Jobs for the boys
UK government rewards supporters via £72 million TLIF fund
Trebles all around as the DfE plunders the recently announced £72 million Teaching and Learning Innovation Fund to reward its policy supporters, sycophants and Tsars (TL;DR scroll to end for usual suspects).
A colleague once lambasted me for the political nature of my education blogging and yet given that the quality of education one receives is a key indicator of voting behaviour the message I’m trying to send is that education is political.
To paraphrase technology critic Evgeny Morozov, many of the decisions that look like decisions about education actually are not at all about education — they are about politics, and they need to be scrutinised as closely as we would scrutinise decisions about politics.
In February of this year, Education Secretary Justine Greening launched the TLIF at the inaugural national conference of the Chartered College of Teaching. Ironically announced as part of Greening’s vision for social mobility to “increase opportunity for young people” it plans to do this by stimulating the private sector for teacher CPD. Indeed Greening announced the “12 opportunity areas” the TLIF is intended to impact at the offices of, auditing firm, PwC at an event jointly hosted with the Sutton Trust, the philanthropic arm of private equity firm Sutton Company.
Sir Peter Lampl, the founder of Sutton Company, is founder and chairman of the Sutton Trust and the Education Endowment Foundation. He is a staunch believer in private education and dreams of getting bright disadvantaged children into elite private schools. A confidant of cabinet ministers and one of the most influential figures in British education Lampl has been pulling at the strings on Conservative education policy for many years. Without a shred of evidence to support improved social mobility both Lampl and Greening have been advocates of Theresa May’s ideological attempt to bring back grammar schools.
Interview with Sir Peter Lampl in the Financial Times (paywall)
The government position on education since Michael Gove, now championed by Greening and Nick Gibb, Secretary of State for School Standards, has been firmly fixed on dismantling progressive, personalised, learner-centred education. Instead, government ideologues, their advisers and think tanks, have driven through retrograde policies that seek to make school education both teacher-centred and teacher-proof.
Less to do with social mobility and nothing to do with evidence these policies replace personalisation with rigid standardisation, fetishising data and reducing the practice of teaching to a technical task of content distribution overseen by a £ multi-billion measurement industry. This is teaching as a (bad) science rather than a craft, education as a transmission of knowledge, an industrial process that can be scaled using the same management techniques of the retail and fast food industries. A standardised schooling system devoid of the expense of experienced talent in the form of qualified teachers whilst providing a scalable platform suitable for handing over to privatisation and datafication.
It is, of course, the exact opposite of what Greening suggested in her speech of February 16th when she said
“It is teachers who, on a day-to-day basis, understand and develop potential to enable and shape those young people to — as it were — become themselves.”
Unsurprisingly then, despite the facade of opening the first round of the £72 million pot to public tender, that the first awards have gone to friends of the family and the supporters of this mission to de-skill the teaching profession and depersonalise education.
It’s not as if Greening, who describes herself as an accountant, hadn’t sign-posted the commercial organisations who would be receiving these investments of public money. One has to wonder if Greening was trolling the College of Teaching when she said,
“This culture of constantly pushing to do better — a hallmark of a great profession — will continue to be strengthened and embedded by teachers, with the support of the Chartered College of Teaching, as well as organisations like the Education Endowment Foundation and ResearchED.”
So the recipients of public money under this first round of TLIF funding are:
Let the Freedom of Information requests begin
And legal challenges
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