Unlocking Time: A Fresh Paradigm for Primary Education

"It is not in human nature for all men to tread the same path of development, as animals do of a single species."(Mary Montessori)

There's a good deal of criticism about children leaving the school system who are illiterate. Boris Johnson, speaking after the London riots, asked  "How can these kids expect to progress when one in four 11-year-olds in London is functionally illiterate?" But they've been through the school system. Is it poor teachers who cannot impart the knowledge well? Or students who cannot learn? In Jersey, the debate is being opened up by consideration of the performance of States schools at GCSE, in contrast to the private sector. But the idea of "failing schools" seems to be the common factor, but perhaps we are looking the wrong way.

Perhaps we need to rethink how we do education, especially primary education? Primary education forms the foundational layer on which the structures of secondary education can be built, and if that is inadequate, then it is like the parable, building a house on sand. I know how varied the primary school children's ability can be with mathematics, for instance, and yet they have all come through the same curriculum, the same progress over mathematical subjects, and the same boxes ticked that say the teacher has taught that.

I've long been struck by the difference between the educational system of the Middle Ages, and that of modernity. This can be seen across Europe in the Middle Ages. In Italy for example where:

during the 1430s and 1440s, there were three levels of teaching: the most elementary class was for pupils not yet reading Donatus; the second was for the Donatists; the third and most advanced was for the study of the Latin language(lactinare) and literature (auctores). This kind of division was typical throughout fourteenth-and fifteenth-century Italy, and it held true for private tutors as well as public elementary and grammar schools. There was usually a clear division between elementary and grammar or Latin education, towns often employing one type of teacher for reading and writing and a real grammarian for Latin. (1)

The doctores puerorum of the fourteenth century became the maestri di leggere e scrivere or maestri difanciulli of the fifteenth: men (or very occasionally women) of little education, drawn from the artisan class, who seem to have known little or no Latin. As distinct from grammar teachers, who almost always corresponded in Latin, these elementary teachers usually wrote their letters and submitted their petitions in the vernacular. (1)

The way in which the schools taught was, of course, familiar to most of us who were taught back in the days when primary education meant chanting tables, and copying letters out. As Nicholas Orme notes:

The introduction to reading by learning the alphabet and then syllables was a technique going back to Greek and Roman antiquity; the smallest Roman schoolboys were known as abecedarii or syllabarii. In the earlier middle ages, too, children began with the alphabet and proceeded to syllables: as Remigius of Auxerre wrote in the ninth century, 'the instruction of small children normally involves first the study of letters, then of syllables'; similar was Peter Damian's scheme articulated in the eleventh century. (2)

And education was geared to the ability of the pupils to read. A translation of a note from the Middle Ages (which also shows that girls were being taught) says: "Tina has read the psalter; she needs a book containing the seven psalms and the office of our lady which needs to be well-written [i.e. easily readable]."

This was combined with memory skills, so that reading and retention went hand in hand:

In the middle ages, a pupil acquired the skills of basic reading by subjecting the psalter to a two-stage process. The first focused on a written text: the pupil had a psalm written on his waxed tablet and read it over and over again. The second involved memory: by reading the psalm from his tablet many times, the pupil eventually learned the text by heart and so was able to dispense with the written text. After appropriate examination by his teacher, he was then assigned another psalm, and the whole process was repeated. This procedure, involving first reading from a written text and secondly recitation from memory without the written text, is described in the sixth-century monastic Regula magistri (2)

But one fundamental difference between today's schools, regardless of curriculum, was schools were ungraded. A class might contain children aged between 6 and 14, sometimes sharing the same bench. You moved up from one class to another, perhaps after a term or a year, once you had mastered the lessons taught by that class. During this time, older and more able children might also help explain concepts to younger children in addition to doing their own work, and often better than teachers, because they were closer to difficulties experientially.

In contrast, modern education is graded by year. The curriculum is not something to be mastered, it is more akin to being on a train, passing through different towns and villages on the way. Once the train has passed a point, there is no going back. The result is that pupils move upwards through the different classes without the necessity of achieving mastery and skills at a particular level, and in subjects like mathematics, of course, this can be a disaster, which is why mathematics is commonly streamed into different groups within the same age at secondary school - it is an attempt to fix what is in fact a problem with the train-method of education. But, of course, it is only a partial fix. The express train goes more quickly, but the slower train is still having to carry along the track, leaving behind half-finished and half-understood work. Is it any wonder that less able pupils leave Primary School without the skill set needed to carry them successfully through Secondary education?

But the idea of multiage grouping is being reconsidered in America, as the problem with the traditional education - the train rushing through stations - is becoming more apparent:

Interest in the potential benefits of multiage grouping has increased steadily again in recent years. The growing interest is due to a greater focus on the importance of the early years in efforts to restructure the educational system (Stone, 1995; Katz, 1992; Anderson, 1992; Willis, 1991; Cohen, 1990) and an awareness of the limitations of graded education. The realization that childrens' uneven developmental patterns and differing rates of progress are ill-matched to the rigid grade-level system has left teachers searching for a better way to meet the needs of all students (Miller, 1996). More and more schools are implementing multiage programs because of the current educational practices embedded in the multiage model that address these issues (Cohen, 1990) (3)

Multi aged grouping does away with grade levels, and combines younger and older students together. Adherence to chronological age/grade groupings or ability groupings is disregarded. Children progress at their own rates, making continuous progress rather than being "promoted" to the next grade. (4)

The change to graded year group education was very much a model based on Prussian education, where this had long been the case, and it also chimed with the industrial revolution, and the idea of schools as production line education factories. In America, for example, this came about in the 19th century:

However, mid way into the 19th century, Horace Mann who was then the Secretary of Education for the State Massachusetts dramatically changed our way of grouping students. He was impressed by the efficiency of arranging students by grade level, a practice he witnessed during a visit to Prussia. Since America was going through an industrial revolution at the time it's not surprising that an educational system based on a factory model was so readily accepted. ..One hundred and fifty years later, we have an existing educational structure that anticipates all children will perform at the same levels at the same time.(4)

The key to success of ungraded education is of course the appropriate methods for implementing it. Where this has been done, as for instance, in the schools of Maria Montessori, it worked well; when it was just the structure, and no consideration was given to what should be taught and how, it usually failed. As one educationalist noted: "Education reforms based solely on financial considerations rather than a pedagogical basis usually have a short shelf-life". But the tide is turning towards a more complete and thought through shift to ungraded education in the primary years:

A report of a 1994 National Commission on Education determined: "Common sense suffices: American students must have more time for learning. The six-hour, 180-day school year should be relegated to museums, an exhibit for our educational past. Both learners and teachers need more time-not to do more of the same, but to use all time in new, different, and better ways. The key to liberating learning lies in unlocking time"(5)

References
(1) Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy: Tradition and Innovation in Latin Schools from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Century, Robert Black, 2001
(2) What Did Medieval Schools Do for Us? Nicholas Orme Returns to the Classroom to Find out How Boys, and Girls Were Educated from the Anglo-Saxons to the Tudors; and Finds That the Foundations of Our Education System Were Laid during This Period. History Today, June 2006.
(3) http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/methods/instrctn/in500.htm
(4) http://ruby.fgcu.edu/courses/80337/McAvoy/HETERO~1.html
(5) http://multiageinfo.dnswh.com/thesis.htm

Education Matters

Jersey's state run secondary schools perform worse than almost all UK schools, according to figures released by the education department. The island-wide pass rate including the fee-paying and selective schools compares well with the UK. But take away their results and the GCSE pass-rates at the four State secondary schools fall dramatically. (1)

These are, of course, the figures that Deputy James Reed, the Minister for Education, didn't want to get out into the public domain. But Mario Lundy has a point when he notes that:

43% of our secondary pupils are in fee paying education and a further 15% transfer to Hautlieu.

Now - providing that is correct (and the statistics to back it up agree), then the national average of children at fee paying education is only 7%, which means that the spread of children over a broad range of abilities in the UK is much greater.

For Victoria College, for example, 35% of senior intake comes from state schools, and this is selected by an entrance examination.

Clearly, within the UK, many of the brighter pupils remain in the States sector. So there is good reason to believe that the situation in Jersey is quite different. The real question is:

Is it possible to take pupils with lesser ability and educate all of them to the same GCSE standard as the private schools? Or is there a plateau, beyond which most pupils are unable to go much further?

This brings up echoes of the debates about the fixed nature of IQ, which formed the basis of Sir Cyril Burt's work, and lead to the Eleven Plus examination. After all, if IQ is fixed, then the best strategy for an education system is to sort out the dull sheep from the intelligent goats, and educate them according to their ability. But Cyril Burt's data was discovered to have been largely fabricated, although such is the excellence of the peer review programme, that research which had taken place decades before - some going back to the 1920s - was not investigated thoroughly until the late 1970s!

A body of work notable for its warning signals was that of Cyril Burt, the psychologist who won the 1971 Thorndike Prize of the American Psychological Association. Burt's work on inheritability of intelligence, based upon studies of separated twins over a fifty year period (1913--66), reported correlations that were not just similar but identical, despite the increasing number of subjects in the sample. It was only after his death that parties examining the whole of his work brought the fraud to light.(4)

The problem, of course, with peer review is that when "assured results" confirm the expectations that most scientists reading an article want to hear, then the review process fails.

How did the fraud evade earlier detection? On a piece-by-piece basis, Burt presented plausible explanations, and when asked to share his data, he constructed it from published correlations. But inescapable also is that his conclusions about IQ and inheritance enjoyed a hospitable political audience, eager to embrace the findings about inheritability. (4)

There are clearly differences in a child's ability - but the factors which play into this are not just hereditary. The social background of the child may play just as important a role in providing the kind of role models and discipline in study for the child. It is not surprising that the schools which feature most poorly in the States sector in Jersey are those whose catchment area is around town, and where there are most children who are from a poorer background, or whose parent's native language may not be English.

A study in Scotland last year found that even within schools themselves in Scotland, that children from poorer backgrounds consistently performed worse at school:

Save the Children compared overall exam results with attainment by pupils registered for free school meals. The research suggested children from wealthier backgrounds performed about 60% better in exams than poorer pupils. The research indicated that the gap impacted in every council area and at every stage of school, varying from a 19% gap in Eilean Siar, the Western isles, to 102% in the Stirling area. Free school meals are provided in Scotland if parents are receiving help including income support, income-based jobseeker's allowance and child tax credits. (2)

The other impact on children in education is undoubtedly class size. Private schools consistently have smaller classes, while in States schools, this is often masked by looking at the teacher / pupil ratio. A standard definition is as follows:

Pupil-teacher ratios shall be calculated by school. The pupil-teacher ratio for each school shall be calculated by dividing the number of enrolled pupils by the number of full-time equivalent teachers assigned to the school.

That is an average, and like most averages, can be distorted. A very small special needs or remedial class in a States school can help to lower the average, and even make it look fairly good compared with the private sector. But that's the wrong figure being considered. The median is the best measure, and median class sizes, in terms of number of pupils, ensure that the class size is not disproportionally reduced by a few outliers.

Results showed that as class sizes became smaller there were more times when pupils were the focus of a teacher's attention, and more times when they were engaged in active interaction with teachers. This effect was found for all groups at both primary and secondary levels. It was also found that pupils' classroom engagement decreased in larger classes and this problem was particularly marked for the pupils who are already attaining at lower levels. This, in turn, was accompanied by teachers seeking to control low attainers more than other groups in larger classes. It is suggested that small classes can be a valuable educational initiative right through school, but could be particularly targeted at lower attaining pupils at secondary level. (3)

What is needed at the present is more information on two fronts. Firstly, a study of how much poverty and language difficulties overlap with the States secondary schools, and what the same distribution looks like in the private sector, and secondly, some information on median class sizes in both States and private sectors. Part of the problem may be structural, simply because of the nature of Jersey society, and the distribution of poverty, but part may also be because of insufficient resources in terms of teacher numbers.

Links
(1) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-jersey-12561047
(2) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-11309250
(3) http://www.classsizeresearch.org.uk/
The full paper is available at:
http://www.classsizeresearch.org.uk/aera%2008%20paper.pdf
(4) Scientific Misconduct and Editorial and Peer Review Processes, Mary Frank Fox, Journal of Higher Education, 1994

Degrees of Evasiveness

WRITTEN QUESTION TO THE MINISTER FOR EDUCATION, SPORT AND CULTURE
BY SENATOR J.L. PERCHARD
ANSWER TO BE TABLED ON TUESDAY 19th OCTOBER 2010

Question

How many student places are available in each of the non fee paying secondary schools and which year groups of those schools have the spare places?

Answer

Due to the designated catchment areas assigned to each school, two of our secondary schools are full. There is capacity for a further 318 students in the remainder of the non-fee paying secondary schools, across all year groups. If additional spaces are required, the department has a degree of flexibility to accommodate more students if circumstances dictate.

What this appallingly weasel answer means, of course, by "degree of flexibility" is that class sizes will have to rise. But Deputy Reed, the man who described himself as "blunt" recently in the JEP, now reveals himself to be really shy of making any declaration that is blunt at all. Instead there is the kind of rambling jargon that one might expect from Jim Hacker in "Yes Minister".

The current thinking behind the reductions in the subsidy to private schools is that it should be rapid, and be at 25% as quickly as possible. That means, of course, as we have seen in letters in the JEP, that parents struggling already will have to transfer their children to the States school, and the child's education will undoubtedly suffer as a result.

Yet Deputy Reed has a point with relation to spaces. If there are waiting lists, and not all children can get into the private schools, he believes the demand is fee related, and the fee is too low. If the fees rise, the numbers on the waiting lists will reduce until an equilibrium point is reached. It does mean that the private schools are ruled out of the pocket of those who might choose them for other reasons - religious, for example - but it does make sense in a crude Thatcherite economics.

But like Thatcher's economics, the speed of the change fails to address the distress it will cause for parents who simply cannot make ends meet, and have to give up, and the child who is snatched away from one school and has to suddenly fit in - and avoid bullying at the hands of children who see the posh kid on the block, and want to take away any airs they may have. Of course we are told that schools have anti-bullying policies, and bullying does not happen, but anyone with children at school knows this is palpable nonsense. The bullies will always find ways to avoid the teacher's gaze, or the bullying will take place after school, on the way home, outside the responsibility of the teacher as loco parentis. There is also the stigma to parents of apparently failing their children, despite their best efforts, and perhaps here sowing the seeds for disrespect and adolescent crime.

I don't have children at fee paying schools, and I have no axe to grind. I think the education they give is probably mixed, with some excellent teachers, and some pretty poor ones. But I dislike the way in which the economic arguments seem to trump any consideration of social implications, and when there may be an impact on States education, such as rising class sizes (judged by these median not the mean size), this can somehow be glossed over as a "degree of flexibility", as if somehow the human element does not enter into Deputy Reed's calculations.

Shenton, Newman and the Idea of a University

And now the question is asked me, What is the use of it? (John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University)

Philosophy, like sociology and psychology, is one of those degrees that people do when they're not quite sure what vocation they want to follow. It's a fun-time 4 years, open to stoners, egocentrics and those that love the sound of their own voice, who will finish the course even more confused at what they want to do in life and probably end up working at a convenience store. (Senator Ben Shenton) (1)

While Senator Shenton may have an argument in respect of media studies, and even in respect of sociology and philosophy (although I would dispute that, and return to it later), his knowledge of psychology is abysmal. He seems to assume (and I fear this is a widespread assumption), that it is on the same level as all those self-help guides one finds in such proliferation in the book shops.

Let me correct him with regard to psychology. A psychology course involves detailed knowledge of biology, cognitive neuropsychology, statistics, linguistics, language pathology, cognitive development etc. It's not exactly a medical course, but a psychologist needs a working knowledge of neurology.

A clinical psychologist, for example, would be expected to be able to carry out neuropsychological assessments using a standardised test battery (including research and understanding of the assessment, organising the subtests, scoring, analysing and initial preparation of a formal report) as part of a comprehensive multidisciplinary assessment of clients in the memory clinic. A working knowledge of pharmacology is also needed for any medicinal interventions.

It's worth noting that psychology degrees throughout the United Kingdom are fairly similar in their course content, because the British Psychological Society requires that certain areas must be covered if a degree is to be accredited. So what is typical of one is typical of all - there are no Universities offering an easier option.

Indicative degree structure:
Year 1: Basic psychology, research methods and statistics and key skills.
Year 2: Core areas including research methods and statistics.
Year 3: Empirical project in psychology (not a literature review) and options particular
to a department.

Core areas include:

Cognitive Psychology Perception, attention, learning, memory and language
Psychobiology Basic neurochemistry, neurophysiology of nerve transmission, hormones and behaviour, biological bases of behaviour
Social Psychology Attitudes, attributions, prejudice, social identification, conformity, obedience
Developmental Psychology Perceptual, motor and cognitive development during infancy
Individual Differences Genetic, environmental and cultural influences, psychological testing
Conceptual and Historical Issues Scientific method, social and cultural construction of knowledge, history and
philosophy of science
Research Methods and Statistics Research design, quantitative methods including statistical tests

Some of the statistics involves:

Descriptive Statistics
Samples, populations and the normal distribution.
Making Inferences: Confidence Limits and Statistical Significance
Analysing Data from Repeated Measures Experiments
Analysing data from independent groups: Continuous and Ordinal Measures
Analysing Data from Independent Groups: Categorical Measures
Relationships between Variables: Correlation and Regression
Introducing Analysis of Variance (ANOVA)
Analysing questionnaires and measurement instruments
Correcting Spearman correlation for ties.
Exact significance of a correlation in Excel.
Calculating Kendall's Tau-a Correlation
Report writing

There is a worked example here of the chi-square test (which is one of the easier statistical methods), which anyone who still has not been disabused of Senator Shenton's idea may care to look through - "fun time" it is probably not, except to a mathematician (I enjoyed it).

http://www.celiagreen.com/charlesmccreery/statistics/chisquare.pdf

I know at least two people who went for a psychology course thinking it would be some kind of soft soap Freudian, talking shop option - and after quite a shock to the system - the amount of mathematics and neurological information involved is not trivial - they gave up after a few weeks. And nearly all undergraduate degree courses in Psychology are now BSc as opposed to BA, reflecting the scientific weight of the subject. Incidentally, neither of them now work in convenience stores.

I hope this corrects the misleading impression given by Senator Shenton - I am intrigued to know the exact source of his information as it is clearly not trustworthy - as this is clearly not a course for "stoners, egocentrics and those that love the sound of their own voice"! However, to date, he has not seen fit to return my email; perhaps because his opinion on the matter is so easily refuted, or perhaps because he prefers the sound of his own voice to listening to arguments.

But let's now also look at philosophy, which is not itself perhaps capable of practical ends. I would still argue that it is not a "simple" course, and I would challenge Senator Shenton to dispute that with any of the notable philosophers such as Simon Blackburn, Mary Midgeley, Michael Ruse etc. They would certainly eat him alive! One facet of philosophy which is extremely useful is in helping to uncover assumptions and critically examine them, and often people believe something is true (such as the idea that psychology is a pop-science) simply because they have not examined their own assumptions, and don't want to.

Another argument comes with Newman who argued in his seminal work, "The Idea of a University", that "Knowledge is capable of being its own end. Such is the constitution of the human mind, that any kind of knowledge, if it be really such, is its own reward." Against this, Newman saw what we might term the Shenton approach to knowledge, which is nothing new, because he heard it sounded in Cato: "The fit representative of a practical people, Cato estimated every thing by what it produced; whereas the Pursuit of Knowledge promised nothing beyond Knowledge itself. He despised that refinement or enlargement of mind of which he had no experience.".

Newman expands on this in some length, explaining the criticism he is finding on the subject of education, and University Education in particular; and when one considers that he was writing in 1852, it is notable that the same kind of criticism which Senator Shenton is bringing is nothing new.

Now this is what some great men are very slow to allow; they insist that Education should be confined to some particular and narrow end, and should issue in some definite work, which can be weighed and measured. They argue as if every thing, as well as every person, had its price; and that where there has been a great outlay, they have a right to expect a return in kind. This they call making Education and Instruction "useful," and "Utility" becomes their watchword. With a fundamental principle of this nature, they very naturally go on to ask, what there is to show for the expense of a University; what is the real worth in the market of the article called "a Liberal Education," on the supposition that it does not teach us definitely how to advance our manufactures, or to improve our lands, or to better our civil economy; or again, if it does not at once make this man a lawyer, that an engineer, and that a surgeon; or at least if it does not lead to discoveries in chemistry, astronomy, geology, magnetism, and science of every kind.

He find this first stated in Locke, in which we find an enlightenment idea of education. It is interesting that what began as a philosophical argument has now become part of the mainstream thinking, at least as far as University Education is concerned, and even with some people, as far as more general education is concerned.

The author to whom I allude is no other than Locke. That celebrated philosopher has preceded the Edinburgh Reviewers in condemning the ordinary subjects in which boys are instructed at school, on the ground that they are not needed by them in after life; and before quoting what his disciples have said in the present century, I will refer to a few passages of the master. "'Tis matter {159} of astonishment," he says in his work on Education, "that men of quality and parts should suffer themselves to be so far misled by custom and implicit faith. Reason, if consulted with, would advise, that their children's time should be spent in acquiring what might be useful to them, when they come to be men, rather than that their heads should be stuffed with a deal of trash, a great part whereof they usually never do ('tis certain they never need to) think on again as long as they live; and so much of it as does stick by them they are only the worse for."

And we can see this is in the idea of vocational education, which is certainly good, but which is not the whole of education. There have been moves in the past, of varying success, to take those pupils who were deemed not to be capable of academic education, and move them to more vocational education - the 1944 distinction between Secondary Modern Schools and Grammar Schools was one example, although the selection process was wedded to a flawed testing procedure (using so-called IQ tests).

But if we take the principle that utility is the final end of education, why try to make this distinction. Isn't is, as Locke, argues, a waste of time? The question to which anyone wedded to utility in education needs to ask is - why stop at University? What not make the whole of education and the curriculum purely designed for practical ends? For the average school leaver, is it going to damage their career if they cannot solve a differential equation, or determine the cosine of an angle, or be able to determine the ratio of chemical compounds by titration? Most of modern mathematics and science within the school curriculum is evidently not of practical use - should it therefore be discarded?

Now one ground which is argued is that it teaches the ability to work in practical and abstract ways, and that effort can be transferred to other subjects. Someone who applies his or her self to school work may equally be able to apply these disciplines to other professions which are quite remote from that. Newman returns to this with the health of the body - a healthy body, he argues, is capable of many things, so that health is good in itself, in that it prepares the body for many activities. In this respect, he argues, subjects like philosophy and theology sharpen the mind.

Again, as health ought to precede labour of the body, and as a man in health can do what an unhealthy man cannot do, and as of this health the properties are strength, energy, agility, graceful carriage and action, manual dexterity, and endurance of fatigue, so in like manner general culture of mind is the best aid to professional and scientific study, and educated men can do what illiterate cannot; and the man who has learned to think and to reason and to compare and to discriminate and to analyze, who has refined his taste, and formed his judgment, and sharpened his mental vision, will not indeed at once be a lawyer, or a pleader, or an orator, or a statesman, or a physician, or a good landlord, or a man of business, or a soldier, or an engineer, or a chemist, or a geologist, or an antiquarian, but he will be placed in that state of intellect in which he can take up any one of the sciences or callings I have referred to, or any other for which he has a taste or special talent, with an ease, a grace, a versatility, and a success, to which another is a stranger. In this sense then, and as yet I have said but a very few words on a large subject, mental culture is emphatically useful.

And in fact, as a letter in the JEP from Benjamin Smart, notes:

The vast majority of philosophy graduates find graduate jobs within six months of graduation (See the Guardian 20 November 2007); many in the finance sector so crucial to the Island. Why? Because reading philosophy develops an individual's ability to critically analyse arguments, to question assumptions, to formulate clear and developed arguments, and to be careful to analyse even the smallest details in literature. These are qualities essential to success in many careers.

Of course, in the appendix to his proposition, along with the opening remarks on philosophy, Senator Shenton cites all kind of whacky University subjects:

David Beckham studies - Staffordshire University, UK
Doctorate of Philosophy in Ufology - Melbourne University
Surfing Studies - Plymouth/Melbourne
Star Trek - Georgetown University in Washington

- what he fails to take into account, however, is that before any financial support is given to University courses, the applicant must say what course they are going on. He has no evidence of any Jersey students doing any courses like these, because of course there have been none. The Education Department would not provide funding. It is the classic example of the "straw man" fallacy - to present the worse possible scenario, and take it as the norm. Trained in assessing various logical fallacies of all kinds, I suspect most students of philosophy would have spotted it a light year away.

The Philosophy of Utility, you will say, Gentlemen, has at least done its work; and I grant it,-it aimed low, but it has fulfilled its aim. (John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University)

Links
http://www.statesassembly.gov.je/documents/propositions/10960-23063-2482010.pdf
http://www.newmanreader.org/works/idea/index.html

Unjoined Up Government

"The schools are open today" says Mario Lundy, reported on BBC Radio Jersey.

The same programme also carries the announcement from Connex that the school bus services are not running for the moment, and Connex advises users to stay home if you catch one - and listen to see when they will be running.

Didn't education think to ring the bus service? One tiny phone call before making their announcement. We hear so much about "joined up government", and yet when it comes to really useful matters, the old "law unto themselves" seems to rule.

The bus service, Connex, having sent out buses, then decided (presumably on the basis of reports from bus drivers) to suspend all services (as well as school ones) until 9.00. That's fair enough, but in the old days, I remember that Jersey Bus sent out a driver on the Corbiere route in a car to tell all those clusters of people waiting that there was not going to be any buses and to go home until 9.00 (or whenever). Sometimes the route did run to a safe location, and they used a car to take people to that location - for instance Jersey Bus thought the road Corbiere was too dangerous an incline, so they went to La Moye Pub car park, and a driver collected people from the stops along the way to Corbiere. That is a cautious but measured response. Not all roads are the same, and they took every road on its merits, and assessed the risk accordingly. The response of Connex, in comparison, seems rather like a headless chicken, or Corporal Jones from Dad's Army shouting "Don't Panic".

Postscript:
The BBC website now says Mario Grundy has told schoolchildren to stay at home until they hear the buses are running. That was not what was reported at 7.00-7.20 am this morning.