.

So far, you may think, so standard edutech ‘disrupt all of the things!’ talk – though the main pull-quote has lovely implications for the analysis of the university as a chaotic organisation, which is what I’m currently warming up to do. But Robin Hanson is an interesting chap and worthy of further consideration. He takes most of the credit (pdf) for one of strangest ideas in US foreign policy in the last 10 years.

First coming to light in 2003, the Policy Analysis Market (PAM) was an audacious attempt to harness the power of the free market in order to identify likely terrorist threats. Participants (who needed to show no evidence of expertise in foreign policy, or indeed identity) could bet (and win) actual money on a range of likely acts. This approach seems to sit neatly between crowd-sourcing and rewarding “informants” in a traditional intelligence industry manner.

It is easy, and indeed was easy, to write this idea off as a right-wing fantasy – the invisible hand of the market solves everything. And that, coupled with a hefty dollop of ‘nothing is more serious than the safety of our nation’ rightist hand-wringing is pretty much what happened – sparking a scandal so great that it even caused John Poindexter (of Iran-Contra fame) to resign. So with all of this media frenzy, the actual research project (and it was only a research project) never got started.

I’d started thinking about PAM again after reading Mike Smithson’s analysis of political punditry versus the (UK!) betting markets during the US election:

Throughout the long night of the White House race the most striking feature for the punters was how the betting markets were much faster responding to events and the information available than any of the so-called pundits.

Again, lots of anonymous predictions come closer to the mark than a smaller number of “expert” ones, and the offer of reward to predictors leads to the possibility of non-open information being used (“cheating”, as academics would call it).

And as the press began to call it, in relation to activity on Coursera massive online courses. A large number of participants, with varying levels of expertise, competed to answer non-trivial questions. And clearly some used “forbidden” information to do so.

Now Coursera is not so much a new model of education as a tool to produce test data in order to draw quantitative conclusions on every aspect of educational performance. [just realised as writing, I’m also describing a traditional university in maybe 3-5 years time]. This approach (at least, on this huge scale) was pioneered by Candace Thille’s team within Carnegie Mellon’s OLI project.

Where PAM and political predications via betting markets actively hope for “cheats” in order to gain better quality data, Coursera and OLI are looking for an honest failure to predict correctly in order to improve what I can only, in this context, describe as market intelligence products (or as I might used to have called them, lectures). As Andrew Ng (co-founder of Coursera) described:

[…] While reviewing answers to a machine learning assignment, [I]
noticed that 2,000 users submitted identical wrong answers to a programming
assignment. A k-means clustering analysis revealed that the student errors
originated with switching two lines of code in a particular algorithm. This
information was used to improve the underlying lecture associated with the
assignment.

[a useful academic counter-example here would be Galaxy Zoo]

Now the casual reader (hello both!) will probably be wondering what I am getting at here! It’s clear that both PAM and Coursera/OLI, whilst ostensibly set up for widely differing reasons, both are really looking for what you might call the “interesting outlier” in order to improve and expand upon the intelligence resources provided by in-house experts. It was Pauli who famously remarked of an uninteresting paper “It is not even wrong” – my suspicion is for both examples that a “right” answer is “not even wrong” and thus uninteresting.

And the top quotation on teacher autonomy – is the subtext not that it is impossible to get good quality comparable data on teaching methods whilst classroom practices are so varied?

But – finally, and chillingly – a university substitute that is actually hoping for wrong answers from students? That raises far deeper ethical questions than PAM ever did.

[edtech diaspora postscript: Hanson is clearly sensible enough to read – and cite – Martin Weller]

[further reading postscript: And Hanson maintains a great archive of PAM related materials on a dedicated corner of his web presence]

So I’m sitting in a nondescript airport bar in Vancouver with Brian Lamb. We’re at the end of an immense and amazing conference on Open Education (OpenEd12, which I’ll be writing much more about). We’ve drinks in hand but have not yet reached the “gentle incoherence/blind rage” stage. And what are two supposed luminaries of the EdTech/edublogging scene talking about? The slow inexorable march of Coursera? The current consuming obsession with learning analytics? Gartner Campbell’s amazing keynote?

No. We are lamenting, with passion and disappointment, the slow death of investigative journalism. Brian speaks of the end of his long-standing support for the Globe and Mail, I respond with my own lingering fondness for Private Eye. We discussed of the freelance work of Nick Davies in uncovering the News Corp phone-hacking scandal – the way that one single revelation (the hacking of the voicemail of a murdered schoolgirl) turned an astonishingly well-researched “niche interest” media story into an all-engulfing political and media firestorm.

—

Flash back six months to another pint of beer, this time in the home of an old friend and (currently) a sub-editor. “All my life I wanted to be a journalist”, he tells me, “but the job I had dreamed of and trained for no longer exists.” I worry that the job of his dreams is the one I’ve been doing in my own time, for free, here.

—

And back even further, as I nervously check and re-check the sums that crystallise the argument that the new model of funding UK higher education would cost the tax-payer significantly more than the then-current method. I was so terrified I was actually ill – bottled publishing myself and sent the whole story to another blogger who published it word-for-word…

—

Forward again to last Friday. I follow a link on twitter to read of Jennifer M. Jones’ decision to quit her PhD. In the build-up to what I can only call the “’lympics” she blogged and tweeted from a range of bizarre and twisted ‘lympic education events, about the pressures and the politics that defined not just the games but the planned public reaction to the games. It was mesmerising, it was chilling, and it was – I’m not sure whether she’d agree, but this is how I saw it – investigative journalism at it’s very finest.

But the structure of a PhD meant that she had to keep engaging with the topic. I remember seeing her tweets from a cheap hotel in London, during the hysteria and suspension of critical facilities that was the Opening Ceremony. I remember how painful it was for her when the whole world seemed to get sucked in to the insidious machine that she had been documenting and understanding over a research project that had taken over her life.

And I couldn’t help thinking that getting out then, getting out now should not be seen as failure. She’s clear that it isn’t – she’s able to do the small community projects she really wants to. And for all those of us who benefited from the way she reported back from the belly of the beast and have since had chance to get to know an amazing person don’t see it as a failure either.

—

So what am I drawing together here?

The realities of the media profession mean that investigative writers like Nick Davies are becoming increasingly rare, and that even the ones that do exist have to fit their findings into easily digestible nuggets for the 24 hour news juggernaut to graze on.

The realities of academia mean that, although sustained investigation and reflection are possible, they are constrained to the need to produce “academese” outputs, which are constrained to arbitrary lengths and timings, and a written in a language that is nearly incomprehensible to all but a small group of specialists. And that work outside of these constraints is not rewarded, or even stigmatised as failure.

There is a space – in the gap between academia and journalism, somewhere in the vicinity of the digital humanities movement – for what I would call the “campaigning academic”, someone who is supported (in a similar way to traditional research funding) to investigate issues of interest and to report back in a variety of accessible media. Maybe this “reporting back” could build up into equivalence to an academic reward, maybe not.

These would be cross-disciplinary scholars, not tied to a particular critical perspective or methodology. And they would likely be highly networked, linking in both to the interested and the involved in any particular area – at times becoming both. They might have a high media profile and an accessible style (Ben Goldacre comes to mind). Or they might be an anonymous but fascinating blogger (whoever it is that does the wonderful Public Policy and The Past). Or anything in between.

But they would campaign, they would investigate, they would expose and they would analyse. Bringing together academic and old-school journalistic standards of integrity and verifiability.

Bletchley Park – rightly – has a semi-mythical status amongst UK geeks as the birthplace of modern hacking. As the wartime employer of Alan Turing and his peers, many of the underpinnings of the information age – from super-computers to advanced cryptography – were developed here. Certainly in my imagination it was a small, close-knit, community of the finest minds in the UK – a place where sustained concentration and flashes of genius changed the course of the war.

Except of course, it wasn’t. It was a huge organisation – employing over 9,000 people by 1945, something you would never know from the official history. I was genuinely taken aback to hear this on an edition of BBC Radio 4’s “Thinking Allowed” (from about 15mins) which was discussing a recent book on Bletchley Park by Professor Christopher Grey of Warwick University. The book, “Decoding Organisation“*, takes an organisational analysis approach the to work of the station, and draws some surprising conclusions.

The fundamental shock being that – in any modern sense of the term – it was in no way organised. There were no clear lines of reporting, often different parts of the organisation had no idea of the existence of other parts, much less what they were doing and why. A very small initial elite group, drawn primarily from interpersonal contacts, barely held together what Grey describes an “anarchistic” system. It had no (or nearly no) job delineation, no strategic or policy function, and (surprising for a quasi-military wartime function) very little hierarchy. The small, close-knit social circle at the top was nominally “in charge” of the establishment – but they didn’t have a remit or regular committee meetings, or -really- any idea what was going on.

And this isn’t a story of “despite this, Alan Turing won the war and invented modern computers”. As Grey makes clear in the interview, it was because of this chaos that such things were possible.

This is by no means a single example. To me the Bletchley management parallels the classic British University structure of a similar vintage. In both cases you see a commitment to a single overarching cultural goal – the “defence of Civilisation”, with surprisingly little codification of such a goal.  And universities – loosely organised, loosely managed – have produced many of the advances that have advanced and defended Civilisation: from DNA at Cambridge to the Web at CERN (a multi-university collaboration in Switzerland).

When we hear stories of these efforts, we hear about individual genius, we hear about sudden flashes of brilliance, things falling in to place. We hear – in essence – a revisionist history informed by the myth of the entrepreneur. We seldom here anything of the conditions that make such breakthroughs possible, and we never hear anyone arguing for the establishment of quasi-anarchistic organisations that provide support and resources without obsessing over outputs and accountability.

Which is a very dangerous state of affairs when coupled with our current cultural enthralment with the quantification and demonstration of value. There are few infographics with question marks. Little performance data with error bars. And the irony comes with the realisation of the sheer expense of doing all of this measurement – both in terms of human and financial cost – is the most effective way of ensuring that no innovation ever happens.

(* I’ve not managed to get my hands on a copy of this book, either in a library or through spending £55 plus p&p. If anyone would like to buy me a copy, I’d be happy to review it here)

The Followers of the Apocalypse have clearly been remiss in not bidding for UK Rail Franchises. With the announcement of a £40m pot to compensate for bidding costs from the Department of Transport (DfT), I could be writing this post from somewhere entirely sunnier today.

It’s interesting that compensation (and so much compensation) is being offered. The “Invitation to Tender”  (large pdf document) (ITT) explicitly says that:

“The information contained in this document does not purport to contain all of the information that a prospective franchisee or shareholder may require. Neither the Secretary of State, nor any of his employees, agents or advisers (“representatives”), makes any representation or warranty (express or implied) (and no such representatives have any authority to make such representations and warranties) as to the accuracy, reasonableness or completeness of the information contained in this document.

All such persons or entities expressly disclaim any and all liability (other than in respect of fraudulent misrepresentation) based on or relating to any such information or representations or warranties (express or implied) contained in, or errors or omissions from, this document or based on or relating to the recipient’s use of this document ,or the use by any of its subsidiaries or the respective representatives of any of them in the course of its or their evaluation of any franchise or the shares of any franchisee or prospective franchisee or any other decision. 

[…]
The Department reserves the right at any time to issue further supplementary instructions and updates and amendments to the instructions and information contained in this document as it thinks fit.

[…]

The Department will not be responsible for the costs or expenses of any Bidder in relation to any matter referred to in this document howsoever incurred, including the evaluation of the InterCity West Coast franchise opportunity, the award, or any bid for the award of the InterCity West Coast franchise, or negotiation of the Franchise Agreement.”

which makes a pretty strong case for arguing that there is no way anyone should be getting any compensation for bidding under any circumstances. You’ll note it allows for changes to the instructions (and thus the process) at any time.

Now this is boiler-plate stuff. It, or something similar, will be in every invitation to tender that comes from the DfT (and there are similar clauses in most other public sector ITTs). It is there for a reason – to ensure that taxpayers money is not put at risk by any errors in the process that may creep in. It is nearly impossible to offer compensation for bidders costs – I know this, because I did it once (in 2003/4) at HEFCE and had to basically get permission from the Chancellor of the Exchequer. And this was for sums of up to £1,000 (I don’t recall that anyone claimed).

Rail Franchises are a stupid, stupid, stupid idea and they always have been. That said, the  DfT have been running these competitions for nigh-on 20 years, so you’d suspect that processes would be pretty solid by now. And running a bidding exercise is not an unheard-of activity in the civil service – I’ve run more than I care to remember.

What I think this tells us is that there is a political motivation to offer compensation. There is nothing in the terms of the bidding competition to say that compensation should (or indeed could) be offered.

Because of this long-existing large scale civil service capacity to do this stuff, I’ve been having a look into what has changed this time round. If there has been an error (and I am not convinced entirely that there has been), it must be due to a recent change in the process.

And the process was changed, in 2011, to allow for “longer, less prescriptive franchises that will give the industry more freedom to innovate“. This suite of changes was complex, and criticised widely.  The Rail Professional article (as subscribers probably recall!) ends with a lovely summary of the central issue:

“It would be nice, some day, to have a calm, government-led thinkthrough of franchising policy, inspired by nothing more than a desire to devise the best balance of risks and rewards. The likelihood is that franchising policy will continue to be re-examined amid crises, and the results skewed by the need to tackle a single, perceived problem. The outcomes, like this one, will also be flawed but robust enough to see out a parliament before another unfortunate minister needs to rethink them.”

This – like previous rethinks of the rail system – was fire-fighting a single perceived issue – the need for rail companies to contribute more to infrastructure upkeep – with a single “magic bullet” – helping franchisees to make larger profits. However, it didn’t even last a parliament.

What appears to have happened is that the likelihood of the non-payment of amount of money the “successful bidder” (FirstGroup) offered for the opportunity to run the West Coast line was not properly insured against by DfT. FirstGroup had offered to pay £13.3bn over three years, and DfT asked for £180m to be deposited with them as a deposit which could be kept if payments were not met. You might think that £180m is a hell of a lot less than £13.3bn and you would be right. It is. Virgin’s argument was that this wasn’t enough – and DfT already has the right to demand an additional bond from a franchisee if it thinks it hasn’t got enough.

I suspect we’ll never know what actually happened – but it is unlikely to be a matter of a civil servant getting his sums wrong.

 

 

This is kind of a part two post to part one, which dealt with “The Black Paper” and the educational policy of the UK right. I concluded by suggesting that there were two threads in this particular braid, one nostalgic, the other business-like and that Gove exemplified the worst of both – this week’s news proves it. I seem to have written a disturbing amount about Gove: do see also my top 10 GoveLOLs.

Let’s begin with a GoveLOL that continues the woven theme – and also tends towards the biblical. In early 2010, the House of Commons was faced with a plague of moths that had taken to hiding in the air vents of a particular corridor. Nothing was ever proven, but suspicious fingers were pointed at the second-hand Morrocan carpet that Mr Gove had supposedly installed in his office at the time.  Wonderfully, Gove gave a quote (itself a textbook example of a non-denial denial) to the august Surrey Herald and News.

“Sadly I have never been to Morocco and never bought a carpet from there. I think there must have been a mix up with someone with more time to go on their travels.”

(maybe he bought it from the market – from that bloke that sells carpets)

Happily for us all, Gove managed to get to Marrakesh in 2012, along with one Henry Dimbleby – whom he later (and, I’m sure, coincidentally) asked to review the provision of school dinners! I’m sure he was thanking his lucky carpet for that.

Anyway…

Gove has been in the news over the last few days regarding the replacement of the GCSE system. As always, there is much more to the story than the headlines suggest – but the fuller tale does exemplify the kind of confusion inherent in right wing education policy.

First of all, there has been an English Baccalaureate since 2010. It was initially invented as another way of measuring schools against each other – rather than the old “pupils with 5+ GCSEs at grade A-C” it ensured students had those grades in the “right” subjects (these have moved slightly over time).  It was never popular with teachers, parents or employers, and it was never a qualification in its own right – though exam boards have always been keen to promote the concept.

There are two groups of “right” subjects now, which are already covered by the existing “bacc”. From 2015, there will be a single certificate covering English Language and Literature, Pure and Applied Mathematics, Chemistry, Biology, Physics. From 2016, a similar exam will include Languages, Geography and History.

So the news this week is actually that:

• the English Bacc would become the certificate, rather than a notional meta-certificate awarded to someone who has a bunch of other certificates.
• It would be offered by a single exam board only – which would replace an (open) national curriculum with a (monopoly) national exam. This will be a huge earner for whichever board get the gig – not only a huge captive markets for exams, but a staggering monopoly over textbooks, resources, teacher’s guides etc.

The second is quite interesting in that Gove met representatives from educational publishing behemoth Pearson (who own the Edexcel exam board) in July, shortly before the English Bacc initial announcement.

So far, so business-friendly, you may think.

But the other aspects give the policy a foot in the imaginary 50s utopia of Daily Mail Island. Gove clearly has a moth in his carpet about “coursework” – labouring under the misapprehension that because more people pass qualifications assessed by coursework it must be “easier”. It is not “easier” – it is a more efficient way of testing subject knowledge and expertise. Rather than a traditional exam, which is a great way of testing memory under stress.

So aligned to the employer-friendly pragmatics of a common and rigorous single qualification, you get the romanticism of a proper old-fashioned exam.

Science, geography and languages are partially exempt from this to allow for lab-work, field work and oral (hopefully this will also include experimental design in the first two instances). But it worries me (as an English grad myself) that Bacc holders will have no experience of sustained assessed essay writing until A-level.

A further nostalgia issue is that creative subjects and technological subjects will be outside of the bacc. Creative and technical work are two of our major export industries.

For a man who thinks that ministerial responsibilities around confidentiality apply to others not to himself, holding these two contradictory ideologies simultaneously cannot be a challenge. But to the rest of us, it just looks like a mess.

Much like his second-hand Moroccan carpet.

The reality we confronted at #altc2012 was an imposed reality – one world amongst many possible – that was not a domain in which we could claim expertise. The strange new EduTech tongue – now a hybrid between the traditional 50s business ecclesiasticism and the objectivist evangelism of Silicon Valley was foreign to most delegates. And this is where the fear comes from, a fear of not being understood, a fear of not being listened to.

From a previous position of being the “experts” of the future, it is painful to find ourselves living in a future where we seemingly know next to nothing of value – and to see the hard-won knowledge and truth that we grew uprooted and discarded. We are in the unique and awful position of knowing what is coming will not work, but being utterly powerless to stop it.

The new “experts” in educational technology were not at #altc2012. Sal Khan, Sebastian Thrun and Joel Klein spoke instead on an “education panel” at “TechCrunch Disrupt” in San Francisco. Tim Cook launched another iDevice in Barcelona. David Willetts spoke at Keele University in an ultimately futile attempt to square a neoliberal need for unrestricted global markets with a conservative dream of a mythical cloistered past.  Michael Gove similarly played with the future life-chances of thousands of English and Welsh school children. David Cameron played FruitNinja.

And more than a hundred senior institutional managers made more than a hundred short term decisions.

The new reality is that institutions wish to trade and compete on a “student experience” delivered by short-term,exploited, disenfranchised and (therefore) cynical academic and support staff. No matter the shininess of the interface, the humanity of learning is trampled by standardisation and the accompanying measurements. By marketing, and the need to project a uniform, designed image of perfection. Just at the point that we begin to understand the chaotic creativity of the connected world, we attempt to mitigate risk by establishing artificially simple and inhuman structures.

Ivory towers (if we ever had ivory towers – don’t academics make the same mistakes as other people, but just have better mental tools to analyse them?) are emotional places. Young post-docs don’t take on the drudgery of a series of temporary teaching-only contracts, writing REF-able papers in their free time, because they want to. They do it because they need to – for all kinds of insane reasons that few can ever understand. There will never be a university monoculture – and this is why one size will never fit all.

The most interesting sessions for me were where the humanity and passion shone through. Seb Schmoller – for so long the personification of the thoughtful, engaged and radical Association of Learning Technologists (ALT) – delivered a wonderfully moving journey through a lifetimes attempt to use computers to help people. Richard Noss called for us to understand a little more of the processes and activities that shape our lives – and reminded us that education gave us far more than just abilities, it gives us aptitudes. Amber Thomas and I poked and prodded a room full of “open education” enthusiasts until we saw the tensions and skewed perspectives that we’d earlier predicted (blog to follow). We saw knitting, fancy dress, gangster rap (Pat Parslow kicking it old-skool style): we saw mesmerising demos of software hacks, mash-ups and proofs-of-concept. A session on pilot projects progressed via reflection to a hard look at the nature of this strange thing called innovation.

These can be frustrating, occasionally cringeworthy, sometimes misguided, but never less than beautiful. Authenticity often is like this.

The weaker sessions were those that made pretentions towards science. It is clear that we have the tools to gather and analyse vast amounts of data. What we are clearly lacking is the ability to ask meaningful questions of it and receive meaningful answers, and to understand the limits of these answers. An opening keynote from Eric Mazur based around a central presumption involving the findings of measuring the “brain activity” from a self-selecting sample of 26 students is not necessarily a bad thing. But presenting it as a new “scientific” approach to learning clearly is.

It’s not just shampoo that sells better with a “science bit”. Meaningless graphs, misleading infographics and spurious explanations abound in the new wave of education. It’s what happens when we mistake a messy human reality for an empirical process, and compress it all into a “dashboard”.  It is merely educational research as an arm of marketing, and as one delegate put it “Colleagues, we have utterly failed if we do not get beyond ideas like branding”.

Branding is no substitute for human understanding, and authenticity is an important part of any expertise that can be claimed.  If we are going to confront this “reality”, it’s time to get messy.

There is a possibly apocryphal story, told in lowered tones wherever two or three HE policy wonks are gathered, about a certain former Minister who approached their staff with a wizard HE wheeze. “I want to close a University”, they said. On being asked why, few credible answers were forthcoming. Clearly they’d discovered that they could, and felt that the wielding of this power would encourage the others into mute compliance.

However, then, as now, there was a candidate University in place. This was an institution which had distinguished itself by doing many of the non-university-like things that ministers had asked for. It had aped the conventions and shibboleths of private business, sought efficiencies and expanded in to new markets. But crucially, it was not fashionable, and did not have the ivy-strewn patina of a “proper university”.

Appearances matter. For all the reports and white-papers that envisage a thrusting, dynamic business going around leveraging things and increasing valourisation in suits and bright ties, there is a ministerial daydream that involves drifting down the Cherwell on Mayday in a punt with two jugs of Pimms and a pretty girl whose Daddy owns Hampshire.

Meanwhile in the compulsory sector, anger rages over a return to norm-referenced grading at GCSE level. Is this an attempt to drive up academic quality, or to return top grades to the preserve of the elite?

Be they red, blue, or yellow Tories – the right is fundamentally split on education. A rift deeper than any European quarrels, or the evidence-based/Daily Mail editorial argument on law’n’order’n’hanging’n’flogging. And to understand why, we need to look at the publication of a very peculiar set of books from way back in the 70s – in a story that includes Brian Cox, Francis Maude’s dad, Mrs Thatcher, Kingsley Amis and many others luminaries…

Brian Cox (no relation to the other Brian Cox) was a Professor of English Literature, an early advocate of University teaching in creative writing and (at the time) a lifelong labour voter. Having been on sabbatical in Berkeley in 1968, he returned to Britain in time to catch the student unrest at LSE. Being in proximity to two such outbursts, he made the unlikely decision to blame the rise of “expression” in schools following the “10/65” government edict to move further along the road to a fully comprehensive system.

Incensed, he spoke to his friend AE Dyson – who had recently been one of those who drove through the reform of laws around homosexuality, and who now edited the Creative Review Quarterly (which he had co-founded with Cox). Together they decided to co-edit a collection of essays around the general theme of the excesses of progressive education, which (perhaps mischievously) they entitled The Black Papers.

Whilst by no means – in 2012 – a page turner, the first Black Paper is a fascinating historical document concerning a turning point in UK educational thought. What stood out for me is how measured the criticism is, in places. This (the first volume at least) is not the radical preservationist clarion it has subsequently been characterised as. It does not explicitly criticise the comprehensive system as an idea, just the worst – unthinking – excesses of it.

The collection of essays has three main targets: the rise of student radicalism, the excesses of progressive education and the value of private education. The three are connected by an overarching theme of the need for elitism, not just to favour the naturally gifted but to provide the best possible education for all children. The collection saw progressive education as one approach amongst many to be used by skilled teachers with consideration and support – the excesses it decried concerned “progressive” ideas becoming the unthinking status quo. As the opening words of the opening essay made clear:

“Taking a long view, one must conclude that the most serious danger facing Britain is the threat to the quality of education at all levels. The motive force behind this threat is the ideology of egalitarianism”

Contributors included Kingsley Amis, John Sparrow (warden of All Souls College, Oxford), and Angus Maude (at the time a rebel Conservative MP, and the source of the quote above). It was perhaps Maude and Amis’s contributions that led to the whole pamphlet being perceived as a Rightist initiative. Certainly it was seen as such by the Labour Education Minister of the time, Edward Short, who said “In my view the publication of the Black Paper was one of the blackest days for education in the past century”. Cox’s later career gave lie to the initial label, and he was delighted to be labelled a “wooly liberal” following the publication of the (very progressive) 1989 Cox report on the teaching of English.

The traditional education mooted in response is cultural rather than utilitarian in perspective. As Dyson puts it:

“It seems indisputable, though alarming, that education, which ought to be particularly concerned with transmitting the heritage of reason on which civilisation is founded, has turned it’s back on this reason to a disturbing extent”

Or Robert Conquest:

“A wide diversity of ideas, many merely voguish and picked up from television, replace a proper training in the thought and history of the western world. I would urge a very simple reform – no admittance to University without passing a broadly based general paper”

Such a publishing coup (more than 15,000 copies sold in less than a year – very much the “Fifty Shades of Grey” of the early 70s education policy world) required a sequel, so Cox and Dyson edited a second volume, along with another Conservative MP in waiting,  Rhodes Boyson. The editorial board meeting between gay-rights pioneer Dyson and noted homophobe (“It is wrong biblically, is homosexuality. It is unnatural.”) Boyson must have been very interesting indeed. At the time Boyson was the headmaster of a school (Highbury Grove) that marketed itself based on a renewed emphasis on corporal punishment.

SchoolboyLOLs aside, the Black Paper series was causing a range of people from across the political spectrum to coalesce around the very broad idea of a return to “traditional education”, however they personally conceived it. Not least amongst these was Margaret Thatcher, whose stance on education was initially at odds with a more business-focused Conservative party.

Prior to this, the education policies of the right had been much more proto-Cameronite, suggesting a desire to “prioritise economic stability over costly egalitarian social spending, selectivity over universality and minimal rather than optimal levels of state provision”.  But Thatcher – though for completeness it should be noted that she created more comprehensive schools than any other Education secretary – was at least diverted by the dream of traditionalism.

Her version, however, required an active centralised intervention in nearly every aspect of educational activity: there was little room for accidental learning in the centrally planned GCSE curriculum, and in (Thatcher and Major’s) expansion of university provision to meet the needs of employers for graduates. This was a top-down conservatism with much more in common with the “progressives” Cox and Dyson railed against than with Gove.

There is a romantic and utilitarian strand within the “traditional” education policies of governments of all stripes, and some of the most confusing errors occur when this tension is highlighted. Be this the romantic notion of a university against the economic reality of mass provision, or the romantic ideas of egalitarianism against the utilitarian need to stratify society, the background to the current debate draws heavily on this little read and little understood collection of essays.

Further reading:

A History of Education In England,  Derek Gillard.

The Black Papers and the debate about standards, Conservative History Journal

The Black Papers, CB Cox and AE Dyson (WorldCat link, no online version)