Tag Archives: education

AI, human rights

AI in the public sector today, is the RAAC of the future

Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete (RAAC) used in the school environment is giving our Education Minister a headache. Having been the first to address the problem most publicly, she’s coming under fire as responsible for failure; for Ministerial failure to act on it in thirteen years of a Conservative government since 2010, and the failure of the fabric of educational settings itself.

Decades after buildings’ infrastructure started using RAAC, there is now a parallel digital infrastructure in educational settings. It’s worth thinking about what’s caused the RAAC problem and how it was identified. Could we avoid the same things in the digital environment and in the design, procurement and use of edTech products, and in particular, Artificial Intelligence?

Where has it been used?

In the procurement of school infrastructure, RAAC has been integrated into some parts of the everyday school system, especially in large flat roofs built around the 1960s-80s. It is now hard to detect and remedy or remove without significant effort. There was short-term thinking, short-term spending, and no strategy for its full life cycle or end-of-life expectations. It’s going to be expensive, slow, and difficult to find it and fix.

Where is the risk and what was the risk assessment?

Both most well-known recent cases, the 2016 Edinburgh School masonry collapse and the 2018 roof incident, happened in the early morning when no pupils were present, but, according to the 2019 safety alert by SCOSS, “in either case, the consequences could have been more severe, possibly resulting in injuries or fatalities. There is therefore a risk, although its extent is uncertain.”

That risk has been known for a long time, as today’s education minister Gillian Keegan rightly explained in that interview before airing her frustration. Perhaps it was not seen as a pressing priority because it was not seen as a new problem. In fact locally it often isn’t seen much at all, as it is either hidden behind front-end facades or built into hard-to-see places, like roofs. But already, ‘in the 1990s structural deficiencies became apparent’. (Discussed in papers by the Building Research Establishment (BRE) In the 1990s and again in 2002).

What has changed, according to expert reports, is that those visible problems are no longer behaving as expected in advance,  giving time for mitigation in what had previously been one-off catastrophic incidents. What was only affecting a few, could now affect the many at scale, and without warning. The most recent failures show there is no longer a reliable margin to act, before parts of the mainstream state education infrastructure pose children a threat to life.

Where is the similarity in the digital environment?

AI is the RAAC of another Minister’s future—it’s often similarly sold today as cost-saving, quick and easy to put in place.  You might need fewer people to install it rather than the available alternatives.

AI is being widely introduced at speed into children’s private and family life in England through its procurement and application in the infrastructure of public services; in education and children’s services and policing and in welfare; and some companies claim to be able to identify mood or autism or to be able to profile and influence mental health. Children rarely have any choice or agency to control its often untested effects or outcomes on them, in non-consensual settings.

If you’re working in AI “safety” right now, consider this a parable.

  • There are plenty of people pointing out risk in the current adoption of AI into UK public sector infrastructure; in schools, in health, in welfare, and in prisons and the justice system;
  • There are plenty of cases where harm is very real, but first seen by those in power as affecting the marginalised and minority;
  • There are no consistent published standards or obligations on transparency or of accountability to which AI sellers must hold their products before procurement and affect on people;
  • And there are no easily accessible records of where what type of AI is being procured and built into which public infrastructure, making tracing and remedy even harder in case of product recall.

The objectives of any company, State, service users, the public and investors may not be aligned. Do investors have a duty to ensure that artificial intelligence is developed in an ethical and responsible way? Prioritising short term economic gain and convenience, ahead of human impact or the long term public interest, has resulted in parts of schools’ infrastructure collapsing. And some AI is already going the same way.

The Cardiff Data Justice Lab together with Carnegie Trust have published numerous examples of cancelled systems across public services. “Pressure on public finances means that governments are trying to do more with less. Increasingly, policymakers are turning to technology to cut costs. But what if this technology doesn’t work as it should?” they asked.

In places where similar technology has been in place longer, we already see the impact and harm to people. In 2022, the Chicago Sun Times published an article noting that, “Illinois wisely stopped using algorithms in child welfare cases, but at least 26 states and Washington, D.C., have considered using them, and at least 11 have deployed them. A recent investigation found they are often unreliable and perpetuate racial disparities.” And the author wrote, “Government agencies that oversee child welfare should be prohibited from using algorithms.”

Where are the parallels in the problem and its fixes?

It’s also worth considering how AI can be “removed” or stopped from working in a system. Often not through removal at all, but simply throttling, shutting off that functionality. The problematic parts of the infrastructure remains in situ, but can’t easily be taken out after being designed-in. Whole products may also be difficult to remove.

The 2022 Institution of Structural Engineers’ report summarises the challenge now how to fix the current RAAC problems. Think about what this would mean doing to fix a failure of digital infrastructure:

  • Positive remedial supports and Emergency propping, to mitigate against known deficiencies or unknown/unproven conditions
  • Passive, fail safe supports, to mitigate catastrophic failure of the panels if a panel was to fail
  • Removal of individual panels and replacement with an alternative solution
  • Entire roof replacement to remove the ongoing liabilities
  • Periodic monitoring of the panels for their remaining service life

RAAC has not become a risk to life. It already was from design. While still recognised as a ‘good construction material for many purposes’ it has been widely used in unsafe ways in the wrong places.

RAAC planks made fifty years ago did not have the same level of quality control as we would demand today and yet was procured and put in place for decades after it was known to be unsafe for some uses, and risk assessments saying so.

RAAC was given an exemption from the commonly used codes of practice of reinforced concrete design (RC).

RAAC is scattered among non-RAAC infrastructure, making finding and fixing it, or its removal, very much harder than if it had been recorded in a register, making it easily traceable.

RAAC developers and sellers may no longer exist or have gone out of business without any accountability.

Current AI discourse should be asking not only for retrospective accountability or even life-cycle accountability, but also what does accountable AI look like by design and how do you guarantee it?

  • How do we prevent risk of harm to people from poor quality of systems designed to support them, what will protect people from being affected by unsafe products in those settings in the first place?
  • Are the incentives correct in procurement to enable adequate Risk Assessment be carried out by those who choose to use it?
  • Rather than accepting risk and retroactively expecting remedial action across all manner of public services in future—ignoring a growing number of ticking time bombs—what should public policy makers be doing to avoid putting them in place?
  • How will we know where the unsafe products were built into, if they are permitted then later found to be a threat-to-life?
  • How is safety or accountability upheld for the lifecycle of the product if companies stop making it, or go out of business?
  • How does anyone working with systems applied to people, assess their ongoing use and ensure it promotes human flourishing?

In the digital environment we still have margin to act, to ensure the safety of everyday parts of institutional digital infrastructure in mainstream state education and prevent harm to children. Whether that’s from parts of a product’s code, or use in the wrong way, or entire products. AI is already used in the infrastructure of school’ curriculum planning, curriculum content, or steering children’s self-beliefs and behaviours, and the values of the adult society these pupils will become. Some products have been oversold as AI when they weren’t, overhyped, overused and under explained,  their design is hidden away and kept from sight or independent scrutiny– some with real risks and harms. Right now, some companies and policy makers are making familiar errors and ‘safety-washing’ AI harms, ignoring criticism and pushing it off as someone else’s future problem.

In education, they could learn lessons from RAAC.

Background references

BBC Newsnight Timeline: reports from as far back as 1961 about aerated concrete concerns. 01/09/2023

BBC Radio 4 The World At One: Was RAAC mis-sold? 04/09/2023

Pre-1980 RAAC roof planks are now past their expected service life. CROSS. (2020) Failure of RAAC planks in schools.

A 2019 safety alert by SCOSS, “Failure of Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete (RAAC) Planks” following the sudden collapse of a school flat roof in 2018.

The Local Government Association (LGA) and the Department for Education (DfE) then contacted all school building owners and warned of ‘risk of sudden structural failure.’

In February 2022, the Institution of Structural Engineers published a report, Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete (RAAC) Panels Investigation and Assessment with follow up in April 2023, including a proposed approach to the classification of these risk factors and how these may impact on the proposed remediation and management of RAAC. (p.11)

image credit: DALL·E 2 OpenAI generated using the prompt “a model of Artificial Intelligence made from concrete slabs”.

 

children, family, Tech, women

On #IWD2022 gender bias in #edTech

I’m a mother of three girls at secondary school. For international women’s day 2022 I’ve been thinking about the role of school technology in my life.

Could some of it be improved to stop baking-in gender discrimination norms to home-school relationships?

Families come in all shapes and sizes and not every family has defined Mum and Dad roles. I wonder if edTech could be better at supporting families if it offered the choice of a multi-parent-per-child relationship by-default?

School-home communications rarely come home in school bags anymore, but digitally, and routinely sent to one-parent-per-child. If something needs actioned, it’s typically going to one parent, not both. The design of digital tools can lock-in the responsibility for action to a single nominated person. Schools send the edTech company the ‘pupil parent contact’ email, but, at least in my experience, don’t ever ask what that should be after it’s been collected once. (And don’t do a good job of communicating data rights each time before doing so either, but that’s another story.)

Whether it’s about learning updates with report cards about the child, or weekly newsletters, changes of school clubs, closures, events or other ‘things you should know’ I filter emails I get daily from a number of different email accounts for relevance, and forward them on to Dad.

To administer cashless payments to school for contributions to art, cooking, science and technology lessons, school trips, other extras or to manage my child’s lunch money, there is a single email log-in and password for a parent role allocated to the child’s account.

And it might be just my own unrepresentative circle of friends, but it’s usually Mum who’s on the receiving end of demands at all hours.

In case of illness, work commitments, otherwise being unable to carry on as usual, it’s no longer as easy for a second designated parent role to automatically pick up or share the responsibilities.

One common cashless payment system’s approach does permit more than one parent role, but it’s manual and awkward to set up. “For a second parent to have access it is necessary for the school to send a second letter with a second temporary username and password combo to activate a second account. In short, the only way to do this is to ask your school.”

Some messaging services allow a school-to-multiple-parent email, but the message itself often forms an individual not group thread with the teacher, i.e designed for a class not a family.

Some might suggest it is easy enough to set up automatic email forwarding, but again this pushes back the onus onto the parent and doesn’t solve the problem of only one person able to perform transactions.

I wonder if one-way communications tools offered a second email address by default what difference it would make to overall parental engagement?

What if for financial management edTech permitted an option to have a ‘temporary re-route’ to another email address, or default second role with notification to the other something had been paid?

Why can’t one parent, once confirmed with secure access to the child-parent account, add a second parent role? These need not be the parent, but another relation managing the outgoing money. You can only make outgoing payments to the school, or withdraw money to the same single bank account it comes from, so fraud isn’t likely.

I wonder what research would look like at each of these tools, to assess whether there is a gender divide built into default admin?

What could it improve in work-life balance for staff and families, if emails were restricted to send or receive in preferred time windows?

Technology can be amazing and genuinely make life easier for some. But not everyone fits the default and I believe the defaults are rarely built to best suit users, but rather the institutions that procure them. In many cases edTech aren’t working well for the parents that make up their main user base.

If I were designing these, they’d be school not third-party cloud based, and distributed systems, centred on the child. I think we can do better, not only for women, but everyone.

PS When my children come home from school today, I’ll be showing them the Gender Pay Gap Bot @PayGapApp thread with explanations of mode, mean and median and worth a look.

care.data, change, change management, children, datasharing, empowerment, human rights

A fresh start for edtech? Maybe. But I wouldn’t start from here.

In 1924 the Hibbert Journal published what is accepted as the first printed copy of a well-known joke.

A genial Irishman, cutting peat in the wilds of Connemara, was once asked by a pedestrian Englishman to direct him on his way to Letterfrack. With the wonted enthusiasm of his race the Irishman flung himself into the problem and, taking the wayfarer to the top of a hill commanding a wide prospect of bogs, lakes, and mountains, proceeded to give him, with more eloquence than precision, a copious account of the route to be taken. He then concluded as follows: ‘Tis the divil’s own country, sorr, to find your way in. But a gintleman with a face like your honour’s can’t miss the road; though, if it was meself that was going to Letterfrack, faith, I wouldn’t start from here.’

Ty Goddard asked some sensible questions in TES on April 4 on the UK edTech strategy, under the overarching question, ‘A fresh start for edtech? Maybe. But the road is bumpy.’

We’d hope so, since he’s on the DfE edTech board and aims “to accelerate the edtech sector in Britain and globally.”

“The questions now being asked are whether you can protect learning at a time of national emergency? Can you truly connect educators working from home with their pupils?”

and he rightly noted that,

“One problem schools are now attempting to overcome is that many lack the infrastructure, experience and training to use digital resources to support a wholesale move to online teaching at short notice.”

He calls for “bold investment and co-ordination across Whitehall led by Downing Street to really set a sprint towards super-fast connectivity to schools, pupils’ homes and investment in actual devices for students. The Department for Education, too, has done much to think through our recent national edtech strategy – now it needs to own and explain it.”

But the own and explain it, is the same problematic starting point as care-data had in the NHS in 2014. And we know how that went.

The edTech demands and drive for the UK are not a communications issue. Nor are they simply problems of infrastructure, or the age-old idea of shipping suitable tech at scale. The ‘fresh start’ isn’t going to be what anyone wants, least of all the edTech evangelists if we start from where they are.

Demonstrators of certain programmes, platforms, and products to promote to others and drive adoption, is ‘the divil’s own country‘.

The edTech UK strategy in effect avoided online learning, and the reasons for that were not public knowledge but likely well founded. They’re mostly unevidenced and often any available research comes from the companies themselves or their partners and promoter think tanks and related, or self interested bodies.

I’ve not seen anyone yet talk about disadvantage and deprivation from not issuing course curriculum standard text books to every child.  Why on earth can secondary schools not afford to give each child their text book home? A darn sight cheaper than tech, independent of data costs and a guide to exactly what the exams will demand. Should we not seek to champion the most appropriate and equitable learning solutions, in addition to, rather than exclusively, the digital ones? GSCE children I support(ed) in foreign languages each improved once they had written materials. Getting out Chromebooks by contrast, simply interfered in the process, and wasted valuable classroom time.

Technology can deliver most vital communications, at speed and scale. It can support admin, expand learning and level the playing field through accessible tools. But done wrongly, it makes things worse than without.

Its procurement must assess any potential harmful consequences and safeguard against them, and not accept short term benefits, at the cost of long term harm. It should be safe, fair, and transparent.

“Responsible technology is no longer a nice thing to do to look good, it’s becoming a fundamental pillar of corporate business models. In a post-Cambridge Analytica world, consumers are demanding better technology and more transparency. Companies that do create those services are the ones that will have a better, brighter future.”

Kriti Sharma, VP of AI, Sage, (Doteveryone 2019 event, Responsible Technology)

The hype of ‘edTech’ achievement in the classroom so far, far outweighs the evidence of delivery. Neil Selwyn, Professor in the Faculty of Education, Monash University, Australia, writing in the Impact magazine of the Chartered College in January 2019 summed up:

“the impacts of technology use on teaching and learning remain uncertain. Andreas Schleicher – the OECD’s director of education – caused some upset in 2015 when suggesting that ICT has negligible impact on classrooms. Yet he was simply voicing what many teachers have long known: good technology use in education is very tricky to pin down.”

That won’t stop edTech being part of the mainstay of the UK export strategy post-Brexit whenever that may now be. But let’s be very clear that if the Department wants to be a world leader it shouldn’t promote products whose founders were last most notably interviewing fellow students online about their porn preferences. Or who are based in offshore organisations with very odd financial structures. Do your due diligence. Work with reputable people and organisations and build a trustworthy network of trustworthy products framed by the rule of law, that is rights’ respecting and appropriate to children. But don’t start with the products.

Above all build a strategy for education, for administrative support, for respecting rights, and for teaching in which tools that may or may not be technology-based add value; but don’t start with the product promotion.

To date the aims are to serve two masters. Our children’s education, and the UK edTech export strategy. You can if you’re prepared to do the proper groundwork, but it’s lacking right now. What is certain, is that if you get it wrong for UK children, the other will inevitably fail.

Covid19 must not be misused to direct our national edTech strategy. I wouldn’t start from here isn’t a joke, it’s a national call for change.

Here’s ten reasons where, why, and how to start instead.

1. The national edTech strategy board should start by demonstrating what it wants to see from others, with full transparency of its members, aims, terms of reference, partners and meeting minutes. There should be no need FOI to ask for them. There are much more sensitive subjects that operate in the open. It unfortunately emulates other DfE strategy, and the UK edTech network which has an in-crowd, and long standing controlling members. Both would be the richer for transparency and openness.

2. Stop bigging up the ‘Big Three’  and doing their market monopolisation for them, unless you want people to see you simply as promoting your friends’-on-the-board/foundation/ethics committee’s products. Yes,” many [educational settings] lack the infrastructure” but that should never mean encouraging ownership and delivery by only closed commercial partners.  That is the route to losing control of your state education curriculum, staff training  and (e)quality,  its delivery, risk management, data,  and cost control.

3. Start with designing for fairness in public sector systems. Minimum acceptable ethical standards could be framed around for example, accessibility, design, and restrictions on commercial exploitation and in-product advertising. This needs to be in place first, before fitting products ‘on top’ of an existing unfair, and imbalanced system, to avoid embedding disadvantage and the commodification of children in education, even further.

5. Accessibility and Internet access is a social justice issue.  Again as we’ve argued for at defenddigitalme for some time, these come *before* you promote products on top of the delivery systems:

  • Accessibility standards for all products used in state education should be defined and made compulsory in procurement processes, to ensure access for all and reduce digital exclusion.
  • All schools must be able to connect to high-speed broadband services to ensure equality of access and participation in the educational, economic, cultural and social opportunities of the world wide web.
  • Ensure a substantial improvement in support available to public and school library networks. CILIP has pointed to CIPFA figures of a net reduction of 178 libraries in England between 2009-10 and 2014-15.

6. Core national education infrastructure must be put on the national risk register, as we’ve argued for previously at defenddigitalme (see 6.6). Dependence such as MS Office 365, major cashless payment systems, and Google for Education all need assessed and to be part of the assessment for regular and exceptional delivery of education. We currently operate in the dark. And it should be unthinkable that companies get seats at the national UK edTech strategy table without full transparency over questions on their practices, policy and meeting the rule of law.

7. Shift the power balance back to schools and families, where they can trust an approved procurement route, and children and legal guardians can trust school staff to only be working with suppliers that are not overstepping the boundaries of lawful processing. Incorporate (1) the Recommendation CM/Rec(2018)7 of the Committee of Ministers to member States on Guidelines to respect, protect and fulfil the rights of the child in the digital environment  and (2) respect the UN General comment No. 16 (2013) on State obligations regarding the impact of the business sector on children’s rights, across the education and wider public sector.

8. Start with teacher training. Why on earth is the national strategy all about products, when it should be starting with people?

  • Introduce data protection and pupil privacy into basic teacher training, to support a rights-respecting environment in policy and practice, using edTech and broader data processing, to give staff the clarity, consistency and confidence in applying the high standards they need.
  • Ensure ongoing training is available and accessible to all staff for continuous professional development.
  • A focus on people, nor products, will deliver fundamental basics needed for good tech use.

9. Safe data by design and default. I’m tired of hearing from CEOs of companies that claim to be social entrepreneurs, or non-profit, or teachers who’ve designed apps, how well intentioned their products are. Show me instead. Meet the requirements of the rule of law.

  • Local systems must stop shipping out (often sensitive) pupil data at scale and speed to companies, and instead stay in control of terms and conditions, data purposes, and ban product developments for example.
  • Companies must stop using pupil data for their own purposes for profit, or to make inferences about autism or dyslexia for example, if that’s not your stated product aim, it’s likely unlawful.
  • Stop national pupil data distribution for third-party reuse. Start safe access instead.  And get the Home Office out of education.
  • Establish fair and independent oversight mechanisms of national pupil data, so that transparency and trust are consistently maintained across the public sector, and throughout the chain of data use, from collection, to the end of its life cycle, including annual data usage reports for each child.

10. We need a law that works for children’s rights. Develop a legislative framework for the fair use of a child’s digital footprint from the classroom for direct educational and administrative purposes at local level, including commercial acceptable use policies.  Build the national edTech strategy with a rights’ based framework and lawful basis in an Education and Privacy Act. Without this, you are building on sand.

change, children, datasharing, empowerment, ethics, pupils

Failing a generation is not what post-Brexit Britain needs

Basically Britain needs Prof. Brian Cox shaping education policy:

“If it were up to me I would increase pay and conditions and levels of responsibility and respect significantly, because it is an investment that would pay itself back many times over in the decades to come.”

Don’t use children as ‘measurement probes’ to test schools

What effect does using school exam results to reform the school system have on children? And what effect does it have on society?

Last autumn Ofqual published a report and their study on consistency of exam marking and metrics.

The report concluded that half of pupils in English Literature, as an example, are not awarded the “correct” grade on a particular exam paper due to marking inconsistencies and the design of the tests.
Given the complexity and sensitivity of the data, Ofqual concluded, it is essential that the metrics stand up to scrutiny and that there is a very clear understanding behind the meaning and application of any quality of marking.  They wrote that, “there are dangers that information from metrics (particularly when related to grade boundaries) could be used out of context.”

Context and accuracy are fundamental to the value of and trust in these tests. And at the moment, trust is not high in the system behind it. There must also be trust in policy behind the system.

This summer two sets of UK school tests, will come under scrutiny. GCSEs and SATS. The goal posts are moving for children and schools across the country. And it’s bad for children and bad for Britain.

Grades A-G will be swapped for numbers 1 -9

GCSE sitting 15-16 year olds will see their exams shift to a numerical system, scoring from the highest Grade 9 to Grade 1, with the three top grades replacing the current A and A*. The alphabetical grading system will be fully phased out by 2019.

The plans intended that roughly the same proportion of students as have achieved a Grade C will be awarded a new Grade 4 and as Schools Week reported: “There will be two GCSE pass rates in school performance tables.”

One will measure grade 5s or above, and this will be called the ‘strong’ pass rate. And the other will measure grade 4s or above, and this will be the ‘standard’ pass rate.

Laura McInerney summed up, “in some senses, it’s not a bad idea as it will mean it is easier to see if the measures are comparable. We can check if the ‘standard’ rate is better or worse over the next few years. (This is particularly good for the DfE who have been told off by the government watchdog for fiddling about with data so much that no one can tell if anything has worked anymore).”

There’s plenty of confusion in parents, how the numerical grading system will work. The confusion you can gauge in playground conversations, is also reflected nationally in a more measurable way.

Market research in a range of audiences – including businesses, head teachers, universities, colleges, parents and pupils – found that just 31 per cent of secondary school pupils and 30 per cent of parents were clear on the new numerical grading system.

So that’s a change in the GCSE grading structure. But why? If more differentiators are needed, why not add one or two more letters and shift grade boundaries? A policy need for these changes is unclear.

Machine marking is training on ten year olds

I wonder if any of the shift to numerical marking, is due in any part to a desire to move GCSEs in future to machine marking?

This year, ten and eleven year olds, children in their last year of primary school, will have their SATs tests computer marked.

That’s everything in maths and English. Not multiple choice papers or one word answers, but full written responses. If their f, b or g doesn’t look like the correct  letter in the correct place in the sentence, then it gains no marks.

Parents are concerned about children whose handwriting is awful, but their knowledge is not. How well can they hope to be assessed? If exams are increasingly machine marked out of sight, many sent to India, where is our oversight of the marking process and accuracy?

The concerns I’ve heard simply among local parents and staff, seem reflected in national discussions and the assessor, Oftsed. TES has reported Ofsted’s most senior officials as saying that the inspectorate is just as reluctant to use this year’s writing assessments as it was in 2016. Teachers and parents locally are united in feeling it is not accurate, not fair, and not right.

The content is also to be tougher.

How will we know what is being accurately measured and the accuracy of the metrics with content changes at the same time? How will we know if children didn’t make the mark, or if the marks were simply not awarded?

The accountability of the process is less than transparent to pupils and parents. We have little opportunity for Ofqual’s recommended scrutiny of these metrics, or the data behind the system on our kids.

Causation, correlation and why we should care

The real risk is that no one will be able to tell if there is an error, where it stems from, and where there is a reason if pass rates should be markedly different from what was expected.

After the wide range of changes across pupil attainment, exam content, school progress scores, and their interaction and dependencies, can they all fit together and be comparable with the past at all?

If the SATS are making lots of mistakes simply due to being bad at reading ten year’ old’s handwriting, how will we know?

Or if GCSE scores are lower, will we be able to see if it is because they have genuinely differentiated the results in a wider spread, and stretched out the fail, pass and top passes more strictly than before?

What is likely, is that this year’s set of children who were expecting As and A star at GCSE but fail to be the one of the two children nationally who get the new grade 9, will be disappointed to feel they are not, after all, as great as they thought they were.

And next year, if you can’t be the one or two to get the top mark, will the best simply stop stretching themselves and rest a bit easier, because, whatever, you won’t get that straight grade As anyway?

Even if children would not change behaviours were they to know, the target range scoring sent by third party data processors to schools, discourages teachers from stretching those at the top.

Politicians look for positive progress, but policies are changing that will increase the number of schools deemed to have failed. Why?

Our children’s results are being used to reform the school system.

Coasting and failing schools can be compelled to become academies.

Government policy on this forced academisation was rejected by popular revolt. It appears that the government is determined that schools *will* become academies with the same fervour that they *will* re-introduce grammar schools. Both are unevidenced and unwanted. But there is a workaround.  Create evidence. Make the successful scores harder to achieve, and more will be seen to fail.

A total of 282 secondary schools in England were deemed to be failing by the government this January, as they “have not met a new set of national standards”.

It is expected that even more will attain ‘less’ this summer. Tim Leunig, Chief Analyst & Chief Scientific Adviser Department for Education, made a personal guess at two reaching the top mark.

The context of this GCSE ‘failure’ is the changes in how schools are measured. Children’s progress over 8 subjects, or “P8” is being used as an accountability measure of overall school quality.

But it’s really just: “a school’s average Attainment 8 score adjusted for pupils’ Key Stage 2 attainment.” [Dave Thomson, Education Datalab]

Work done by FFT Education Datalab showed that contextualising P8 scores can lead to large changes for some schools.  (Read more here and here). You cannot meaningfully compare schools with different types of intake, but it appears that the government is determined to do so. Starting ever younger if new plans go ahead.

Data is being reshaped to tell stories to fit to policy.

Shaping children’s future

What this reshaping doesn’t factor in at all, is the labelling of a generation or more, with personal failure, from age ten and up.

All this tinkering with the data, isn’t just data.

It’s tinkering badly with our kids sense of self, their sense of achievement, aspiration, and with that; the country’s future.

Education reform has become the aim, and it has replaced the aims of education.

Post-Brexit Britain doesn’t need policy that delivers ideology. We don’t need “to use children as ‘measurement probes’ to test schools.”

Just as we shouldn’t use children’s educational path to test their net worth or cost to the economy. Or predict it in future.

Children’s education and human value cannot be measured in data.