2013: All Change for FE in Scotland

As a member of the Pedagoo community and as a user of twitter as a PLN, I read many informed and passionate writings on pedagogy and the structures that it is practiced within. I refer, of course, mainly to the compulsory education system, a system that employs the vast majority of teachers in Scotland. I have followed with keen interest, both the Donaldson Review of Teacher Education, and latterly the McCormac Review of Teacher Employment. I am, however ,employed within the FE sector, a system anomalous from the compulsory sectors in several ways, for example:

• It is not a mandatory graduate profession
• It is not a mandatory registered profession
• It is has been driven by a deeply flawed funding model (the student unit of
  measurement) SUMs equate to approximately 40 hours of study, weighted to reflect the different costs concomitant with running a variety of courses.

It is, however, charged with almost all of the functions of the compulsory teaching profession.

I have campaigned dilligently that we in FE should be granted the same professional status as all other teaching practitioners. This would, I believe, provide a more seamless transition for learners throughout their education and engender a higher degree of public confidence in the FE system

Further education has had its own share of reviews in the past two years, namely:

• The Review of Post-16 Education and Vocational Training in Scotland; click to access
• Putting Learners at the Centre: Delivering our Ambitions for Post-16 Education; click to access
• Report of the Review of Further Education Governance in Scotland click to access

These three reports have now brought about the most profound shake up of further education in its history, and we now embark on a programme of regionalisation that will have far reaching consequences for the learners and employees of these new entities once established. It should be noted that many of the suggestions made in these reports could have been addressed by the incumbents of the system rather than the profession having to be subjected to such a huge seismic shift. A new funding model based on 'outcomes' will come into force and The Scottish Funding Council (SFC) lists the priorities for the regional outcomes as follows:

Outcome 1 Efficient regional structures:

To deliver efficient regional structures to meet the needs of the region

Outcome 2 Right learning in the right place:

To contribute to meeting the national guarantee for young people, meeting the demands of the region, and where appropriate the nation

Outcome 3 High quality & efficient learning:

To ensure that learners are qualified to progress through the system in both an efficient and flexible manner

Outcome 4 A developed workforce:

To ensure learners are qualified and prepared for work and to improve and adapt the skills of the regional workforce

Outcome 5 Sustainable institutions:

To secure, well-managed and financially and environmentally sustainable colleges

Colleges have been supplied with a template from the SFC that provides more detail and can be viewed here:

http://www.sfc.ac.uk/web/FILES/Guidance/College_Outcome_Agreement_Guidance_2013-14.pdf

Unlike the reviews of compulsory education, the solutions to the troubled landscape of FE are not to be found by addressing and questioning what we do in the classroom, but rather by employing a fiscal overhaul and keeping fingers crossed!

Change should offer the prospect of improvement, and in such a process care should be taken to address the core purpose of our endeavours; exercising our professional practice in such a way that our learners acquire a desire for knowledge and appreciate the benefits that a quality education has to offer. Ultimately, engagement is the key to the future of our learning and teaching approaches. Such engagement can only become a reality if our colleges truly embrace development in the way that we continually press our learners to do so. The desire for pedagogical improvement must be manifestly at the centre of everything we do, driven by our values, and led assiduously by senior staff.

Outbreak of 'new managerialism' infects faculties-2001 or 2012?

Although written in 2001, I cannot add more to this germane article and its prescience for our current concerns.

Post in the Times Higher Education supplement, July 2001

"New managerialism" is emerging as a dominant force in British higher education, according to a two-year study into the running of universities.

A team led by Rosemary Deem, professor of education at Bristol University, has conducted interviews with more than 150 senior academics and administrators from 16 universities and held focus group discussions in a bid to understand what is happening.

"New managerialism" usually refers to practices commonplace in the private sector, particularly the imposition of a powerful management body that overrides professional skills and knowledge. It keeps discipline under tight control and is driven by efficiency, external accountability and monitoring, and an emphasis on standards.

Higher education, with declining public funding, the shift from an elite to a mass system, and the increasing reliance on internal and external controls, is a fertile breeding ground for these practices.

"The imposition of new managerialism has been much studied in public services from health to local government and schools but has been little examined in higher education," Professor Deem said.

Her study, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, found that higher education was perceived to be highly bureaucratic with declining trust and discretion. Complaints about greater workloads, long hours, finance-driven decisions, remote senior management teams and pressure for accountability were common.

A head of a humanities department in a pre-1992 university said: "I think the whole intrusive culture means that people are not left to just get on with it in the way that they were. There is perhaps too much monitoring and too much written reporting which is a bit of a dilemma - being asked to implement something while having misgivings about it."

The research found that manager-academics' lives tended to revolve around long hours packed with meetings, mountains of paperwork and email and the search for additional resources. Research was marginalised and there was little time for reflection. The absence of proper reward structures and the lack of adequate administrative support for heads of departments and deans contributed to workloads. Only one third of the sample had received any formal management training.

"Unlike, for example, a sales manager, academics cannot be told what to do," Professor Deem said. "So a great deal of management time is spent negotiating with individuals about their work. This partly explains why things take so long in higher education."

A maths dean from a post-1992 university said he had learnt to think more corporately. "When I first became dean (faculties) were quite frequently seen as competitors... nowadays we tend to think much more corporately, particularly in terms of the different profitability of the faculties. Department X, for example, in this university is generating a surplus of £2.5 to £3 million every year which we see nothing of because it goes to the centre, but it subsidises the deficits in areas like humanities. We decided some years ago that we were not unhappy with that."

Many respondents found the constant monitoring of targets frustrating. One head of department in a post-1992 university said: "You are expected to deliver as far as the directorate is concerned. So, for example, you hit student targets, generate external income, raise the research profile... And at the same time you know from the troops that some of those things are almost impossible to do given all the resource constraints that have been imposed."

According to Professor Deem, academic and support staff not in management roles say higher education has moved towards new managerialism. However, the situation as described by manager-academics contains evidence of more hybridised forms of management. Unlike in the National Health Service where big organisational changes had to be introduced, universities have tended to develop within existing structures.

Some cultural re-engineering of higher education has clearly been attempted, said Professor Deem.

She said: "While public sector organisations have always been combinations of markets, bureaucracies and networks, the reforms associated with new managerialism have exacerbated the contradictions they contain.

"New managerial cultures may have been grafted on in a piecemeal fashion to existing structures and since this has happened in universities, professional power is being incrementally diluted and displaced by ideological new managerialist reforms."

ANOTHER YEAR-TIME FOR A CHANGE

As we all get used to the fact that we are teaching for another academic year, I thought I would write a brief post to let everyone know the approach I’ve been taking in the classroom.

Firstly, I’ve decided to cut down on the exposition element of my practice having been convinced that this transmissionist approach does little to develop learners’ ‘higher order skills’.  I’ve provided all my classes with ‘brief’ lessons on the concept of learning and attempted to get them to think about how knowledge can evolve-creating opportunities to cultivate a deeper understanding of concepts and how they interconnect across a diverse set of disciplines. I am also mindful of the comments made by the “Higher Order Skills” group. Chaired by Keir Bloomer in relation to the implementation of CfE:

“There are those who clearly envisage it (Curriculum for Excellence) as a short-term programme of change, much like any other. If this view prevails, courses may be slightly adapted to conform to the surface requirements of the experiences and outcomes. Inter-disciplinary learning will feature around the margins of the curriculum. Improved pedagogy will be patchily evident. New examinations will replace old. Boxes will be ticked but Scotland will not have risen to the demands of the new age.”

In a previous post, I mentioned a social enterprise project that involved a partnership with the local credit union. Although in its early stages, there is emerging evidence that learners will benefit greatly from their participation-I have endeavoured to frame the venture within the four capacities of CfE:

Successful learners

• The bespoke course includes the use of http://rbsmoneysense.co.uk/schools/students , a Royal Bank of Scotland scheme designed to improve financial literacy and promote independent living.
• The following SQA Unit is integrated into the design and delivery of the project: Financial Services: Personal Finance Awareness DM7X 11 (Intermediate 2)
• Learners are charged with the organisation, management, marketing and operation of the Credit Union with support from tutors and Credit Union Staff.

Confident Individuals

• Learners are encouraged through activities, research and exposition to fully understand the implications of financial exclusion, the relationship between the lack of financial literacy and social deprivation.
• The Credit Union ethos is built on community cohesion and civic responsibility
• The co-operative spirit of the Credit Union is emulated by the independence of the student cohort in developing appropriate strategies for success.

Responsible citizens

• Ethical issues are explored through the examination of the cause of the 2008 financial crisis.
• Learners are encouraged, through research and activities, to examine the financial, social and ethical issues that relate to financial products made available to the citizens of Scotland.

Effective Contributors

• Learners work independently on all aspects of the Social Enterprise activity.
• An oversight committee monitors all activities of the project. Membership includes four learners, two JWC staff and a representative of 1^st Alliance.
• Learners work on sub-projects, including the use of social media in marketing and promotion.

I will continue to post on the project’s progress throughout the year.

CAN MOTIVATIONAL THEORY BE OF USE IN THE CLASSROOM?

Management theory tends to be a mandatory field of learning for all students of business studies. They will be introduced to organisational theory, leadership theory and motivational theory, among other fairly esoteric topics. But can an understanding of managerial theory help with the management of learning in the classroom?

One such motivational theory was first advocated by Victor Vroom in 1964 and has subsequently been refined by Lyman W. Porter and Edward E. Lawler. This concept is commonly known as ’expectancy theory’. In simple terms, this theory contends that individuals choose particular behaviours based on the outcomes that they perceive such behaviours will lead to. The three main elements of the theory are as follows:

1.      Expectancy-the belief that effort will lead to desired performance. Factors associated with expectancy are self-efficacy, goal difficulty and control.

2.      Instrumentality-the belief that a reward will be forthcoming should the performance expectation be met. Factors associated with instrumentality are trust, control and policies

3.     Valence-the value that the individual places on such rewards. Factors associated with valence are values, needs, goals and preferences

PARADIGMS AND CfE IN ACTION

Sir Ken Robinson believes that we are in need of a change of educational paradigms and some of his assertions relate to the ‘antiquated’ nature of our education systems-‘education modelled on the interests of industrialisation, and in the image of it’. Are our systems of timetabling, teaching periods, term times and curricular boundaries stifling our children’s ability to learn effectively? I’ll let you watch Sir Ken’s entire presentation to see how far it resonates.

Our Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) has evolved mainly from the anxieties associated with the notion of ‘Teaching in the 21^st Century', indeed the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), has had a significant role in shaping what it believes our young people will need to flourish in the future-'Skills have become the global currency of the 21st century. Without proper investment in skills, people languish on the margins of society’.-and so we are presented with the skills versus knowledge debate-is knowledge disappearing from education?

In my blog yesterday, I argued that that it is acquired through a purposeful process and that we should not merely be transmitters of content. I was, in pedagogical terms, referring to a constructivist approach. Perhaps then, our fears and anxieties regarding the new curriculum are a manifestation of how to truly embrace interdisciplinary learning and experiences within our existing structures. I am having such an experience!

In the last academic session I became involved in a partnership with the local credit union and was lucky enough to see how such a partnership operates within a local primary school. I was thrilled to see children as young as 5 and 6 engaging in real life financial learning within the early broad general education stage of the curriculum. However, I am charged with implementation at post 16 and this provides me with a different set of challenges. There are amazing opportunities to meet the four capacities and even more means to achieve experiences and outcomes across health and wellbeing, social studies and technologies. I am not constrained by these as I’m sure you are in the compulsory sector, however, I do wish to embrace the curriculum in a way that provides the seamless transitions expected within its core. To what extent my own institutional and sectoral imperatives either help or hinder-well that remains to be seen.

I would heartily recommend that anyone interested in leading such a credit union initiatve search out their local provider.

I will blog on my progress in the new term.

Commissioner publishes a report on poverty, educational attainment and achievement

SCCYP (Scotland’s Commissioner for Children and Young People)

This critical review of the literature on the links between poverty, educational attainment and achievement aims to provide a clear picture of recent policy and research relating to addressing the attainment gap and to promoting young people's achievement.

http://www.sccyp.org.uk/news/in-the-news/poverty-and-educational-attainment

Further Education and the ‘Senior Phase’ of CfE

Before I begin, I must offer my sincere thanks to Dr Mark Priestley for giving me the opportunity to invest in reading some, but not all of his inspirational research literature. Specifically, Mark has allowed me to challenge the perception of my own teaching practice as well as the practice that I have witnessed working within the further education sector. I have reflected on many initiatives, both historical and current that, when I was first introduced to them, I thought of them as ‘quite sound’ ideas.

Additionally, my dissection of the Curriculum for Excellence has also allowed me to attempt a re-framing of my professional practice. I have spent literally hours reading reams of explanatory literature attempting to get to grips not with the essence of, but rather the practical application of what the curriculum translates to in pedagogical terms. Furthermore, I have listened to other practitioners give their valuable and valued opinions on what it means to them. Thanks must also go to www.pedagoo.org   

Mark and Walter Hume’s paper entitled, The Development of Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence: amnesia and déjà vu’ (Oxford Review of Education, 36[3], 345-361.) gave me an interesting dilemma. Was this new curriculum model one which I should put my faith in? The paper raised a substantial query-could it be ‘that curricular content runs the risk of becoming divorced from curricular purposes?’ The suggestion of a ‘process curriculum’ seems to me to be a sensible one but not without significant challenges.

Within the further education sector I have, and still do, work with prescriptive unit descriptors that provide the lecturer with a map for what he or she must do to satisfy the requirements of the awarding body (and not necessarily the learner). Content is thus referred to under the heading ‘knowledge and/or skill’s, process is covered by (minimal) guidance on delivery, and lastly outcomes are dealt with by evidence requirements which, of course, must be met to the letter. These evidence requirements will always pull on elements of the cognitive domain of Bloom’s Taxonomy. I should clarify, that as a business studies lecturer, there has been little or no attempt to capture the affective domain in any meaningful way-it’s easier not to!  We have been afforded less prescriptive assessment requirements in a recent SQA review, so with a little work and imagination, change may be demanding but not impossible

Support initiatives have always presented in the form of notes and these have been gratefully accepted by the profession, indeed many will get anxious if there are no notes to distribute! Assessment exemplification is provided by the awarding body and again there will be unease if none are available. The alternative to both specification and exemplification would be to commit to, and have the time for engagement that is more valuable and meaningful. We as teachers or lecturers (I tend not to make the distinction) have had to comply with structural and institutional norms but I am not suggesting that we are complacent, nor am I advocating that we are unwilling or unable to change our practice. This is where the importance of leadership, reflection and debate are of paramount importance.

Mark goes on to pose a question that I think gives us the prospect of a real professional dialogue- Is knowledge acquired, or is it constructed? The answer is, of course, that it is acquired through a purposeful process and if we are to address the needs of our learners and their future prospects, we must first challenge ourselves. I will end on a positive note by confirming that I and some, if not all of my colleagues, have made a pledge to do exactly that in the next academic session.