Wednesday, December 07, 2005

BRITISH SCHOOLS REDISCOVER INTELLIGENCE

National talent search is being planned to track the brightest 150,000 children through school and into top universities. Thirty thousand children will be invited each year to join the Government's National Academy of Gifted and Talented Youth, using results from primary school tests taken by 11-year-olds. The initiative comes as teachers were accused of being ideologically opposed to singling out gifted children for special help after it emerged that 40 per cent of secondary schools had never recommended any child to attend the academy.

The talent search is certain to anger Labour MPs, who are already threatening to rebel against Tony Blair's education White Paper over what they see as plans to introduce back-door selection to secondary schools. Members of the Russell Group of leading universities would be given the names of pupils who were members of the academy so that they could recruit them to degree courses. Advocates say that this would end the imbalance at Oxford, Cambridge and other elite universities between students from state and fee-paying schools. Critics will see it as a renewed attempt at social engineering by giving state students a head start in the race for university places.

The initiative comes after The Times published research by Professor David Jesson, of the University of York, who found that the brightest 5 per cent students were only half as likely to achieve three A grades at A level in state schools as in the fee-paying sector.

Under the new scheme, promising children in state schools would be tracked from the age of 11 and those who fulfil their academic promise in GCSE examinations at 16 would be approached by admissions officers from Russell Group universities in their first year of sixth form. Officials at the academy, which is based at the University of Warwick, are in discussions about the scheme with the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (SSAT) and the Department for Education and Skills. They expect to recruit the first children under the scheme in September.

Until now, the academy has relied on teachers at individual secondary schools to recommend candidates for its "gifted and talented" programme from the most able 5 per cent of pupils. But official figures released to Nick Gibb, the Shadow Education Minister, last month showed huge variations in the willingness of schools to identify bright children. Teachers in 40 per cent of schools have failed to nominate a single pupil since the academy opened in 2002.

Sir Cyril Taylor, the chairman of the SSAT, said that the brightest 11-year-olds would be identified from their scores in national curriculum tests of English and mathematics. Secondary schools would also use non-verbal reasoning tests to confirm the abilities of pupils and to identify any whose potential had not been spotted from the national curriculum exams. Staff at the academy would then contact the children and their parents to invite them to enrol. "There is a commitment in the White Paper for a national talent search using the scores in English and maths and we are going to do it," Sir Cyril said. "The people at Warwick have agreed that, instead of relying on teacher recommendations, they will get 30,000 names of 11-year-olds each year."

This would build over five years to a national register of the country's most gifted 150,000 children aged 11 to 16, whose talents would be nurtured through regular summer schools, short courses and other activities.

Sir Cyril said that children who fulfilled their potential by passing at least seven GCSEs with A* and A grades at age 16 could be identified to Russell Group universities. Admissions tutors could then approach the teenagers to encourage them to apply for places, pointing out to those from poorer families that bursaries and other financial aid was available. "The Russell Group are saying, `give us the names'," he said. " We can't think of a more effective way of getting very able children from comprehensive schools into the better universities."

Mr Gibb said that there was an "ideological opposition" among teachers in many schools towards singling out gifted children for help

Source






British buckpassing about teacher evaluation

What the jury did not hear were comments made by Sharif to a class of young children shortly after the attack on the Twin Towers. "Hands up everybody who has relatives in New York? Well, they're dead," she reportedly announced one morning, making an abrupt change from reading the form register and singing a few verses of All Things Bright and Beautiful. She also reportedly added: "I'm on Osama Bin Laden's team." The school at which she was teaching - Grampian primary - received numerous complaints from parents, and Select Education, the agency which had supplied Sharif, was told never to send the woman their way again.

She denied saying the words and the judge ruled them inadmissible, as being based on the uncorroborated evidence of young children.

We may not be certain of the exact words uttered by Sharif, but we know that she was ticked off and agreed her comments had been "inappropriate". One hopes she agrees it is wrong to exult in mass murder.

It is this business that bothers me. "Parveen's teaching ability has never been brought into question," Select Education said at the time. It hasn't? What precisely would it take a teacher to do in class for such suitability to be questioned then? "Um, that's a very good question," a chap from Select told me. "But we would have no option but to let her apply again if she wished to do so. We couldn't stop her. I mean, ha ha, you can imagine the difficulty we'd have stopping her, couldn't you? It's very delicate. It's a very thin line."

Yes, I understand all too well, I suspect: delicate, difficult, thin line, etc. Luckily, she has not applied to rejoin Select's books (she left two or three years ago). "In any case, final responsibility rests with the school," the chap remarked. But I wonder if it will say on her references "reprimanded for inappropriate comments about the massacre of thousands of innocent people on 9/11". Hands up everyone who thinks probably not.

Derby city council cannot stop her teaching, either. Sharif was never on the local education authority's list of supply teachers - but then she did not need to be in order to gain employment. "She came from an agency," the council told me. "We couldn't stop her teaching. It's up to the schools, really."

Poor schools. I'll bet they think that the deep vetting is done somewhere else and that it is not up to them. Can you imagine these institutions taking a similarly indulgent view if a teacher had championed paedophilia in the classroom? Or suggested that homosexuals were warped and deviant? Or announced that all Muslims should be banged up? Meanwhile, Sharif has expressed a wish to teach in, or even found, an Islamic school. I don't suppose anybody will be remotely inclined to stop her.

More here

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"


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