I have seen a few virtual schools now, and here is the train of thoughts I am going to bring with me to SIDE the school of Isolation and Distance Learning.  For me personally Mr Brown my English teacher inspired me at school, other teachers never managed to hit the spot for me. I don’t learn in a structured environment, the carrot did not work, and the stick was even more useless, Brownie hit the spot for me, because when I got stroppy and argumentative with him, he said something like “YOU work YOU pass and the pass is yours and do you know what I wont remember you in 5  years…..YOU mess about…YOU fail the failure is YOURS, I ownt remember you in 5 years”

For most of us, our most influential teacher is the one who resonates with us…she/he is the one who articulates that self image we have but somehow we can’t express, they free us up to harness our inner spirit.  Sorry no….not the self image of who we are….but the image of who we want to be. 

“Brownie” hit the spot for me because in a way he reflected something in me….My favourite character in Lord of the Rings was Tom Bombadil…..in Animal Farm it was the donkey. My heroes are the men and women who make the stand or do the deed not because they are driven, not because of some reward nor because circumstances force their hand  but because they want to. When he gave me the choice of working or  not, it was up to me….I worked

But the idealised image most of us have of ourselves reflects the teacher who inspires us. But it means  that more often than not, the teacher is the rebel – the guy who burns the rulebook …the woman who teaches the way that  matches them. The teacher who went to school….teaching college and comes back to school only inspires the kid who aspires to be a teacher.  Those “Marmite”…sorry I am down under….Those Vegemite personalities who leave an imprint on who teach us as much about the world , as much about ourselves as they did about their own subject area, they are the inspirations. I was wondering if virtual education consigned them to fiction.

We all know the inspirational teachers from fiction…they  all  fit this model: Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds, Jack Black in School of Rock. They are the teachers who inspire others to teach.  Yet they are marginalised because we work in a system which can’t accommodate individuality, and I understand this,,,, our schools are more worried about risk assessments and Ofsted visits.

Were the Virtual schools going to be hidebound by rules and targets and paperwork? I was looking forward to finding out.

In 1987 when I became a teacher, I dreamed that I could one day inspire young people. I was already passionate about so many things, I had hoped my passion for international experiences, my passion for travel, my love of sport, my love of hill walking and my insatiable thirst  for knowledge could be given to the kids I was going to teach. I think that good teaching depends  on the personality of the teacher.  Remove that  individuality, what else is left?

My last few years at school led me to feel that the same strict homogenous strategies for lesson delivery and planning matched the paranoia schools held about their student dress codes. Increasingly I felt that I was teaching in a strait jacket…..or being forced to wear ill fitting shoes and underwear that nipped my balls, because someone wanted to make sure we all delivered the same script at the same time.

I sat in a variety of  CPDs about the Key Stage 3 mastery programme.  The language of the training, the agenda and the focus of the training seemed to reflect the training sessions the telesales guys got at MARI  and seemed so similar to the stories my son told me about the time he worked in a call centre ; We were told, with no hint of irony, that the mastery strategies of gradual learning would let all outr kids learn faster.

It was called Mastery but it was obedience and the death of imagination. For me it stifled the teacher’s creativity and limited the development of students’ subject knowledge, because the methodology relied  on the script to do the thinking for them. It also goes completely against the enquiry-based learning or cooperative learning strategies I learned during my teacher training.

Most importantly, it does not factor in the real-world applications of subject skills beyond assessments, or allow for the development of a student’s own creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving, communication or leadership skills. There are no frills or pleasure, and – as far as I could see – no need for a teacher’s personality.

The training video bore a strong hint of David Brent, the teacher – script in hand – demonstrating mastery techniques to a “real” class of  seven compliant students. We were  then prompted into applauding a colleagues ability to solve a simple fractions problem with the mastery methodology, I found myself looking over my shoulder for any hidden cameras, or for you have been framed jokers who had set us all up for such an obvious prank.

It shouldn’t have come as such a surprise that this was where we had ended up; a room full of teachers with a wealth of experience being instructed to “just stick to the script”. Sales strategies and vernacular have been creeping into the teaching profession. You will often hear of teachers “cold calling” students, where a teacher selects a student to answer a question who hasn’t raised their hand. And the current obsession with student “target grades” and teachers’ “performance management” seems to have been directly copied from sales team training manuals.

The main reason we have ended up with an educational landscape that closely resembles a production line is largely down to control; if all the teachers are singing from the same hymn sheet, there can be no margin for error. This is partly due to the continuing growth of multi-academy trusts and the calls for greater consistency in teaching across all their academies. It also comes against a backdrop of the national changes making GCSEs more rigorous.

This growing trend worries me  both as a teacher and a citizen. I want young people to love learning. but I also want them to feel that they have a voice////I want them to create…..I want them to fail and succeed.

At the end of the day, the key factor in student success is their motivation. If a student is engaged and motivated to succeed, then they can achieve anything – and that is what I am worried DI might do away with.

On my way to the airport before  I went to New Zealand , the taxi driver…smiled a smile as wide as the Tyne, he was a young man comfortable in his own skin. “Hello sir” he said. I must have taught him I realised, but I did not recognisse him

Mining my memory , I remembered the eyes of a kid who’d spent many an hour avoiding doing any work, bunking off,  during GCSE lessons he had engaged in polemics about the pointlessness of pythagoras.

As the taxi drove away….he said…” You were wrong sir….I never needed to do algebra.  But sans any knowledge of Algebra or trig or even data handling, I discovered that this ex-student of mine was self employed, he had a lot of work and a good salary, he’s found more self-worth than he ever found at school. Yeah we all told him that he “wouldn’t amount to anything without GCSEs”. Yet here he was happy wealthy and healthy.

School was rubbish for him for him. I remember the detentions, the on calls,  the fights. He was frustrated. I’d told him he needed an Maths GCSE to survive adult life. I perpetuated the myth that without GCSEs he would fail.

I was wrong. There are plenty of people who, despite the threat of lifelong failure, go on to do great things Qualifications have their place, of course, but some students see GCSEs as the gateway to conform, not be informed. Put simply, these courses don’t always feel relevant. These subjects are learned to pass exams, not gain a living knowledge. With their academic frames so distant from real-life experience, GCSEs aren’t useful, creative, productive or fun.

To make matters worse, GCSE failure lands squarely on the shoulders of students and teachers. The complaints of “What’s the point?” are ignored and aren’t treated as symptomatic of a systemic problem. Rather, the students themselves are considered a problem – the bad eggs preventing schools from improving those all-important performance statistics marking out “success”.

 Learners need to see the purpose and relevance of what they are learning”. So I believe we must make these subjects meaningful in a real-world context (even the most disengaged have shown to be hardworking during tasks meaningful to them). Who, for the love of Pythagoras, draws triangles just to calculate their hypotenuse? Instead, why not learn the great man through productive activity, like the construction of buildings or designing of video games? Learning is much more effective when students focus on topics they actually find interesting. And now I am returning to Big Picture Education

I was asked recently in a post script to my blog post …how do we make education more effective, let’s bring the resources of business to the world of education,. Let’s  build mentoring programmes offering  role models, lets explore  ways to offer varied learning contexts through more work placements, and make school-based education relevant and purposeful. This wouldn’t just benefit the disaffected, but all students who crave more independence.

No child should be asking, ‘What’s the point?’ – much less be stamped as a troublemaker or failure. They should be empowered to find meaning and the self-worth to excel.

For those of you who are still following the blog, thank you, at times I honestly feel that is an exercise in self –indulgence and while I am having an amazing time, a real adventure, I feel humbled that people are still reading what I am doing, so before I continue the travelogue about Canberra, so if you are still with me, please accept my deepest thanks.

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OK this is about Canberra, its not about work, its not about school it is just about our visit to Australia’s capital city. Forgive me if I start talking about the city, I found the place really interesting and I hope I can communicate some of that to you. Also I may be talking nonsense with some of my comments here, I think I am correct, I may well have misunderstood things I have been told, misinterpreted things I have seen, but sitting here in my air B and B steadily emptying this rather tasty bottle of wine, I promise you I am not going to check my facts, If I am factually wrong….well I am sure it wont hurt me.

Canberra, is located in Austalia’s tiniest state “Australian Capital Territory.” I believe it was selected to be the capital because both Melbourne and Sydney claimed to be Oz’s number one city and so the rightful capital city, but Canberra was sort of in the middle …ish, so in order to avoid irritating the proud burghers of the two heavy weights, The government decided to locate its parliament and administration in this tiny little village…If you imagine Edinburgh and London both claiming to be the capital of the UK….but finally locating the houses of Parliament in Hebden Bridge….now there is a thought.

Possible a more important fact is that also has its own water supply. Now let me tell you about water in Australia;

During the drive to Canberra, we passed Lake George a 25 km long lake, probably, at a guess 10 km wide, ahhh I here you say…its a biggish lake but not much bigger than Windermere or Geneva or Lago di Garda….and you are right, it is a biggish but unexceptional body of water…. except this lake is not a body of water, it literally does not have enough water to wash your hands in….it is totally dried out. (Flocks of sheep or wallabies or wombats….I dont know…..where walking over the dry surface of the where the lake was). There has been a drought in New South Wales for a couple of years now and many of the farms are importing water by truck from Sydney’s desalination plant and to see this blue thing called Lake George on the sat-nav in the car and to look out at a vast dust pan was actually quite scary. Greta Thunburg you are an inspiration…..even if my flight here left a carbon footprint bigger than a football pitch. Needless to say water is an important feature but we take it for granted, here on the planet’s driest continent, siting a city needed to consider it’s proximity to a water supply. The two pictures below show “Lake” George

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After finishing at Finigan we went to the B and B, the lift opened and we were greeted by a man lying on the floor of the lift….”are you OK mate?” I asked. Thinking  this elderly gentleman had fallen or had a heart attack or some such catastrophe.

“ No mate” ….” I am really drunk” was the reply. 

Nicola was horrified and I was reminded about the riddle oft the man who lived on the 40th floor of a tower block, but always got out at the 20^th and walked the remaining 20 flights of stairs…..because he was too small to reach the numbers in the lift above that floor…..only from this fella’s worms eye point of view he could not select anywhere.  We helped him to his feet and he staggered out into the sunlight. I was left wondering what sort of gaff we had booked up for.

The gaff was in Queansbyen, now what can I say about this suburb?

Queansbyen is a residential suburb of Canberra

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Er that’s about it.

We dumped our bags, and headed for the bright lights of Canberra, I had expected precisely nothing, I had been told that this “large village” was an enormous office complex that died at 5 Oclock and at weekends. I had been told Canberra was Milton Keynes or Stevenage or Washington CD (county Durham) without the population. I had been told Canberra was boredom on steroids…..a one horse town without the horse. I had been told wrong. Canberra is really nice, lovely restaurants, museums, galleries and parks. We did not get to the war memorial but we were told it was breathtaking. All of this set in a very clean tastefully landscaped setting, surrounded by hills. There is a big university and the area around it is vibrant and young. It is not crowded like Melbourne, it lacks the sheer “in your face assault on the senses”, that is Sydney, but it is really nice and definitely worth a visit. We visited the national gallery, the national library,, walked around the lake and had what I think was the best Chinese meal I have ever had.

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We visited the Australian National Library…..well Nicola was with me and as a librarian she had a professional interest in it. There was an exhibition of childrens literature on at the time.

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From there National Gallery – where there was an amazing exhibition of aboriginal art and if you’re lucky, you can watch a cool exhibition such as the one we saw from post reform Indonesia. The photo below is an art work by a swiss artist, It started of as a giant wax statue of some gadgy holding his mobile, …..the wax statue is a candle and is burning…..eventually all that will remain will be the phone. Interpret that as you wish.

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We visiting the parliament and stone me…..the parking is free……. as is the entry…and photos are allowed. I cant say I really liked the building that much, then again Nicola did so that is a matter of taste.

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We also saw a written apology to the lost generation….which was moving.

But really just wandering around the lake through the international walkway, nice gardens in a very pleasant temperature was cool. After arriving in Canberra expecting nothing…I was sad to leave, it is a really nice city.

Then the drive home and at last …woo hoo…I saw my first kangeroos. I had expectd to see Kangeroos and Wallabies and Wombats wandering through every street, but 9 days into my visit to Oz I had finally seen my first “roo” to which I say “Woo Hoo it’s a Roo”  sorry

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This blog entry is really only of interest to those of you who are interested in the potential of distance learning, those of you wanting to read the travelogue or the opionates rants or learn more about the Churchill fellowship, I would probably recommend you skip this entry. However If you are interested in virtual schools…read on.

The weekend was spent visiting my aunts, uncles and cousin in Bowral and the simple truth is I have had a wonderful time, I know these relations very well, they have been to the UK many times, indeed one of these Aunts is my godmother. These are people with whom I have, and always have had, a lot of genuine warmth towards. I am not going to describe everything I did, not because it was a quiet or a forgettable time, on the contrary, I could not have been happier, but because a family rendezvous is of interest only to the family itself.

I will reiterate what I said yesterday about the Sydney Opal Card. Bowral is a suburb about 2 hours by rail from the heart of Sydney, in English terms think of the commuter towns of Cambridgeshire, Surrey, Hampshire or Kent, the commute is the same here in Oz….. actually no its not the same….it really isn’t , look  as you catch the 06: 50 from Leighton Buzzard to Euston, I want you to imagine a rail fare of 6 dollars using the Opal and while you are thinking about that, I want you to imagine a clean commuter train that is busy but you can still get a seat because they put on double decker trains at peak times.

But today, I am not going to Sydney, the destination is “Finnigan Virtual School” just outside Canberra.  For those of you who know Canberra, it’s actually just outside the city in a suburb called Queansbyan. Also I am driving, not going by train and a note to UK readers, the Aussies drive on the left the same as us….and the roads are much quieter.  

Later I am going to return to discussing the Virtual School of Victoria. That will be after today’s visit because just now I am interested to see how two virtual schools are going to compare. It’s not going to be a case of this school is better than that one, but over the weekend, I have been writing up my impressions of VSV and I have had a chance to reflect and digest what I saw. Remember the idea of this fellowship, is to look at the potential of virtual schools in England.

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The initial impression of Finnigan is impressive, the first thing to strike you when you arrive at the school is just how new it is. Please don’t misunderstand me, new does not necessarily equate to impressive or attractive. I work in a new school in Peterlee and when you enter the doors for the first time, there is a “wow factor,” partly because the architects did a good job, partly because whoever was responsible for dictating the parameters of the design, (Ian Mowbray and Lesley Powell, I dunno? ) was clear about what they wanted and partly because of the inspirational art work and interior design by Alix Vince. But I have been to other new schools which look awful, one former school which I left many years ago resembled my idea of a prison. Finnigan was both new, impressive and aesthetically right on the mark, like my current school…Finnigan had that initial “oomph effect”

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Sorry I am wandering off the point again, I wanted to see if the model here could be used in the UK, I wanted to see what they did, who they did it for?did it work? how was it evaluated and assessed. What unique problems and flaws were there? I have already said I want to return to discussing VSV because I am aware that I have really bought the idea, I was convinced it was good, but did I look with a sufficiently critical eye? Was I naïve in accepting what I was told? I did have questions about feedback, I did have questions about student engagement, what about the need to escape a dysfunctional family, what about loneliness and isolation, what about the pressure on carers, guardians, parents who were now obliged to stay at home because there child was home schooled.

Well lets start by looking at the student “demographic” who actually attends Finigan?

Geographic Isolation                  5%

Itinerant                                     10%

Parents working abroad             15%

Medical                                       6%

Pregnant/young parent                2%

Gifted and talented                      9%

Learning Support                        31%

Extraordinary circumstances        4%

Transition                                   18%

This alone was interesting. The second interesting fact is a number of students are dual registered, they already attend face2face school but for whatever reason need to supplement their curriculum with one or more distance learning classes.

Now this is something I am interested in, indeed it looks as if 17% of all students on the role are in this situation.

I also learned that the school is not a first choice option. Attendance at Finnigan is only possible after referral from another school and medical practioner or some other officially recognised body for example sporting body for elite athletes, government school in the case of distance barriers.

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Finally the figures I was given includes but does not quantify the young adults who have already left school but are trying to catch up with missing certificates.

My first question was about the students experiencing loneliness and isolation because their teaching is “remote,” The response was interesting, The need to deliver as broad a curriculum as possible and to ensure sufficient numbers of students accessed a full curriculum has led distance education schools such as Finigan to collaborate with face 2face schools and pioneer a model of dual-mode studies that a significant proportion of their students already attend a traditional bricks and mortar 4 walls institution.  So the whole issue of loneliness and isolation des not affect many students.  Finigan does deliver remote education but there remains an emphasis on face-to-face contact between staff and students and students and students through residential work, and  pre arranged tutorials within the school.

OK so for 20% kids, there is no problem, then we look at the travellers, those who have moved abroad but want to maintain an Australian education, we find we have reduced the question to 55% of the cohort. In fact we could continue with whittling the numbers away, but at the end we have a reality that every student has the opportunity to attend this school at least part of the time, on-line forums do afford students the opportunity to hook up with their peers, that in some cases there is a clear isolation issue, but these are often school refusers anyway, and while the arrangement is far from ideal for all young people, a pragmatic compromise has been reached. Finally enrolment is not viewed as a permanent issue for every child, re enrolement occurs and in some cases, children are guided to return to face2face education. So yes there is an issue, but many of the children would not experience or flourish in a “social setting of the face2face school”

What about dysfunctional families? How can virtual school address the need to offer an escape to vulnerable children from this? To be honest, I don’t think I really got a clear answer on this, in my little note book I need this as a follow up question and will come back to you on this.

What I was really impressed with was the lesson delivery,

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The School has a number of “green Screen Studios” and teachers are able to customise lessons using this technique. Now when I was being shown around, I was thinking “what is green screen?” the teachers were very excited about this …but in my ignorance I was sort of “Meh!!! so you have a green screen and a video camera?” Well if like me you have no idea what green screen is, let me explain.

Green Screen is a visual effects technique for layering two videos or photos together based on color hues . The technique is used in to remove a  background from the subject of a photo or video. A colour range in the foreground footage is made transparent, allowing separately filmed background footage or a static image to be inserted into the scene. The green screen technique is commonly used in by TV weather forecasters where the weathergirl/man appears to be standing in front of a large map during live television, though in actuality it is a large blue or green background. Then different weather maps are added on the parts of the image where the color is green. If the news presenter wears green clothes, his or her clothes will also be replaced with the background video.

So what this means is someone in the studio sees a teacher standing in front of a green wall….the student watching this on their computer at home will se something very different. So in the pictures below, the top photos shows you what someone in the studio will see….the bottom photo will show you what a student watching on her computer will see. Later in this study visit I am going to watch a science lesson using this. Now believe me when I say the potential for this in the delivery of lessons is something quite amazing. It means your teacher can appear to walk inside a human organ pointing out the different cells or parts for example.

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Earlier I was really excited about virtual schools, I have waxed lyrical about its potential, I have discussed how it liberates education, there are problems, I can see that, it is expensive….I suspect that it does demand a greater level of student self motivation than we would expect in a face to face classroom because th teacher is not really there with the “whip” to demand engagement. The weakness as I see it….is the domestic situation, unless the student has someone who can mentor them at home (or in the library community centre or whatever), this is going to be a difficult alternative. On the other hand the flexibility for a disaffected student could be a potential revolution in education. As I see it, a student with emotional problems or a mental or physical health may not always feel up to working or studying……but they will have purple patches where they do feel up to working.

In an earlier posting, I said that some blog entries are about my travels …purely as a visitor, some are about Churchill fellowship and some are about my observations and impressions of the educational research. Probably every entry has an element of singing the praises of a Churchill fellowship and in that sense, this is no different, but there is no educational input to this entry.

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It’s 07:30, the alarm has dragged me from a very deep slumber. I hadn’t realised until this morning, just how much the tension of yesterday had taken its toll. I know everything worked out well, the rendezvous in Sydney had   transpired at the time and place planned, but this morning I am absolutely slaughtered. Anyway the plan for today is to leave our suitcases in the left luggage at Sydney Central Station, then spend the day taking a look at the city, before taking the 16:00 train up to Bowral in the Southern Highlands.

Just so you understand why I am staying in this small town 150km from Sydney, rather than finding a billet in Sydney. In addition to visiting the Distance Learning School of NSW, I have an appointment at Finnigan School in Canberra in a day or two, moreover I have aunts who live in Bowral, a town strategically placed between the two cities. But irrespective of the strategic benefits of staying there, I genuinely want to visit my relatives. They have been to UK many times and it is always nice to see them when they visit, so I am looking forward to going to their home. I mention this as part of the promotion of a Churchill Fellowship. Yes I have to work, yes the grant is awarded just for me and No it is not a holiday. However, my wife self financed her trip here, there is no fellowship rule saying you cannot visit relations, friends, be joined by partners. So this afternoon, I am taking the train up country.

But that is tonight, what about now? it is a sunny Saturday morning and I need to see if the first impressions of the city  are going to be confirmed. Well let me tell you, dragging those suitcases to the station was not a pleasure, sweating and breathing heavily…..hoping my heart was not going to do anything stupid, I cursed my way to the railway station. Now its time to digress briefly, There are some cities which in my opinion are essentially “super cities”, these are the cities which belong to the world and not to the country in which they are located, New York, London, Singapore and I will include Sydney in that group. I have been to New York and liked it…I love London as well, but both cities are big teeming metropoli (is that the plural?) where human contact is cooled, the subway train, the tube, Whitehall or Broadway are places where people don’t have the time to be friendly, to engage in chat or to welcome visitors and despite sulking a bit about thieving Sydney taxi drivers, the warmth shown by strangers in this city was special. We were lost, somehow we entered the railway station and walked through a big subway tunnel to reach the other side….oh be warned Central Station does not have working escalators or lifts, so I had to drag this 25 kg suitcase and a 7kg back pack up the stairs….only to leave the station and we could not find left luggage. Luckily some labourer saw our problem….helped Nicola with her case….(Oh help me ..help me…I felt a bit like Queen Elizabeth 1^st in reverse   “I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king”…..)  and took us to the left luggage. Sweating, puffing and with sweat pouring from skin, but unencumbered by my bags we were free to go sightseeing.

Now 2 points to be aware of

1. Darling Harbour is nice but it does not command views of the bridge
2. The Central Station is not the stop for Sydney Harbour, Opera house Bridge etc…that stop is circular Quay
3. Get yourself an Opal Card, I am not sure how far it is valid, I think it is valid for the whole of Sydney and the suburbs. A 20 Dollar top up seems to be able to take me on the ferries across the harbour, on the buses in the city and on the commuter trains to the outside of the city. We were going to take the Southern Highlands line later today and the Opal covers the whole journey.

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So our walk to the harbour took us to Darling Harbour, not actually as famous as Sydney Harbour itself, but it is still pretty damn good, we visited the Chinese garden, took a walk along the harbour, took in the Maritime museum and had lunch at a lovely restaurant overlooking the waterfront…..but be aware, nice though Darling Harbour is,,,it is not the post card Bridge area. But there are firework displays at night, no shortage of restaurants theatres and it is really groovy. 

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Last night I said I was disappointed with Sydney….nah ignore that, I was wrong, this city is fabulous, the tiredness has gone, the sky is blue. It is late winter here, but a Sydney late winter….think a beautiful Late September day back in England. In the sun it was warm. Although in the shade, yeah OK a bit cooler. Our time in Darling passed too quickly now its time to head to Bowral.

I am going to close now…but holy smoke, Sydney may have been warm today,  but we have just arrived in Bowral, the sun has gone down, the wind is blowing a hooley and it is cold. Melbourne was nippy at St Kilda beach, Wellington was windy but this is the first time when I have felt cold. My aunt was at the railway station to meet us and now a new chapter begins. 

According to the Institute of strategic studies, the league table for spending on defense across the world is

USA

Saudi

China

Russia

India

UK

Although some figures have France in between UK and India

If we look at the per capita spending, UK moves up to third place after Saudi and USA

Using the same idea of Education, UK weighs in just above the EU average in terms of Gross expenditure, but when we look at UK education Spending per students, the UK is ranked 57^th

https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Education/Public-spending-per-student/Primary-level

This entry is to the questions asked of me following my last entry.

How should we improve Education? What do I think the model should look like?

Clearly the two sets of statistics which opened this entry provide a clue as to the direction of travel of my response.

I am also aware that I have used two very superficial and probably over simplistic data sets upon which the argument is based. You wont find an apology for that, because put quite, defence spending is high and education is not. So whether we rank 6^th or 16^th with respect to military spending, and education lies at 27^th or  57^th   It is in need of better resources.

I am not going to say that we should abandon our military, I am not going to say we should assume that at no time in the future should we assume the protection of NATO or the EU.

But really do we need to have such a defence capability.

The next point I want to make is the cost of sending a boy to Eton is £14,167 per half term, if we accept that there are 6 half terms per year and that there is a signing on fee of £3400, this means that the cost for an 11 year old boy going to Eton is going to be in the order of £85342 for the first year.  That fee does not include extras like music tuition.

https://www.etoncollege.com/currentfees.aspx

So if I was in a position to really fashion an education system fit for the 21^st my first moves would be

1. close all private schools, fee paying schools, public schools.
2. Every school in the UK would be state school and would receive capitation in the order of £85 300 index linked. That way every school in the UK would become an Eton College.

2) The existing GCSEs and IBs, A levels etc are fine for kids whose abilities and psycho social health or domestic situation lies within one standard deviation of the normal. It is the others, We need to oblige company’s, universities, sports clubs, public bodies and communities themselves to  generate individualised, valued and accredited educational programmes for our young people.

One young student who I spoke to in Victoria said “in face 2 face school, the teacher would spent 75% of every lesson, just calming the class or reasserting he was the boss man, in the 15 minutes left he had to get to know, teach, give feedback and suggestions for improvement for 28 kids, When I looed at typical class sizes in Eton, Dulwich College, Harrow, St Pauls…they were 16 to a class which dropped to below 10, One school’s web site boasted a teacher student ratio of 4:1

So in short, increase expenditure to match the money already paid to the elite

Remove the notion that high quality, elite education is the preserve of the rich, I don’t want to drag Eton down to become like Grange Hill or Waterloo Road, I want every school in the UK to receive the same as the top schools get.

But also let’s imagine someone like Paul Gascoigne attended a duel registration school, or a distance education school where his entire curriculum was tailored to being a sports star including…a curriculum that included how to deal with being rich, how to handle the tabloids, how to cope with early ending career, included coaching, finance, and instead of a GCSE in English he could do something on reading contracts, law, sports journalism, TV journalism.

I would also say for every member o the population, instead of saying you leave school at 16 or 18 or whatever, how about…education is free and optional u until you have attained the equivalent of 3 A Levels. So I could leave school at 16 to become  a ballet dancer, because I am an elite dancer, but by the time I am 22, my career never took off, is unlikely to ever take off but I left school with no qualifications because I danced my entire adolescence away. Well I should be allowed to return to education free until I am qualified to embark on a second career.

• 

This is my last day in Melbourne, I had a fabulous day at VSV, I like to think I learned a lot, the programme organised by Mal McIver was about as perfect as it could get. OK so this is work, but we can enjoy work n this was a pretty good day. I have already said “No Love Letters Please” is the best air BandB that I have stayed in and a considerable feature of this was the host. No the host is a person who loves sport…. Always a positive for me….the host loves rugby a double positive. However like me, and often unlike a lot of sports fans, the host is a passionate anti

I arrived “home” from VSV, a little footsore, (I got off the bus a few stops late after falling asleep on the ride), to be greeted by “fuck off!!” I was a little surprised, I had tried to be a good guest….I was sure I had left the apartment clean, pretty damn sure I had locked up, turned lights off. I know I have never had the slightest inclination of intruding someone else’s privacy so I had not trespassed into private rooms or steamed open mail…. However my host was watching a documentary about an Aussie rules star who had been the victim of institutionalised racism which had been orchestrated by the press. We talked about it and racist I was reminded of Che Guevara’s quote;

“If you tremble with indignation at every injustice, then you are a comrade of mine”

Phew …. I was worried there, but it only reinforced my enthusiasm for this place. What with a passion for Rugby being anti racist and being just a damn good person, this was a gaff I was going to miss.

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But it was time to leave, my suitcase was getting heavier and heavier, I was leaving Melbourne with even more books, my case was putting on weight, it was now hard to lift up, the bloody wheels were giving up the ghost, and so wheezing and sweating, I was reduced to dragging a 24 kg case while carrying 6kg on my back. The weather was unkind, the heavens had decided to make up for the two year drought in one day and I had no umbrella. But probably the sky crying was better than a hot day. Arriving at Southern cross Station, I picked up the skybus to the airport.

Did I tell you, I was on my way to Sydney to meet Nixie. As I write this she is somewhere in the sky between Dubai and Oz, I am going to fly off to meet her, she will arrive in Australia, 30  minutes before I arrive in Sydney’s terminal 2, ah well it should be nice. Tonight we stay in a nice hotel and not an air BandB so someone will cook for us. It almost feels like a sexy clandestine dirty rendevous, OK I am 60 years old but that does not mean I can’t dream or imagine.  

Whatever, I was definitely looking forward to meeting up with Nixie. It is her first flight alone and she had been worried, but the kids had told me she had reached Dubai OK and was on her way. I hoped her jet lag would not be an issue, I had been unable to speak to her in Dubai, my phone company had

blocked all calls so I could not speak to her. Advice to travellers down under, buy a cheap Sim card, I could communicate by whatsapp when I had Wifi but that was it.

• 

• 

ARghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh I have just checked in to my flight and the departure screens are starting to look like the Wall street crash ticker tape….flight to Sydney cancelled…..flight to Sydney Cancelled….cancelled….oh dear I was unable to speak with Nicola but I was going to be delayed, she was going to arrive in Sydney and not know where I was…..ah well she can wait an hour or two, I phoned Matty and asked him to tell his mam I would be late.

AAAAAARGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!! Just been to the desk to ask when I will be rescheduled, they said Sunday night or Monday night. The train is fully booked but that is an 8 hour ride and the buses are fully booked. It looks as if I will have to hire a car and drive from Melbourne to Sydney……Shit my license is not recognised, no photo its an old style paper license.

So Nicola was going to arrive in Sydney, expecting me to meet her there…she had been unable to check her internet and was currently unaware that there was going to be a wait of at least 48 hours.

So it was back on the blower to Marianne, Matty, Annette…”tell your mam   tell your sister in law to make her own way to the hotel…and then her own way to Pat’s” I was a tiny bit stressed.

In the end it was sorted, a bit of negotiation, A fairly hefty insurance claim for an alternative flight,  I did not need to kill anyone and I was probably going to fly tonight, but it kept me guessing until the last moment……at 19:50 at gate 4 an announcement came over the tannoy…

”here is an important announcement for passengers at gate 4 waiting for flight VA898”…….

“Oh shit”

“Can you transfer to gate 28” or whatever …this meant leaving domestic departures and rechecking through security. Alrighty…I am on it. I am on the plane…I wont relax until we touch down in Sydney

The flight was OK but we seemed to circle Sydney for a few hours and as it turned out although I as an hour late, Nicola was 2 hours late so woo hoo, I got there before her.

The stress was just a sort of arterial dyna-rod. Now it is midnight, I am tired and my first impressions of Sydney are underwhelming, a dead airport, a taxi driver who took us to the cleaners, we knew we were being ripped off but OK….if you are an Aussie reading this, should a taxi ride from airport to  Ultimo cost 200 dollars. The taxi driver told us public transport stopped at 10:00 on Friday nights. The hotel was dead, restaurant closed bar closed, no mini bar, no room service….no restaurants nearby….not even a kettle in the room. I was not impressed and getting some sleep was difficult. Today had been tiring but I was so agitated and wound up after the excitement.

Ah well so an early night, the next chapter of my journey had started.

• 

Not a great picture, I know, I know, but this virtual school Victoria, the school for nearly 4000 students….now take a look at the (blurry) picture, go on take a close look and tell me what you notice? this is a school for 4000 students and there are no students in the photo.

The school uses blended learning, a mix of virtual and face-to-face teaching and learning. Students can visit the school during normal school hours to meet with teachers, attend seminars and study in the library or purpose-built study areas. And Mr McIver arranged a fantastic programme for the day where I did meet teachers, students, administrators so as they say down here in Australia, “its all good”.

I arrived early at the school and signed in to reception, the receptionist asked how the first test was going in the Ashes series…..that was below the belt! England had crumbled in the second innings and gave the match to Australia. As it turned out Mr McIver would not be ready for 20 minutes and the receptionist suggested I go to the canteen for a coffee. I did so and when I placed my order an attractive woman with an “Australian face,” (by which I mean sunshine eyes and sunshine smile it seems to be a characteristic of the Aussies), I got to musing were the solemn countences so ubiquitous in Britain, the consequence of grey, solemn weather. Who knows but I digress. Where was I??? Oh yes……. An attractive woman with an Australian face said “Oh what a lovely accent! where are you from?” after introducing myself, she instructed the girl serving the drinks return my payment for the coffee….”its on the house” she explained.

The above examples may not be important per se, but they do indicate the warmth of the welcome i received in VSV….and they indicate just how well prepared the school was for my visit, I think every request, every query I had was addressed and included in the programme.In this respect, very similar to Te Kura. However this was a different beast to te Kura.

I am going to ask YOU two questions, if you feel the need, answer in the feedback section, actually I would appreciate that.

1. What is Education?
2. Why do we educate our young people?

I have alluded to these questions already, they appear simple and straight forward, but they are questions that have been bothering me for quite some time.

I am not going to say my answer is correct…I really don’t know, nor am I going to drag you down to agree with my conclusion by asking a series of leading questions. But ponder for a moment those two questions.

If you transported the builders who built the pyramids or the stargazers of babylon to the control centre for the Hubble Space telescope or to the construction site for latest prestige project, they would be entering a fantasy world which is completely beyond their understanding…..If on the other hand you transported Socrates to the typical classroom in 21st Century England, he would recognise the structure of the class. It would be different of course, there would be girls, larger classes, more rigid timetable, more structure to the lessons, more teachers but in essence 3000 years have passed but the song remains the same.

So back to the first of my original two questions. The dictionary gives two definitions of education;

1. the process of receiving or giving systematic instruction, especially at a school or university.

2. an enlightening experience

I have already stated in an earlier entry that over the past 55 years, my personal experience of schools has felt like a systematic attempt to stifle and suppress my own passion and curiosity for learning and strait-jacket my education into a neatly packaged curriculum “one size fits all” bundle, with little or no effort to provide me with an enlightening experience.

I got the impression that VSV did attempt to redress the balance and really try to create an experience which for the students in which education was an enlightening opportunity.

• 

For what its worth, I believe we educate children to prepare them for adulthood, I believe the role of the school is vaguely analagous to the neccessity for a very deep and wide gene pool. If students are only educated by parents, the education is potentially narrow and limited. The wider the pool of educators the broader the horizons children are given.

The model I was shown at VSV can be summarised in the following diagram

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I mentioned earlier that Socrates might recognise the 21st century classroom, but I also believe that education even in the golden age of Greece was something dictated by the ruling elite.  Its main purpose was to ensure citizens were trained in the arts, and to prepare them for both peace and war. It was aimed at the cultivation of the students’ physical, mental, and moral qualities.   From Athens we get the motto: A sound mind in a sound body. All schools were very small private schools, and education was very valued.

Boys
Until age six, boys were taught at home by their mother or a male slave. Age six to 14 was primary school. The teacher in school was always a male. Once the youths were 16, their ‘basic education’ was complete. The boys who didn’t have to work could now study the sciences and philosophy. From the ages of 18 to 20, able bodied young men had to take military trainging for the army or the navy. Athenians wanted their sons to have a well rounded education so that they would know a variety of things and appreciate lots of things.  

Girls
Girls were taught at home by their mothers or a private tutor. The objective was to prepare girls for being a stay-at-home mum, to look after and educate their children just as they had been educated. 

However only the citizens of Athens were educated, the metics, the middle classes and the slaves were not educated. They may have received training in a trade or in service, but they were not allowed to develop their think of philosophy or politics, it was an education system designed to keep the elite at the top of the hierarchy and to keep the lower classes at a lower tier.

The story of a hierarchy continues today. Except it is 150 years out of date, The private schools and the likes of Eton and Harrow still offer an education for the ruling class to acquire the skills to rule. This is not envy politics, one simply has to look at the current and the previous governments to see that one school has provided the UK with 19 prime ministers since 1800, which corresponds to 47.5% of British prime ministers educated at the same school. Then when you then consider that 71% of the current tory cabinet attended a private school is an improvement on the 91% under Thatcher you can only draw one of two conclusions, either the education system is skewed to exclude the masses from entering positions of power or the ruling classes are somehow more intelligent than the rest of us. I know which viewpoint I take.

Sorry…I have wandered off the point again, I am accepting education is to provide us with the skills we need for adulthood, but I believe that the current system is 150 years out of date and has has been borne out of a desire to ensure that the demarcation of who ” cooks and serves dinner, who eats dinner and who washes the dirty dishes afterwards” remains intact. The grammar schools were there to teach children to be the functionaries of the empire and the other schools were to teach children to be obedient, know their places ad be ready and willing to shed blood for the empire, which in effect is a euphemism for “give blood and die” to ensure that the seats at the high table continued to belong to the same arseholes which had always sat there.

I said the system is out of date, because now there is no need for the functionary, I honestly passionately believe that our current education system, its emphasis on testing, testing testing and after that test some more, its emphasis on exam performance, school league tables, accountability, the mind numbing narrowness of the curriculum, the marginalisation of modern languages, the politically weaponised history curriculum and an English curriculum which really benefits the middle class “consumer,” I really believe it robs children of the skills they need for the 21st century, it stifles creativity, imagination, independence. We pay lip service to encouraging resilience, entrepreneurship, collaboration and culture awareness, while delivering a curriculum that relies on slavish rote learning.

How many English schools put all forms of life on ice in year 11 and 13? no trips out because it clashes with GCSE or A Level, suspend sports teams, introduce compulsory after school lessons, compulsory saturday clubs, compulsory holiday time cramming….OK they are not compulsory but neither teacher nor student is really allowed to miss them.

And for what? to learn facts that are of no value, that the students have no ownership of. How many times have you heard or have you asked the question when will I ever need this? The “this” in question could be any one of 1000 topics.

Furthermore, who are we really directing our teaching towards? certainly not the kid with pyscho-social anxieties, certainly not the creative spark in our classes who has ADHD who can create and innovate and daydream and make magic happen but who cant sit still, who cant focus on minutae once she is bored, who is so disorganised that homework is never done, classwork is erratic and their mind jumps from topic to topic like a smoke molecule when observing brownian motion. It is not targeted towards the kid who is a lower or higher attainer and god help you if you are different.

I asked a student back in England what she thought the purpose of education is, she said ” to get my GCSEs”. She was right, the exam is the end product, we don’t educate. we fill heads with useless facts that they will retain for the exam period and then forget about forever, but hey…..the school can proudly display a banner on its front door saying 90% of our students achieved 5 GCSEs including Maths and English. Meanwhile Eton and Harrow and St Pauls will be teaching their children how to rule the country.

So what has this got to do with Victoria Virtual School? Actually I truly believe the flexibility, the delivery and the ethos of this school does encourage

• planning skills,
• time management,
• team communication and coordination and self discipline

VSV encourages non formal learning as well as formal learning. Over and over again the needs of the child were the focus of the school;s delivery

• 

OK I have written more than I planned to do here, but I want to conclude tht the model I saw here in Melbourne showed me a lot, it gave me food for thought and I now have real ideas about the way forward.

I am going to write a fairly extensive section here, and will edit it as I go. This particular entry is almost entirely related to the research part of my Churchill Fellowship, so probably if you are not interested in the data I collected from teachers and students at this school, then come back a different day to my blog. BUT I do want to say that Mal Mciver, his team (I will name check these guys later in the blog) and, most importantly, the students provided me with a really interesting and valuable day.

I am not going to record my day in chronological order, I do want to start with conversations with students, some who I met face to face and some who I talked to on Adobe Connect. I also saw a Maths lesson and a drama lessons as well as in depth talks with staff at the school.

These students had come in to attend a face to face session for a chemistry tutorial.

I was interested to hear the students view point, here are transcripts of some of the questions and responses. It might give the impression that the answers were made by one person, I have combined answers.

 What is the best thing about  virtual school  for you?

A: The one-on-one interaction with teachers is best. When I was in face to face school, the teachers would spend 45 minutes in every hour with the kids who were demanding attention, the ones who would mess about, or the ones who always pushed to the front. For kids like me, we get overlooked, when we don’t understand anything, we get 2 minutes of the teachers time and if you still don’t understand, some teachers just think you are dumb. In Virtual school there is no competition with others, I have anxiety and don’t like to speak out in class and I work slowly , in virtual school there is no pressure to  get everything done on time. ‘

I actually have health problems and if I attended face to face school, I would miss loads of work and fall behind.

The teacher is there  to help me when I need it!’  I can phone my teacher anytime betweenearly morning and late at night, I can talk about my  assessments, its does not have to be just a sentence written down saying “could be better” or “great work”.

We can link up with other students as well, We have discussion groups where we can post things and other students can reply; we do some group work. We use adobe connect, its a kind of chat room where the teacher can share PowerPoints and things, but we can record them, so if we don’t get it we can watch again later We can  make things like blogs, videos, podcasts and PowerPoints.

In face to face school we are all meant to have to be treated as individuals, but we are not, what I really like about virtual school is we have as much time as we want to do the work. I like to finish my work early in the day.

Q: What do you see are the worst things about virtual school?

I just don’t really see other kids as much as I want to. We have camps but sometimes it is a bit lonely. But I was bullied at face to face school and I prefer this….you could not bully anyone anyway here.

I think you need to be motivated yourself, it would be easy to not do the work, and then you get calls from your teacher…but sometimes I dont want to answer.

• 

OK so back to a story about school and education. I am neither a language teacher nor a polyglot but the promotion of teaching modern languages is something I feel passionately about. Whether we are talking about the various CLIL partner teachers I have worked with from Albacete, Montarnaud, Mielec or Pivka, whether it the amazing students I have had the honour to work with, these young men and women from IES Leonardo da Vinci, from Castricum, Moreni, Edirne, Adana or Podrute…. have all left me awed and humbled with their eloquence in English. It is a never ending source of shame for me the unwillingness my countryman have for speaking another language. Yet whenever we take young people to Poland or Croatia, to Norway or Netherlands they demonstrate an enthusiasm to speak another language that somehow our education system succeeds in driving from them.

I recall a group of English boys in the south of France when confronted by glamorous French girls being frustrated because their knowledge of French allowed them to ask Pierre “if he was going to the youth club on Saturday night after playing football” but somehow prohibited them with the language skills needed to outrageously flirt with their new friends.

And so I was excited to visit the Victoria School of Languages, how many languages do they offer? 48 languages….48 languages offered to the students…I had not even heard of some of them ….Mizo, Chin Falam, Karen? Not only where these offered but the school had students wanting to study them, they created their own text book. I photographed the Croatian book, only because my friend Valerija is from Samobor near Zagreb and I wanted to show her that her mother tongue is taught here.

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The Victorian School of Languages is a government school committed to the provision of language programs for students in Years 1 to 12 who do not have access to the study of those languages in their mainstream schools. The school’s languages program is delivered through both face-to-face teaching in centres across the state and through distance education mode.

The VSL operates within government policies and priorities and is committed to assisting the Victorian school system meet the languages participation targets set by the government. 

Students are drawn from the 3 school sectors. The VSL also caters for International Students and a small number of Adults. The school is the largest single VCE language provider with over 3,500 VCE students. For many languages of low candidature, the VSL is the only provider through to VCE level.

The VSL has a School Council which meets monthly and provides broadly based guidance and leadership to the school. It includes representatives form the Ethnic Communities Council, Independent and Catholic Schools as well as the Tertiary Sector.

Overall staffing arrangements and curriculum and administrative services are co-ordinated from the VSL Head Office where the Principal and Assistant Principals are situated. The senior administration comprises Principal Class and Area Managers (Leading Teachers). The Distance Education section is staffed by full time teachers and some casual staff and is housed at Head Office.

Generally the VSL provides classes for school age students at the same level as they are in at their regular school. However due to pressure of numbers some multi-level classes need to be organised, particularly in the smaller languages. The VSL has developed curriculum materials to suit such teaching needs and offers professional development to the teachers.

The majority of languages can be studied from primary level through to VCE.