Back when I was a kid, we had one of those dial-telephones, which used pulse-dialing. My dad’s work had a switchboard that was literally that, the telephonist put plugs into sockets to connect incoming calls to the relevant extension. It was similar to the 999 centre we visited during an open day at the local BT offices. They also showed how they worked out phone bills: there was a huge wall of every number in the exchange, and they’d take photos of this wall, take the photo off to get processed, then sit and find each number and match it against the relevant account. Excitement was when we got a cordless phone, where you could answer the call in the kitchen even though the base station was in the hall. Itemised bills were a big deal.

Shortly afterwards, Rabbit phones allowed you to take or receive a call as long as you were within 50 metres of a Rabbit receiver. Then the first real mobile phones came along, but because they were analogue they were large, had poor reception and expensive. Gradually, analogue phones moved into digital, batteries became lighter and the infrastructure costs reduced making mobile phones cheap and practical. It meant that a few years ago I was able to sit on the banks of Lake Tana in northern Ethiopia and text New Years greetings to my friends in the UK at a cost that barely registered on my bill.

All this has happened in the last thirty years. It’s called progress; people have built on the knowledge that has been gathered around telephony, ever since Alexander Graham Bell made his first call.

Why does this matter when it comes to exam results? Because every year, when the results are announced and the usual suspects trot out the annual decrees that because an increasing number of students are getting higher grades, exams are getting easier; I wonder to myself what education has done to merit some special significance that means it is not allowed to progress. Surely teachers, along with academics of education, have looked at what their profession did previously, picked the bits that worked, dropped or changed the bits that didn’t work, developed new methods and systems in order to improve performance. The result being that standards improve and students get better exam results. Surely anything other than improved results is a failure?

Image courtesy of Krypto. Used under licence.

If you type the name Darryl Marfo into a search engine, you may find yourself ending up in pretty despicable racist forums. You may well find yourself reading the national newspapers that covered his arrest in April. What you won’t find, unless you specifically look for it, is news that all charges against him have been dropped.

Darryl was the inner-London student, brought up by a single mum, who won a scholarship at the prestigious £25k-a-year Pangbourne College in Hampshire. Not only did Darryl win the scholarship, but he excelled, playing rugby for the England Under 16s team, chairing the school council, helping write the school newspaper and ending up as ‘chief cadet captain’, aka Head Boy.

And then, in April, Darryl was at a house party with other students when some sort of fracas broke out. Darryl was on the end of some racial abuse, apparently from a solider from nearby Aldershot barracks, and allegedly “grabbed a kitchen knife”. No-one was hurt in the incident, but the police were called.

Two people were subsequently arrested as a result of the incident. One of them was Darryl.

I’m not for one moment condoning using any sort of weapon, and I wasn’t there, but “grabbing a kitchen knife” could mean a variety of things. Not surprisingly this turns into ‘pulling out a blade’, ‘brandishing a weapon’ and ‘knife brawl’ for the benefit of good newspaper copy.

Several national papers ran the story (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), and most stated that parents of other children were demanding that Darryl be suspended from the school. A mother was widely quoted telling the Daily Telegraph: “We are paying £25,000 a year to this school and it’s not what we expect.”  Another said that parents would be writing to the school’s governors to demand action be taken against Darryl. The school, to its credit, said it wouldn’t take any action until the police investigation had concluded. This was especially important as Darryl would be sitting his A Levels whilst on police bail.

Meanwhile, another student (on condition of anonymity) contacted the local paper in Reading, where the other boy who was arrested lived, demanding that this student was innocent: “In our eyes he was a hero. He should never have been arrested… He was identified by mistake by someone who was not at the party.”  An email to Reading’s evening paper (from someone whose sex is known but is not identified) said that the unnamed boy had removed the knife, and stated: “We are proud of what the other Pangbourne pupil did and he should be praised and rewarded.”

But something didn’t stack up with this story. Only the Telegraph made it explicit that it was the other, unnamed boy, who was arrested on the night. Daryl was arrested several days later after he contacted the police about the incident.

And here’s another question: Why was Darryl’s name so freely bandied about (complete with obligatory Facebook photo) when the other boy’s identity was never revealed? Obviously Darryl was the better newsline, but there was no legal reason not to name the other individual, and if it was that easy to get Darryl’s details then it couldn’t have been that difficult to get the name of the other individual? Why did no-one else (not the eyewitnesses, or the people who contacted the local papers, or the concerned mother) want to be identified? Why are the only young people named in any of the newspapers Darryl and his younger brother (who also happens to be at the school)?

And another question: Why were the parents so determined that Darryl should be suspended, but not the other boy who had been arrested? Darryl’s crime was serious, but it also appeared that he had been the victim of racist abuse that night, so surely there were some mitigating circumstances for his alleged actions? There was no suggestion that he had actually threatened anyone with the knife, let alone caused any injury.

And what action, if any, has been taken against the unidentified solider who was responsible for the racist remarks? Why didn’t any newspaper bother itself with investigating this angle? And which of the boys stood up for Darryl against the racist abuse (because they should be named and praised).

I really hope that this is a serious of coincidences, and there is nothing sinister here. But I couldn’t help feel somewhat uncomfortable when I saw the original story, and nothing I’ve seen since has made me feel any better.

Image courtesy of welshwitch36. Used under licence. (The photo has no relevance apart from it was taken in Pangbourne and I quite liked it)

I’m in the middle of a week of 1500 miles of train travel. Over the weekend I was in Scotland for a friend’s wedding, getting back late last night. And tomorrow I’m off to Bradford and Liverpool for work.

One of the advantages of travelling by train is that I get to read the Telegraph. I’m not, unsurprisingly, a natural Telegraph reader, but even I can be persuaded to buy a paper when it comes with a free bottle of water nearly twice its value. As it is, I rather like the news pages of the Telegraph; I just tend to avoid the comment and business sections.

One of it’s Saturday news features was on schools offering Saturday classes for pupils (bizarrely this is dated 20 April online, although I definitely read it in Saturday’s paper). It highlights the positive results that pupils are achieving by making these classes compulsory.

I’m rather ambivalent about Saturday schooling – I grew up in a town with four big private schools that each had Saturday morning lessons and I remember being somewhat amazed that the kids dutifully trotted off to these lessons.

Undoubtedly providing extra tuition for children can be hugely beneficial, and Saturday seems as good a time as any to do it. But the question has to be at what cost?

My concern is that in making them compulsory, and as one teacher says “if they don’t, then Mrs Laycock will come around to their house and pull them out of their smelly pits”, we’re getting obsessed with exam results as the only thing a child has to achieve before they reach adulthood.

I haven’t got particularly high GCSE results, and if I’d really been pushed I probably could have got a couple of grades higher. But that doesn’t seem to have blighted my subsequent university and career prospects. In fact, although I’ve been required to list my GCSE results on application forms, I’ve never knowingly been rejected as a result of them. Equally, as an employer, I can’t say I’ve ever looked at GCSE results as a guide for the suitability or otherwise of a candidate.

So what did I get instead of a set of high results? Well, I could dutifully tell you I spent my Saturdays involved in a number of extra-curricular activities that taught me about communication, teamwork, leadership and lateral thinking. And although I was involved in loads of different things, in reality I probably spent many Saturday mornings hanging around with friends or watching the telly or playing on the computer.

I’d never want to deny young people who wanted to have extra tuition or an opportunity to do their homework away from home. I’m also not totally convinced that compulsory schooling at the weekend on top of compulsory schooling during the week is a good idea. Do we really want a generation of young people who only know the four walls of their classroom, and haven’t had the opportunity to develop their skills outside of an education environment?

Image courtesy of Wesley Fryer. Used under licence.

I spent the first half of today at the rather random Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (in the posh part of town) learning about FutureLab‘s Greater Expectations project. And much that I want to support this kind of work, and appreciate that significant sums of money are being put into projects like this, I came away a bit non-plussed and feeling more frustrated than excited.

One of the problems is that the scope of the project seems so broad that it’s difficult to grasp exactly what scale and impact they see this having. I sat through the presentation and discussion and felt a bit stupid for asking for specifics – some personas or actual examples of young people using this resource for real. And I wasn’t blown away by the example given.

My main problem with the project is that there didn’t seem to be anything in there that wasn’t already available. You want to engage with decision-makers? There’s WriteToThem for that. Want to know how to report graffiti? FixMyStreet can do that.  Want something to do after school?  Here comes Plings. Want to do something positive in your community?  Try do-it.org.uk. Want to know what Universial Declaration of Human Rights are? There’s a brilliant video that will tell you. Want to set up a social enterprise in your school? G-Nation does that. Want some work experience? Hit Wexo. Want to campaign to make the world a better place? Ctrl.Alt.Shift is a good place to start.  Want to set up something closer to home? Turn off at Junction 49. Want to have your say on education policy? Head to Edge.  Want to get creative?  Blast, IdeasTap, or ChewTV to name a few. Wannabe policy wonk?  Get involved with BYC. Etc etc etc.

None of these are perfect, but they are far further down the road of providing practical ways young people can use new media to learn and engage in their communities and society in general than attempting to build an overarching project that tries to do all of these things (or at least links through to them).

I’ve nothing against duplicity of services, as an element of competition can be healthy; but there are too many half-baked ideas that were initially well-funded, but then, as with most third-sector projects, too much was demanded in too short a time and the end project is more “what could have been” rather than what actually is. Then a year later someone comes along to try and create exactly the same project, only that is underfunded and another half-baked project is launched.  It’d be great if one day a funder came along and said “here’s some money to finish that project properly”.

The second major problem with the Greater Expectations website was it was unclear why a young person would go there over any other the existing services. Not wanting to push as an educational resource sounds fine in principle, but it’s difficult to see without a significant marketing campaign how young people would actively go and seek it out. 80% of most website traffic comes from search, and they are as likely to find the existing services as this new one.

My suggestion for FutureLab, give your money to existing services to create a re-versioned website, which is “young people friendly”. You could create them under a common brand. That will have a lot more impact for a lot less cash, and has the added advantage of giving older young people the choice of using the default service, and conversely a youth version that can be advertised on the main website (“Are you under 18? You might prefer our youth version”).

I hope that the above isn’t perceived as bluntly negative about the project, but it’s difficult to get excited about another website aiming to make a positive difference to young people’s lives. And I’d like to thank FutureLab for the opportunity to meet some interesting people and get a flavour of what is going on out there.

PS. A quick stroll around Google led me to RSA’s Brainjuicer,  sounds similar to the Greater Expectations project.

Usual conflict declaration applies. YouthNet runs do-it.org.uk, and Citizenship Foundation is responsible for G-Nation.

Photo credit: Carf. Used under licence.

Yesterday, in a frightfully posh office in that bit of London between Moorgate and the Thames that I have never quite worked out, I plotted the future of citizenship. Or at least the future of the Citizenship Foundation, or which I am a trustee.

Citizenship is in an odd place at the moment. After years of campaigning, it’s on the curriculum and that should make us happy. But actually there is a threat that it’ll come off the curriculum already, and that threat alone has meant it’s not being taken seriously by many schools, or politicians for that matter.

And yet, the concept of what Citizenship is about appears to be at the heart of every piece of government and third sector strategy. Promote ways that young people can make a positive difference to their community. Involve them. Make them bothered about what’s going on around them. Improve turnout at election. Promote young people volunteering. Invest in social enterprise. Citizenship is everywhere, and it’s one of the five key Every Child Matters outcomes.

The government wants to see schools be integrated into the communities they serve. It recognises that young people won’t have a great future if they are brilliant at trigonometry and Shakespeare but don’t get democracy or care about anything to want to make it better.

Since the Citizenship Foundation was set up twenty years ago, the landscape that it operates has changed massively. Many of their projects are now being done by other organisations, who tend to specialise in one particular area.

Does it matter if Citizenship falls off the statutory curriculum? It would be inconvenient, but it wasn’t on there to begin with and plenty of schools taught Citizenship (or at least something vaguely representing it). There’s a school of thought that says Citizenship will be improved by being optional… teachers will do it because they want to rather than because they have been told to. There’s also a school of thought, of which I have a sympathetic agreement with, that Citizenship shouldn’t be taught in the classroom by people you have to call Sir and Madam, it should be delivered in the community by youth workers and peers.

What’s important is that young people are given the skills and knowledge to be able to participate as positive citizens in their local community. How they gain those is really not important. And so I think diversifying the delivery of Citizenship education can only be a good thing.

Photo credit: carf. Used under licence.