A truly British McEducation

I was recently surveying the latest rubrics in The Times’ appointments section and noted two public schools seeking what are effectively business development directors for their schools’ international expansion.  I guess I hadn’t realised that what had started as a trickle of ad hoc satellite schools in Thailand and China was quickly becoming a deluge in the Middle East and further afield.

Brighton College and Wellington College are two of the schools which have recently announced mass roll-outs of franchised operations.  Brighton College plans to open two schools in Abu Dhabi in 2011 and 2013, with others to follow in Oman, Jordan, Romania, Vietnam and India.  Wellington College has plans to open approximately 15 schools, beginning in China in 2011 and following with Malaysia, Qatar, Bahrain and India.  This is not a new phenomenon: Dulwich and Harrow have had franchises in China and Thailand for about a decade, while other public schools have created the odd satellite; Repton Dubai, Oxford High GDST in China, Haileybury-Almaty, Shrewsbury Bangkok and Bromsgrove Bangkok come immediately to mind.  Brighton and Wellington are fairly unique, however, in the scale of their planned operations.  Both are motivated by the franchise fees which will be used to fund bursary places and capital projects in the UK.

The franchising of a marketable British brand (or at least until A Levels are thoroughly discredited through grade inflation and curriculum dilution) outside the UK seems very sensible to me in light of the pressures imposed by the Charities Commission on independent charitable schools to provide “public benefit”.  After all, as I discussed in The public benefit that will cut out the middle classes, the absurd result of the Charities Commission’s guidance is that schools will feel compelled to offer more bursaries — bursaries which many do not have the endowments to fund.   The result?  Increasing fees for non-bursary pupils.  Taken to its absurd conclusion, this would result in most charitable schools having a polarised population of very poor and very rich pupils.  So taking cash from franchised operations to fund these places in the UK and hence preserving a broad economic spectrum of pupils seems eminently sensible.

The repatriation of profits to Britain may be morally questionable to some.  Soft imperialism has been a term that has been bandied about.  Frankly, I’m not too worried about that; the premise for the success of these franchises is that there is a stratum of the local foreign market which has the means to pay for a private British education and is more than willing to pay for it. Moreover, I have no doubt that the local population will soon wise up to the fact that they can replicate the British model on their own and squeeze the franchises out once the local market becomes better established.  This may be precipitated by the profit motive in the local market or perhaps by nationalist sentiment when locals realise that profits from the satellite schools are funding kids back in Britain rather than kids in New Delhi, Bangkok or Abu Dhabi.  I have no doubt that the consumers in these far-flung locations have the wealth and know-how to look out for themselves.  Many probably have incomes far in excess of the average parent of a public school child in England.  

This is precisely why I think the British public schools engaging in franchising or thinking about it should do so with caution.  With the exception of perhaps Harrow, very few of the public schools which are establishing satellites are household names abroad.  As much as many of the franchising schools like to think of themselves as major public schools (and let’s face it, most of them are not in this league), the cachet and hence pulling power of most public schools is not so great that they couldn’t be supplanted by generic locally-established British-modelled schools.  And when it sinks in that consumers are not really getting a Harrow, Dulwich, Repton or Wellington education but rather a knock-off co-branded education, the momentum for local home-grown competitors to the British satellite schools will grow considerably and threaten the viability of the satellite school model.

Franchising offers an opportunity to certain public schools to ensure that they can meet the public benefit requirement that the Charities Commission has imposed without increasing fees and alienating the middle classes.  If they want to take advantage of this they should do so quickly because it won’t take long for satellite school consumers to develop the expertise to establish their own home-grown schools which can give them as much, if not more, than any of our satellite schools can offer.  When that happens, the franchisor schools will find their franchise fees dry up and perhaps, if they’re unlucky, they’ll even find they’ve received little return on their investment. and perhaps seen their most valuable asset — their name and reputation — highly devalued. At that point, selling a birthright for a mess of potage comes to mind, and that cannot be a good thing for any school.

The primary curriculum report: Sir Jim Rose has goofed this time

 In January, I reported my views on Sir Jim Rose’s interim report on the primary curriculum in The 3Rs…or chocolate? The Rose Report says you can have your cake and eat it too!  I defended Sir Jim then, particularly against accusations that he was planning to get rid of subjects in favour of silly themes such as “chocolate” which might have touched on science, history, geography and even modern languages. Sir Jim this week tabled his final report. In it, he set out the tripartite core of the new primary curriculum: literacy, numeracy and [drumroll]….ICT.  Wait!  Are you sure you got that right, Snowdon?  Did you read that correctly? Surely other subjects would come far ahead of ICT — science perhaps, or  modern languages or geography or history?

Sir Jim couldn’t be clearer. ICT has pride of place alongside literacy and numeracy as “foundational knowledge, skills and understanding of the primary curriculum”. No one will dispute the importance of English language skills and mathematical acumen at a time when even relatively few university graduates seem to possess the knowledge and skills necessary to write a coherent business letter or perform simple computations such as the percentage change between two numbers.  The prominence of ICT as a pillar of primary education, however, can only mean less time spent on literacy and numeracy and less time exposing children to subjects which they might not otherwise encounter and which benefit greatly from good teaching.  According to the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement’s Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study in 2007, 95% of Year 5 children in England had a computer at home and 86% had internet access at home.  My guess is that most of these kids have the means and interest in computers to figure this stuff out outside of the classroom.  My further guess is that they know more about ICT than Sir Jim himself.  But science? French? Latin? History? Geography?  I bet very few of  the same children have the inclination and the means to learn these other subjects in the same way on their own.  I’ll put money on even fewer developing a lifelong interest in these subjects without a great teacher to spark the initial excitement.

I defended you in January, Sir Jim, but this time you’ve really goofed.

Coming to a school near you…ContactPoint, the national kiddie database

This week’s backpedalling by the government on the communications superdatabase came as a relief.  But Snowdon won’t be celebrating.  Information on every phone call, email and website visit will still be stored — just separately, rather than together (as the superdatabase would have done.)  Moreover, the national ID card database is still moving forward and, significantly for the readers of Snowdon on Schools, ContactPoint, the national children’s database collating information from the NHS, social workers, the police, schools and other agencies, is still chugging along.

ContactPoint was rooted in the recommendations made by Lord Laming in his 2003 report following the Victoria Climbie inquiry.  That report pointed to the necessity of a national information system given that many children access services in different local authority areas or move between areas.  That recommendation led to the adoption in 2007 of the Information Database (England) Regulations which gave birth formally to ContactPoint.  This all sounds very laudable, but as unfortunate as the cases of Victoria Climbie and more recently Baby P, were, the privacy and security risks to every child under the age of 18 (and some over the age of 18) just do not justify the possible benefits that ContactPoint was intended to bring. 

The centralisation of so much information is bound to cause discomfort to anyone who has even a GCSE knowledge of the goings-on in Germany circa 1939.

But it’s not just the centralisation of information that is frightening, it is also the number of people who have access to that information.  It has been estimated that approximately 330,000-480,000 individuals could legitimately access the ContactPoint database of the country’s 11 million under-18 year olds (plus a few over that age).  Those who can access ContactPoint  include NHS personnel, the police, social workers, school principals, deputy heads, heads of years at schools, and teachers with pastoral duties — in other words, an already potentially large set of  busybodies or persons with malicious intent who happen to wear the necessary badge.  It also includes several others such as “voluntary groups” and “administrators” at schools.  What are “administrators”? Can any nosy parker who happens to be an employee at a school call himself an “administrator” and gain access to children’s files? There is something chilling about the ill-circumscribed list of those having access and its very size, even where “security vetting” (whatever that is) has been promised. 

User names, passwords, security tokens and PINs (the hallmarks of ContactPoint security) are common in most workplaces —- but are often abused through sharing and disclosure. I have worked in several businesses where secrecy should have been the norm, but where confidential documents sat on scanners for any and all to see or in recycling boxes or rubbish bins (rather than being shredded) or where sensitive phone calls were conducted in airport lounges or on trains for anyone to overhear.  And the fact that ContactPoint will log all those who access files is meaningless if no one regularly checks every child’s access log to see who has been accessing the information without a justifiable reason.   It is human nature to be sloppy with processes; witness the MI6 agent who kept unencrypted top secret information on a USB stick which was subsequently stolen or Scotland Yard Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick’s appearance with a document stamped “top secret” under his arm for all to read when a photo was subsequently published on the web.  Remember also our child benefit details which are also circulating somewhere thanks to an inability to follow procedures somewhere along the line as well.

The fact that the information on ContactPoint may be downloaded remotely is also alarming.  The government assures us that users cannot download child data onto a desktop or removable media (such as a memory stick).  This is not terribly convincing.  Again, I have worked in environments with significant security concerns which have purported to have similar restrictions in place; I have found them to be susceptible to circumvention.  Moreover, it matters little how information is disseminated, whether on a memory stick, a photo from a camera-equipped mobile, or through transcription or verbal transmission of information; the result is the same: a potential violation of a child’s privacy and the potential to put a child at risk.  With up to 480,000 persons having access to the database, we have to assume that there are a few who might themselves pose threats to children. On this basis, I have visions of  people remotely accessing ContactPoint from home,  joined by their paedophile network in the same room or via computer link and no one to potentially report suspicions. On a less salacious level, I still abhor the idea of a gaggle of teachers sitting around the common room taking in the fact that little Johnny’s primary physician is a psychiatrist  while one of teenager Mary’s doctors is an obstetrician who is well-known to specialise in teenage pregnancies.  No nosy parker needs case notes to draw a few conclusions worthy of spreadable gossip.  If the full implementation of ContactPoint goes ahead, parents should make regular requests for information under the data protection laws to monitor exactly what is held on their children and, by extension, on them.

Finally, although the database is ostensibly for the protection of children, it is disturbing that children’s details will not be erased when they turn 18 (or 25 for those who stay on until then.)  The government hasn’t even pretended that the files will be erased when a child reaches adulthood.  The regulation is clear: they are “archived”.