Tag Archives: Inequality in Education

Celebrate Science Week in 2019

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British Science Week 2019 - image and web link
British Science Week 2019

The application process for grants to support British Science Week in 2019 is still open.

British Science Week will next take place between 8th-17th March, 2019.

The application process involves thematic grants for school, community groups and one for the British Science Association branches. You can see the detail for each sectoral award below…

The deadline for applications is 5pm, 12 November 2018.

Kick Start Grants

This scheme offers grants for schools in challenging circumstances to organise their own events as part of British Science Week. There are three options available:

  • Kick Start grant: A grant of £300 for your school to run an activity
  • Kick Start More grant: A grant of £700 for your school to host a science event or activity which involves your students and the local community.
  • Kick Start Youth grant: A grant of £150 for your school to run an activity during British Science Week organised by students.

Community Grants

This scheme offers £500 to £1000 grants for community groups that work directly with audiences who are traditionally under-represented and currently not engaged in science activity. Our definition of groups that are underrepresented in science includes:

  • people who are Black Asian Minority Ethnic (BAME)
  • people with low socio-economic status (SES), including people disadvantaged in terms of education and income
  • young people facing adversity, including those not in education, employment or training (NEET)
  • people with a disability, defined as a physical or mental impairment that has a substantial and long-term effect on someone’s ability to do normal daily activities (Equalities Act 2010)
  • people living in a remote and rural location, defined as settlements of less than 10,000 people
  • girls and women

BSW Grants for BSA branches

This scheme offers up to £500 of funding for British Science Association branches to take part in our national celebration by running local events during British Science Week.

This scheme is open to BSA volunteer branches only.

Source: https://www.britishscienceweek.org/about-us/grants/

You can find the on-line grant application pages here.

If you do apply, the best of luck from the Inequality in Ed team!

Turning the tide – making a difference

Gender Equality in Education and The Workplace

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The Open College Network in Australia have recently produced an interesting timeline for the development of access to the world of work by Australian women.

 A long Australian history of success, but qualified…

 

“Australian women are among the most highly educated in the world, yet their participation in paid work remains comparatively low.” Elizabeth Broderick, Sex  Discrimination Commissioner (2007 – 2015). This beginning to the time-line is an illustration of how, even when progress has journeyed so far over time, that there is so much travel left to achieve.

Source:  http://www.opencolleges.edu.au/careers/gender-equality (accessed: 19.07.2017)

Despite Bella Guerin becoming the first Australian woman to achieve a Batchelor of Arts degree, in 1883, we can still read  at the end of the Open College timeline that, in OECD analysis, that the full-time weekly wage for a woman is 17.5% less than a man’s.

We liked the presentation and the easy readability of the content, although there is enough referenced content to satisfy the Australian gender historian too.

See more here – http://www.opencolleges.edu.au/careers/gender-equality

In 2017 the Australian Government – Department of Women published a full report, for the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW61).

Report cover image and web link
View, print or download a pdf copy of the Commission report here.

In it, Kate Jenkins the new Australian Sex Discrimination Commissioner, maps the topography of contemporary Australia in the context of women’s gender equality.

Sharing  ‘…Australian successes and challenges and gained insights on increasing women’s economic participation, including through: equal pay; reducing gender-segregated industries and workplaces; recognising and valuing unpaid work; improving data collection and working alongside men to achieve gender equality’.

There is a very useful reflection on the developing status of Australian Indigenous Women, tempered by the highlighting of continued and persistent risk of violence and discrimination to Australian women in rural areas, as a general finding.

The report of proceedings we also found useful as a research guide to Australian civil society actors, interested in gender equality, which we may not have discovered from this distance.

Our verdict after digesting the sources above? The Australian gender equality journey is one with much success to report, but which continues to highlight a burgeoning equality gap for the Australian woman.

Inequality, like poverty, is a policy choice. Governments, wherever they are, need to do better on this evidence.

Turning the tide – making a difference

 

 

 

Where do all the students go?

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International student migration research
update: What do international students do
after their studies?      Office for National Statistics (ONS)

The conclusions and development plans for data analysis in this ONS paper are based upon two prevous publications.

Long-Term International Migration: International student migration – what do the statistics tell us? https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/articles/longterminternationalmigration/internationalstudentmigrationwhatdothestatisticstellus

Update on international student migration statistics: November 2016
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/articles/updateoninternationalstudentmigrationstatistics/november2016

 

Latest ONS provisional figures show that in the year ending September 2016:

a. long-term immigration to the UK was 596,000 and long-term emigration was 323,000        b. net migration was therefore 273,000
c. long-term immigration for study was 126,000 (87,000 were non-EU nationals)
d. long-term emigration for former students was 62,000 (41,000 were non-EU nationals)

View, print or download this short ONS paper here…(pdf)

The ONS comments therefore ‘...if all international students emigrated from the UK after their studies and immigration for study was remaining at similar levels, then we’d expect the immigration and emigration figures to be similar‘. There is therfore pressure to examine the statistical differences revealed.

This progressive analysis has revealed that, in the government domain, there exists no single data resource that can answer the question ‘…what do students do after their studies if so few are emigrating?‘

Statistics on changes in migrants’ visa and leave status: 2015/ The Migrant Journey offers some analysis and distinct points of reference for those interested in how students, post study, change there immigrant status. See https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/statistics-on-changes-in-migrants-visa-and-leave-status-2015/statistics-on-changes-in-migrants-visa-and-leave-status-2015

For illustrative puposes only ONS have provided the following table, highighting some of the outcomes for students and indicating where absent data collection process may inhibit fuller analysis.

Download the core data for this paper as an Excel Spreadsheet file here.

Turning the tide – making a difference

The Right to Education

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 The University of Glasgow – a ‘mooc’ point in the making…

 

Glasgow University have a new massive, open on-line course (MOOC) under way, courtesy of the FutureLearn network. It seeks to engage educators, adult learners and those broadly interested in the countering of inequity in the provision of education.

Entitled The Right to Education: Breaking down the barriers, there is much to support the aims of IETT within its modules. Particularly useful is the course delivery of international perspectives from educators, policy makers and other contributors to the on-line debate  around the globe.

The work of the Univerity lead educator, Dr Margaret Sutherland (Senior Lecturer: Social Justice, Place, and Lifelong Education), and her team, delivers this pan-global perspective to help contexualise the relative educational  riches and the deficits whch we enjoy in the UK.

The Unesco Education for All programme had promised that all children would have access to school by 2015. This progress had halted by 2008, as can be seen from the UNESCO video below…

Today there are, it is estimated, some fifty eight million children not in school. That is one in ten of all children who are denied access to schooling, with that earlier target of universality extended now to 2030.

Half the educationally deprived children live in sub-Saharan Africa. They are predominantly poor, female, already at work whilst young or are excluded by a disability. The supply side of the educational equation has equal paucity, as some 27 million teachers will be needed, it is estimated, to fill a new full demand by 2030.

So we are able to see that, despite the constraints and inequalities, both social and economic, that dog education in the UK, in the global, aggregate view conflict, caste, faith and gender can all drag a child away from life affirming educational experiences.

You can take a look at the brief programme details here, or you can register with FutureLearn to be notified when the next iteration of the course from The University of Glasgow is available. See more here.

On this evidence, there is by 2030, perhaps, still much for all of us to do globally?

Turning the tide – making a difference

 

Forty Years On – Callaghan and education

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Prime Minister James Callaghan made a speech to an audience at Ruskin College in Oxford on the 18th October, 1976. A speech that, some would argue, launched the Great Debate about education.

James Callaghan - Prime Minister image
See his biography on Wikipedia…

Certainly some of the issues and challenges, that James Callaghan raised that day at Ruskin College, remain as pertinent and telling as ever today. Callaghan emphatically stressed, in his speech, the value of the Trade Union movement, not a view often embraced by a Prime Minister today for sure, but also lucidly saw children as delivering an endowment for a future society.

Speaking on that day in 1976, a detailed reading of the full text saw Callaghan giving long credit to Trade Union education energy, highlighting the role that unions and social activists play in energising human capital, often sailing against the pre-dominant elitist and exclusive educational cultural wind.

Callaghan saw the wide and emphatically important debate abroad in the country in his time about the economy, political or otherwise, but ventured to say ‘…not as important in the long run as preparing future generations for life. RH Tawney, from whom I derived a great deal of my thinking years ago, wrote that the endowment of our children is the most precious of the natural resources of this community. So I do not hesitate to discuss how these endowments should be nurtured‘.

Source: ‘A rational debate based on the facts’ James Callaghan, Ruskin College Oxford,
18th October 1976 (Full text) – http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/speeches/1976ruskin.html

Fiona Millar, writing in The Guardian in December 2016, has revisited the 1976 Callaghan postulation and has teased out many facets of the Callaghan analysis that often leaves the contemporary liberal, educated, education-aware reader in despair, when education is viewed down the long telescope of history.

‘Do we have a curriculum that promotes basic standards while allowing a child’s personality to “flower in its fullest possible way” as Callaghan put it?’

‘Would he (Callaghan) have envisaged systems of oversight so fragmented and convoluted that some headteachers can become proprietors of small business empires from which they directly profit?’

‘Would Callaghan have wanted good heads and teachers suffocated by hyper-accountability, wrestling with what is best for their schools against what is best or their pupils, while the less scrupulous boost performance by weeding out the most challenging pupils?’

Millar has chosen a good time to revisit this educational clarion call from a Labour Prime Minister who, on a detailed reading of this speech, represents the gold standard of education analysis and is deserving of perhaps a kinder view from history than he was previously afforded.

Source: Forty years after the Ruskin speech, education needs another moment
Fiona Millar, The Guardian 13th December 2016 – https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/dec/13/ruskin-speech-education-jim-callaghan-reforms?CMP=share_btn_tw

The great debate continues, we would argue…we commend the Callaghan speech to you and we await our ‘Millarenian moment‘ too!

Turning the tide – making a difference

Computer Science Education Week

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This is Computer Science Education Week. Across the globe, and in the UK too, children and young people are taking part in the Hour of Code.

An attempt to harness fresh interest and excitement, as well as understanding, of the basics of web and code literacy. Important knowledge to have in the skills basket, as the world moves ever more closer to technology.

Whilst such initiatives do not address the core issue of access to this technology, for those who have a route to a point of contact with a keyboard, the enthusiasm is evident.

The lack of women entering STEM continues to be part of the science and education debate. That there are gender role-models for young wormen is celebrated in a recent on-line article from Microsoft.

‘17 for ’17: Microsoft researchers on what to expect in 2017 and 2027‘ – this article focuses on a recent OECD report on gender equality Where are Tomorrow’s Female Scientists? Despite the paucity of female scientists and engineers coming forward, Microsoft argue that with the right recruitment and professional development policies, companies can allow female science graduates to prosper…once the  engagement and recruitment hurdle has been crossed.

…women and girls who, while representing roughly 50 percent of the world’s population, account for less than 20 percent of computer science graduates in 34 OECD countries,

17 for 17 allows seventeen female computing professionals, from a variety of academic backgrounds and interests, the opportunity to express their vision of how the world of computing and code will change society by 2027.

Microsoft in Cambrdidge, UK has members of its team illustrating the future advances in biological computation, artificial intelligence and machine learning, human centred computing and accessibility, as well as security and privacy forecasts.

Despite some pessimism about the political landscape of education, it is always welcome to see gender affirmation and success in an often difficult,  male dominated arena.

The barriers may be coming down at last.

Best wishes to our readers for the forthcoming festive holiday…

Turning the tide - making a difference
Turning the tide – making a difference

Dollar Street, humanity on display!

Flotsam: Our occasional series of pieces about ideas and views from other places.

dollar street road sign image
Discover more here…

Dollar Street

We weren’t quite sure what to make of these web pages at first. Built by Gapminder in Sweden, they show two hundred and forty families, across forty six countries, and link a series of images of their possessions and homes to their average monthly income.

Was it voyeurism that made us uncomfortable? Was it the notion of ‘economic tourism’? Or simply the discomfort of being shown a stark reality, illustrating how individuals and families, often precariously, cling to hope, aspiration and dignity?

For the team at Gapminder the proposition for Dollar Street is clear. These are the facts and they should temper all discourse about the other – other people, communities and culture.

Was it our imaginations, or did the preponderance of families with incomes of less than five hundred dollars a month across the globe decline to smile in the photographs? Of course this could be a cultural thing, rather than a crude measure of some sort of economic level on an imagined ‘happiness index’.

However, the wealth of Creative Commons images on the site and the short biographies of the people photgraphed make for an interesting comparative study.

To counteract litanies of fear, prejudice and racism can be no small aim. Rendering global ignorance redundant by illuminating the world with facts. No small ambition for a small Swedish independent Foundation.

‘For the first time in human history reliable statistics exist. There’s data for almost every aspect of global development. The data shows a very different picture: a world where most things improve; a world that is not divided. People across cultures and religions make decisions based on universal human needs, which are easy to understand.

The fast population growth will soon be over. The total number of children in the world has stopped growing. The remaining population growth is an inevitable consequence of large generations born decades back.

We live in a globalized world, not only in terms of trade and migration. More people than ever care about global development! The world has never been less bad. Which doesn’t mean it’s perfect. The world is far from perfect’. Source: https://www.gapminder.org/about-gapminder/

Exploring Gapminder:

For teachers Gapminder has a proliferation of resources and toolkits available to explore the world through data.

Gapminder World offers access to a series of global trends and an on-line/off-line toolkit to explore them.  A teacher’s guide to 200 years of world developmental history and change. A Life Expectancy PowerPoint, with background information and a teacher’s guide.

Having wrangled with the intrusive nature of the Dollar Street image index, and having read the Gapminder mission statements, we felt their argument that the world is indeed ‘a better place’ to be much needed in troubled econo-social and educative times.

Explore the Gapminder site here and decide.

Turning the tide - making a difference
Turning the tide – making a difference

A matter of life and death?

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Flotsam: an occasional series of ideas from other places…

Bill Gates is in conversation with Nate Bowling,  the Washington State Teacher of the Year for 2016 in the US. In the dialogue, the teacher tells Bill Gates that for many students learning ‘…is a matter of life and death’.

“If my students are not successful in school, they end up in the prison-industrial complex.”

Source: https://www.gatesnotes.com/Education/A-Powerful-Conversation-with-Nate-Bowling Accessed: 26.08.2016

The conversation reveals that in the US public school system, half the students enrolled live in poverty. With more than 70 percent of students qualifying for ‘…free or reduced price meals’.

In a separate publication Nate Bowling had published a blog article which has garnered a lot of attention. In it he declares that ‘…America does not care what happens to poor people and most black people‘. The article, entitled The Conversation I’m Tired of not Having, Mr. Bowling goes on to decry the lack of simple political will, in the US,  to effect change and re-balance equity in educational opportunity and achievement.

‘Polite society has walled itself off and policymakers are largely indifferent. Better funding for schools is and will remain elusive, because middle class and wealthy people have been conditioned over the last 35 years to think of themselves as taxpayers, rather than citizens’.

Source:  http://www.natebowling.com/a-teachers-evolving-mind/2016/1/24/the-conversation-im-tired-of-not-having     Accessed: 25.08.2016

In both the conversation with Bill Gates, and in his own article, Nate Bowling has some profoundly strong and supportive comments to make about teaching as a profession and the nature of the role his professional colleagues play, in the disenfranchised school system he works in.

The narrative has a strong resonance in the UK, with the laborious ebb and flow of educational policy, coupled to outcomes that continue to widen, not alleviate, the inequality gap for the many.

Bill Gates conversation with Nate Bowling originally appeared in Gates Notes. Nate Bowling’s reflection on teaching and the development of his profession originally appeared in natebowling.com .

Read both articles to get insights into the US public shool system from the perspective of a black teacher. It is interesting, and provocative, to those who would press for the continuance of the status-quo.

Turning the tide - making a difference
Turning the tide – making a difference

 

 

 

Meal ticket or reasonable personal allowance?

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Education as it should be…?

The Guardian have recently published an article on the rewards to be had for rising to the top of an Academy management tree.

Using the Freedom of Information Act, the newspaper has revealed the level of taxpayer money spent on salaries, meals out, travel in comfort, private health insurance and the use of leased luxury cars.

The article reveals the expense clams of a Midlands based chain Chief Executive, who whilst drawing a salary of £180,000 p.a. leases a top of the range Jaguar car and dines in Marco Pierre White restaurants. It is a deep irony that the samed named individual is quoted as explaining how education in the UK faces stringent financial challenges and is seeking to reduce his school chain costs by £500,000.

In total, The Guardian claims, some one million pounds of public money has been spent on executives pay in the last twelve months. This tally includes one chain Chief Executive of a Trust, drawing a salary of £195,354 a year, who claims for the wi-fi costs of her French holiday home.

The Chief Executive of one Trust, The Guardian reports, which runs 12 schools, pays its chief executive and founder, a total package of £225,000, while his wife receives £175,000 as executive principal and founder.

Of more concern is the issue of ‘related party transactions’. This is where Directors of Trusts use companies, with whom they have a ‘close relationship’, to charge for services to the Trusts they are responsible for.

It is difficult, from the continuing Guardian article, to see how the Education Funding Agency (EFA), the body charged with oversight of Academy finances can have the resources, time and attention to detail to adequately police this tide of public money.

‘Academy numbers have risen from 600 to 5,000…the EFA dealt with 125% more financial returns in 2014-2015 than the previous year, despite having 20% fewer staff…’

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/jul/23/education-academies-funding-expenses?CMP=share_btn_link          Accessed: 16.08.2016

We leave the last word to Head of Education at Unison, Jon Richards. “There are huge amounts of public money being shovelled around in the schools system, and unless the EFA ups its game, plenty of unscrupulous people out there will help themselves.”

You can read the full Guardian article here.

There is additional information on ‘related party transactions’ here.

Turning the tide - making a difference
Turning the tide – making a difference

Chain effects: ‘low-income’ learners

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The Sutton Trust have been tracking the progress and effectiveness of Academy chains since the inception of the Academy programme in 2000. Chain Effects 2015 is the latest updated report, superceding Chain effects 2014, which looks at questions of effectiveness and service to disadvantaged pupils.

chain effects Cover Pic
View, print or download this 2015 report here…pdf

The 2015 report tells a patchy story of delivery, and how  Ofsted inspection grades actually mark a level of achievement that falls below excellent in many cases.

The report notes that, in an analysis of all secondary schools and sponsored academies, the academies achieve lower inspection grades generally. As educational entitites they are twice as likely to fall below the ‘floor standard’.

The findings across the two reports (2014 and 2015) also make noteable the contrast between ‘the best and the worst’.

It is clear that there are exceptional achievements, where schools with high attainment levels for their disadvantaged pupils have improved faster than the average,  in terms of supporting disadvantaged children. However, those chains who did less well, achieved significantly worse outcomes that comparable schools, using baseline data for 2012 as a starting point for the analysis.

Where data has been captiured for pupils with low prior attainment, it is true that academy chains have been successful in ‘…significantly improving the attainment of this group, an important demonstration of value’.

Using a ‘range of government indicators‘ for attainment, it is clear that most academy chains still underperform their mainstream average ‘competitors’ in supporting disadvantaged pupils.

The report makes six main recommendations for improvement to inspection, process and delivery. They are…

  1. The DfE should expand its pool of school improvement providers beyond academy sponsors, including developing new school-led trusts and federations…
  2. New chains should not be allowed to expand until they have a track record of success in bringing about improvement…
  3. Ofsted has had its ability to inspect chains extended but these fall short of the formal powers they enjoy over academies individually and other education providers. Ofsted should be empowered to undertake formal inspections of academy chains…
  4. Agreements for new sponsors should be shortened to five years from seven. Renewal of funding agreements should only be granted where improvement has been demonstrated…
  5. The DfE should include a measure of progress for disadvantaged pupils in their definition of coasting schools…applicable to all schools…
  6. Sponsor chains, with a demostrable need to improve, should seek out successful practice and reflect on what their own chain could learn from this experience…

Source: The Sutton Trust  http://www.suttontrust.com/researcharchive/chain-effects-2015/  Accessed: 10.07.2016

In order to map progress across the broader educational landscape you can find the detail of Chain Effects 2014  here.

Turning the tide - making a difference
Turning the tide – making a difference