26 February 2019

By Amelia Roberts

We are in an ‘exclusions’ crisis.With a rise in exclusions for three years running, we now have 40 children per day being permanently excluded across the UK.

There is a clear link between exclusions and subsequent mental health difficulties. Add the ‘high number of prisoners currently serving time in jail – 42 percent – hav(ing) formerly been permanently excluded ’we urgently need to understand the reasons behind excluding. The thinktank Poverty and Social Inclusion articulates the links between exclusions and subsequent mental health difficulties. Too often we are assuming that the reason for exclusions lies in prior pupil behaviours or pre-existing illnesses. Should we be instead considering that the cause and effect are the other way round? Could it be that exclusion has an impact on mental health, rather than that the mental illness came first? Perhaps it is the early experiences of excluding in school that reinforces social exclusion in later life?

Such questions will feed into discussions at a conference at UCL on March 15 which will examine how the Lesson Study approach can support vulnerable children. (more…)

29 January 2019

By Rob Webster

It’s no secret pupil numbers are rising. By 2023, secondary mainstream schools will need to have found the space for an additional 376,000 young people. If current prevalence is any indication, we can expect at least 45,300 of these extra pupils to have special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). A further 6,800 will have needs complex enough to qualify for an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP).

The geographic distribution of these young people will, of course, be uneven. But if it were even, it would mean each existing secondary mainstream school in England would need to accommodate 15 additional pupils with SEND, two of whom would have an EHCP. The populations of special schools and alternative provisions (AP)[1]are also set to boom, by 15% and 19% respectively. That’s a further 13,000 or so young people with SEND.

If you think the solution to the increase is, in part or in whole, to up the capacity of (more…)

Amelia Roberts.
Last month The TES revealed that prison officers are being sought by recruitment agency Principal Resourcing to deal with ‘behaviour issues and disruptions’ in Leeds, Bradford, Harrogate and Wakefield.
The image this conjures up is rather unfortunate, and one can’t help but wonder what some prison officers would do without the customary tools of the trade, such as lockable cells, handcuffs, tasers and solitary confinement. As Mary Bousted, joint General Secretary of the National Education Union, says in the TES story: ‘…the set of skills you learn as a prison officer are not necessarily transferrable to schools.’ Moreover, there is an unspoken implication that these young people are unruly and incorrigible, incapable of being helped and merely prison fodder on a predetermined pathway to incarceration.
On the other hand, some prison officers could carry out the behaviour support role in schools with aplomb. Recent research looking at prison education found that:
‘Most prison educators felt that, in addition to achievement, it was important to be able to develop the learning skills and self-image of those they worked with. As one said: ‘I would like learners to gain self-confidence and work on release and be able to network … Teaching has to reach the whole person’.
Our whole school Knowledge Exchange programme: Supporting Wellbeing, Emotional Resilience and Learning (SWERL), takes (more…)

IOE Events.
Our first What if…? debate of 2018/19 addressed the provocation What if… we wanted our kids to be happier? We were delighted to be joined by panellists Caroline Hounsell of Mental Health First Aid England; Praveetha Patalay of UCL; Patrick Johnston of Place2Be, and Viv Grant, former head teacher and Director of Integrity Coaching. What emerged from the discussion was just what a trickle down issue children’s mental health is: first in the sense that, for teachers to be able to support young people’s well-being, their own needs to be looked after first; and then there’s the  failure of (for the sake of a short-hand) ‘trickle-down’ economics.
The panel were clear that the prevalence of mental health issues has increased markedly over recent decades, and particularly so in the last few years: the IOE’s birth cohort study data show that today’s parents of teenagers have greater levels of mental health difficulties than parents from a decade ago, while a host of studies document the increased levels of reporting among children, and from ever younger ages.  As last month’s Nuffield Trust report also shows, reduced stigma may account for some of the rise, but by no means all of it. Nowhere are these pressures felt more strongly than in schools – which are themselves simultaneously caught up in the same dynamics and on the frontline of mediating young people’s (more…)

Amelia Roberts.
Ten years on from the Bercow Review (2008) and we are still hearing that it is a ‘scandal’ that children are even now starting school with impoverished language skills. Education Secretary, Damian Hinds MP, spoke this week at the Resolution Foundation’s headquarters in Westminster.
He identified the gap in language abilities of children from lower socio-economic backgrounds as a major factor in the challenges towards creating greater social mobility.
So what exactly isn’t working?
Highlighting a report released (more…)

Michael Thomas.
I could perhaps have been forgiven for viewing with some trepidation the invitation to address a gathering of artificial intelligence researchers at this week’s London Festival of Learning. At their last conference, they told me, they’d discussed my field – educational neuroscience – and come away sceptical.
They’d decided neuroscience was mainly good for dispelling myths – you know the kind of thing. Fish oil is the answer to all our problems. We all have different learning styles and should be taught accordingly. I’m not going to go into it again here, but if you want to know more you can visit my website.
The AI community sometimes sees education neuroscience mainly as a (more…)

IOE Events.
Competing against a balmy evening outside, we were delighted to welcome so many people to our debate this week on Special Educational Needs and Disability (SEND) and, specifically, the legacy of the 1978 Report of the Committee of Enquiry into the Education of Handicapped Children and Young People, otherwise known as the Warnock Report.
The report was hugely significant for how society thought about the education of children with, using the new terminology of the time, ‘special educational needs’ – encouraging these pupils’ inclusion in mainstream schools and pressing for their needs to be met as an entitlement. At the time, its recommendations were radical and, in the words of our first panellist, former Chair in Special Education at the IOE, Klaus Wedell, represented ‘a paradigm shift’. On the report’s 40^th anniversary we wanted to reflect on how those recommendations have played out in practice and whether the time is ripe for another enquiry of the same scale and ambition.  On the basis of our panellists’ contributions it would seem that it is – and for a paradigm shift that encompasses all pupils.    (more…)

Roberto Filippi. 

A multilingual world

It is estimated that more than half of the world’s population – over 3 billion people – can communicate in two (or more) languages. If we consider that our societies are increasingly mobile, monolingual speakers will soon be the exception.
I believe all of us at a certain point in life, being at school, at work or when travelling for leisure, have come across the need to communicate in another language. We might all have experienced the challenges of learning a new language but also the benefits of being able to understand other cultures, to express and understand feelings in other linguistic forms.

For children raised in multilingual families, the simultaneous acquisition of multiple (more…)

Rob Webster.
Sometimes it’s not just the victory; it’s the manner of the victory.
Just last month, London teacher (and IOE alumna), Andria Zafirakou, beat more than 30,000 entrants to win the Varkey Foundation’s annual Global Teacher prize. Leading the tributes, Theresa May highlighted the qualities of ‘resilience, ingenuity and a generous heart’ that earned Andria the closest thing teaching has to a Nobel Prize – and with it, a nifty $1m.
For all its sincerity, the Prime Minister’s eulogy must jar a little. The English education system, with its obsession with academic performativity, is at best ambivalent towards ‘progressive’ art and textiles teachers like Andria. Had she been nominated for a national ‘best teacher’ prize, adjudicated by May and her education ministers, one can’t help feel she wouldn’t have made it out of the group stages.
Andria, and teachers like her, are motivated not by the numbers game of dragging a proportion of their pupils over some arbitrary – and often slippery – grade boundary, but by how they can change the lives of them as individuals. All the more so if they have the additional challenge of social disadvantage.
(more…)

Alex Bryson and Petri Böckerman
What makes us happy? It sounds a simple enough question. Intuitively, we know what we like – being with friends, going to the movies. In the moment, we know what’s likely to make us happy. Evidence from app-devices that ding people at random moments mostly confirm the rank order of events that make us happy: sex and intimacy comes top, being sick in bed comes bottom.
Work comes second bottom. This might come as a surprise to most, though not to economists who have long thought that work is a disutility (it fails to satisfy human wants) and, in the moment, we’d rather be doing other things. The evidence also confirms we’d usually rather be outdoors in green spaces, and doing things with friends. We also know a lot about the things that go to make a fulfilling worthwhile life such as having a family. Paid work scores highly on (more…)