Research on cattle behaviour shows that they like to eat, stand and lie down at the same time as others
A British-American team of scientists has produced a study called A Mathematical Model for the Dynamics and Synchronisation of Cows. They were driven partly by the intellectual challenge, and at least a little by an EU council directive, which mandates "that cattle housed in groups should be given sufficient space so that they can all lie down simultaneously".
Their key insight, the team says, was to realise "it is biologically plausible to view [cattle] as oscillators … During the first stage (standing/feeding), they stand up to graze but they strongly prefer to lie down and 'ruminate' or chew the cud for the second stage (lying/ruminating). They thus oscillate between two stages."
The researchers "modelled the eating, lying and standing dynamics of a cow using a piecewise linear dynamical system … We chose a form of coupling based on cows having an increased desire to eat if they notice another cow eating and an increased desire to lie down if they notice another cow lying down." This, they say, led to at least one unexpected discovery: "[We] showed that it is possible for cows to synchronise less when the coupling is increased."
The researchers – Mason Porter and Marian Dawkins at Oxford University, and Jie Sun and Erik Bollt at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York – published their work recently in the physics journal Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena. In the 31-year history of that journal, this is the only article specifically about cows. (Cows do have an accepted, very humble place in the history of physics: an old joke, beloved by physicists and a few others. The joke starts (usually) with a physicist offering to solve a dairy-related problem for a desperate farmer. The physicist walks to a blackboard, and draws a circle. "First", he says, "we assume a spherical cow ...").
The team built upon the work of earlier, fully serious bovi-mathematical scholars.
In 1982, PFJ Benham of Reading University published an innovative study called Synchronisation of Behaviour in Grazing Cattle. Brennan studied a herd of 31 Friesian cows, recording the behaviour of each every five minutes during daylight for 15 days. His short paper – it's only two pages long – ends with the declaration: "Studies of behaviour synchronisation are evidently relevant to the management of grazing cattle."
Porter, Dawkins, Sun and Bollt also looked beyond the bounds of cow analysis, gaining insight from a 1991 monograph by AJ Rook and PD Penning of the AFRC Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research in Hurley, Maidenhead. Rook and Penning called their report Synchronisation of Eating, Ruminating and Idling Activity by Grazing Sheep, and published it in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science. They reached four conclusions. I will mention only one, as it has wide applicability: "Start of meals was more synchronised than end of meals."
Thanks to Ig Nobel prize winner Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan for bringing the cow synchronisation research to my attention.
• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize
The Guardian Teacher Network this week looks back to Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, the US naval base, with lots of resources to help pupils understand the reasons – and consequences
Seventy years ago tomorrow, Japan launched its attack on Pearl Harbor, the US naval base in Hawaii, with the loss of more than 2,400 lives.
The Guardian Teacher Network has a wealth of materials to help pupils investigate why the attack happened and what some of the consequences were, including the devastating atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
Battles of World War II – 1941 is a history lesson for KS3 that uses interactive questions, maps and photographs to explain the course of events before, during and after the attack. Pupils are encouraged to put themselves in the shoes of a newspaper editor to explore the American response to Pearl Harbor, and to ponder what they would usually be doing at 8am on a Sunday morning, the time of the attack.
For KS2, the lesson Asking Questions About the Second World War includes a timeline of events showing the attack on Pearl Harbor. For KS3 and KS4, Encyclopaedia Britannica has produced a set of four worksheets about the Second World War that are useful for studying the key events.
The attack on Pearl Harbor led directly to America's entry into the Second World War and this is explored in the KS3 lesson Battles of World War II – 1942-1945. Pupils examine the end of war in Europe, the escalation of war in the Pacific, the increasing role of Japanese kamikaze pilots, and the development of atomic weapons including the role of scientist Albert Einstein, a Jewish German.
The KS4 history lesson Second World War looks specifically at the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Using photographs from the Imperial War Museum and articles from the Guardian and Observer newspapers, pupils are asked to consider why Harry Truman, the US president, ordered the attacks, estimated to have caused around 200,000 deaths. Primary sources of information used in the lesson include an interview with a Hiroshima survivor who describes the death of her daughter from radiation sickness.
After Hiroshima, President Truman threatened "a rain of ruin from the air the like of which has never been seen on this earth" if Japan did not surrender. Details of the Nagasaki bombing three days later and Japan's subsequent capitulation are covered in this KS4 history lesson.
In March this year, following the devastating effects of a massive earthquake and tsunami, the Japanese prime minister, Naoto Can, said his country was facing "its biggest crisis since the Second World War". After the Wave is an English lesson that focuses on the aftermath of the disaster, with tips and ideas to help pupils write their own newspaper reports.
• The Guardian Teacher Network has more than 100,000 pages of lesson plans and interactive materials. To see and share for yourself go to teachers.guardian.co.uk. There are also hundreds of jobs on the site and schools can advertise for free on schoolsjobs.guardian.co.uk
A new report on truanting will make uncomfortable reading for the government. For some young people, truancy becomes a way of life, and punitive measures would make no difference
It's two o'clock on a damp Tuesday afternoon, and at the Huddersfield Central Youth Club a dozen teenage boys are knocking balls around on the pool tables. Above their heads, Hollyoaks is showing on a big wall-mounted television, and a few girls are staring at it intermittently from a slightly worn leather sofa; one of them languidly fiddling with the remote control, another with her phone.
Most of these teenagers have missed huge chunks of their schooling, and all of them have now been excluded from their mainstream schools. But their presence here today represents serious progress. This scene may look purposeless – a small group of boys are hanging round the front entrance, chatting with fizzy drink cans in their hands – but actually, this is authorised chill-out time after a full morning of learning to use spreadsheets and working on a project about "Life in the Wild".
"Sometimes I used to just lie in bed and think, 'Shall I get up today, or not?'" says Dominique St Hilaire, the girl with the remote control. "School just seemed to pull me down, and make me depressed."
Like all these teenagers, 15-year-old Dominique is now enrolled on a programme called Choices, run by the Rathbone charity as an alternative to mainstream school. And, along with several of her classmates, she has recently taken part in the first national survey of persistent truants, run by the charity. It asked 300 young people why they missed school and what types of intervention might have persuaded them to turn up regularly.
The results will make uncomfortable reading for the coalition government. This autumn, David Cameron announced that he had asked his social policy review, set up in the wake of the summer riots, to consider cutting the benefits of parents who fail to make their children go to school. But seven out of 10 respondents to Rathbone's survey said such measures would make no difference to them at all.
Just over half those surveyed said their parents were aware they were truanting, and just under half said their friends encouraged them to miss lessons. One fifth had been stopped by the police while truanting, and 55% had been excluded from school at some point. A quarter had missed school to care for a relative; many were coping with chaotic family backgrounds, and most with the sense that school just really wasn't for them.
Dominique, her thick hair partly dyed red and pulled back from her face, tends to look down when she talks, but underneath the awkwardness there's a spark about her. Her secondary school never gave her a chance, she says. With seven half-sisters, six half-brothers and a raft of cousins, some of whom weren't model pupils themselves, she thinks they just saw her coming; stamped her with the label that tends to get stuck on all the St Hilaires around here.
"They assumed I was just thick, and wouldn't get anywhere," she says. "Most of my brothers and sisters and cousins went there, and most of them missed school, too. Quite a few of them had ADHD. When you've got a name for skiving, if you ask for help they just tell you to get on with it."
In year 9, Dominique started skipping lessons; going out in the mornings as if she was going to school, but then ending up at a friend's house, or hanging out in the town centre. Then one of her half-brothers died, and her life went off the rails. She hated people at school asking her about it, she says. "My mum was always being called to meetings at the school. She didn't like it, but what could she say? She did it herself," Dominique says. Fines and court appearances were talked about, but she never believed in them: "I've never known it to happen. I didn't believe in it." And if her mother had had her benefits taken away? "I'd have said I was going to school, but I wouldn't have. Anyway, my dad gives my mum money."
At Rathbone, they do have procedures for dealing with persistent absence, and theoretically they could end in court – but in the decade the centre has been open that's never happened, according to its manager, Rechelle Boothroyd.
"You've got to understand the difficulty that parents have," she says. "They can't physically drag kids out of bed – they know they're within their rights to call child protection if they do that."
The main strategy here is to engage the children – about 30 of them at present – in a way their previous schools have usually failed to do. The basics are taught through projects and games, and lessons have been renamed "sessions" so the pupils won't have their usual negative reaction to them. And to a large extent, it works – the attendance here is 70%, which, while not brilliant, is a lot better than most of these pupils were managing elsewhere. The charity's survey found that more than half of persistent truants would skip school in order to miss specific lessons they didn't like – PE being the biggest turn-off, followed by maths.
But the major reason why young people miss school, according to Rathbone's spokesman Peter Gibson, is that it just doesn't seem relevant to them.
"We read a lot about how local authorities and the police are 'cracking down' on truants, but very little about what they're doing to prevent truancy in the first place. The number one reason our respondents gave was just 'I hate school'. We get a real sense of them not being in touch with the academic, and wanting to do practical things. They just don't think school's relevant to them."
Meanwhile, the rhetoric from politicians tends to go in the opposite direction. Cameron's suggestion that pupils should be forced into school by tougher sanctions on their parents is not a new one. It was first mooted by the Labour government in 2002, but was quietly dropped again.
The truth, as evidenced by the government's own official statistics on truancy, is that absenteeism, like so many educational ills, is closely linked to deprivation. Of those pupils defined as persistent absentees – that is, those who miss more than 15% of their education –more than a third are eligible for free school meals, one in seven do not have English as a first language and four out of 10 have special needs.
The Department for Education makes few concessions to these factors, though it does concede that pupils often miss school because they're falling behind. A spokeswoman for the DfE said it was up to parents, as well as schools, to clamp down on persistent absence: "Even one day missed from school without very good reason is one too many," she said.
"Parents must have a real stake in their child's education, and they need to face real consequences if their children continually skip school. That's why we're looking at whether we should cut the benefits of those parents whose children constantly play truant."
Rathbone's findings come as no surprise to headteachers, though. Joan McVittie, headteacher of Woodside high school in Haringey, north London, and also president of the Association of School and College Leaders, says the key is to ensure that school is interesting – and relevant – to pupils. Overall attendance at her school has risen from 87% in 1995 to 94% today.
"The key thing to do is to get yourself in a position where the children enjoy coming to school, where you make lessons not just interesting but fun, so they see the point of what they're learning," she says. "But we do recognise that there are some children who by the age of 15 have really outgrown school completely."
• This article was amended on 7 December to include a link to the Rathbone report, which was previously unavailable.
Katie Holmes, 15
"I was OK till year 8, but after that the teachers didn't respect me, so I'd swear at them and interrupt the class. If they sent me home, I wouldn't go back the next day. I used to wake up in the morning and think I just couldn't be bothered going to school. I think really I did it because I was trying to make myself look hard."
Josh Jessop-Woodhead, 15
"I've got dyslexia, and that's why I messed about and missed lessons, because I didn't know what I was doing. Mostly I used to miss geography because my teacher talked to me like I was an idiot. The school used to ring my mum and she'd shout at me. I just needed a bit more help."
Dominique St Hilaire, 15
"All my friends used to skive. Sometimes we'd go to school and go home at dinner time; sometimes we'd just not go at all. My mum used to tell me off about it, but she understood because she did that herself."
Academy chains swoop on failing schools, and the rich Oxford colleges that pay their 'scouts' poorly
Wild West in Kent
With just 14% of students achieving A*-C grades in English and maths, the Marlowe school in Ramsgate was among the worst-performing secondaries last year.
So it came as little surprise when its headteacher resigned in September. While his sudden departure quickly became common knowledge, the fact that the school is now in effect being run by one of the big academy chains has not been so well publicised.
The Academies Education Trust (AET), which sponsors 14 schools in England, has confirmed that it has been contracted by the Young People's Learning Agency (the government body that funds academies) to provide "a significant level" of support to the Marlowe academy for a full academic year – including the appointment of a new head and deputy head.
Yet there is no information about this partnership on either the AET or the school's website. In fact, it doesn't appear to be in the public domain at all.
According to one headteacher, who did not wish to be named, since the government announced it was raising floor targets (the minimum standard of attainment) for schools earlier this year, academy chains have been "lining up" to get business from failing schools.
"With higher targets, more schools are now at risk of failure. [The academy chains] are watching closely, ready to swoop in on vulnerable schools. It's like the Wild West out there."
The DfE made no comment at the time of going to press.
Looking out for Oxford scouts
It may be one of the wealthiest universities in the world, but an investigation by student journalists at Oxford has found many of its cleaning staff – or "scouts" – are hard-up and fed-up.
Oxford is one of the most expensive places to live in the country, but figures released under the Freedom of Information Act show that 15 of the 21 Oxford colleges that responded pay scouts less than the living wage of £7.20 an hour.
One of the worst offenders (and the richest colleges) is St John's, which, according to the Oxford Student's associate editor, Lizzie Porter, gives its students "free stuff galore", but pays its cleaners as little as £6.49 an hour. Porter is so outraged, she has launched a petition.
Reading the riot act
The former children's laureate, Michael Rosen, is not happy with the way reading is being taught in schools. Rosen says he recently received a letter from a teacher who claimed to have been "harassed" by an Ofsted inspector for running a "reading-for-pleasure" session during school time. Ofsted inspection guidance contains no mention of "books, provision of books, reading for pleasure or anything related," he says.
The poet claims that because the government is offering up to £3k a year of additional funding to schools following its approved teaching methods many classrooms now have only books from the government's synthetic phonics scheme. Says Rosen: "No one dares reveal that this is going on, but I've heard of many headteachers who no longer have 'real' books in their classrooms."
Jean Humphrys, of Ofsted, said: "Ofsted absolutely recognises and celebrates the importance of reading for pleasure … For children to get the most out of reading it is essential that they have the basic building blocks of reading skills. That is why we also emphasise the importance of systematic teaching of phonics. It is not a case of either or, but both."
• This article was amended on 9 December 2011. The original gave an incorrect figure for the Junior Common Room entertainment budget at St John's college. This has been removed.
Universities are becoming increasingly angry about the government's assault on academic values and its indifference to the social consequences, says Peter Scott
With most reforms, even the most controversial and contested, there finally comes a time for acceptance. But that time has not yet come for the government's plans to slash public funding and triple fees in higher education.
University managers have had no choice but to prepare for next September, setting fee levels and, for more than 20 institutions, re-setting them to come under the £7,500 threshold that allows them to reclaim some of the student places they have lost.
But the anger is not abating. Students, of course, have been supremely ungrateful from day one despite being placed at "the heart of the system" (to quote the white paper's title), although police tactics have curbed street protests. Now large sections of the academic community – from young researchers and lecturers to the stars of the profession – are finally waking up to the challenge posed by the government's reforms.
There have been three responses. The first is that there is no alternative. Labour started down the track of higher fees; the coalition is simply following. The state won't pay, so students must. Public expenditure has to be cut to reduce the deficit. Luckily, back-doors public funding via state loans to pay these higher fees can compensate higher education.
The second is that the initial proposals were unworkable. So what started out as privatisation is beginning to look more like nationalisation. Not only has the government frozen student numbers, it is now telling universities which categories of student they can freely admit. Far from fading into history, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce) is now to be the "lead" regulator.
The third is to regard the government's reforms as heralding the death of the university as a public and liberal institution. Key academic values are under attack, whether scholarship in the humanities or curiosity-driven science. So are key social values such as widening participation.
The first response has come from a largely craven university establishment. As a result, vice-chancellors risk joining bankers as objects of public disdain – even if their salaries are somewhat lower. The second response, interestingly, has come from the policy establishment, although those who work for Hefce and other agencies have been forced to use coded language to express their criticisms of government policy.
It is the third response that seems to be gathering force. No longer confined to the "usual suspects" such as the National Union of Students and the University and College Union, it is gradually becoming established as the dominant response among the academic rank-and-file and high-profile public intellectuals. Not so long ago, the much-despised "chattering classes" shared the politicians' low opinion of universities; now they are rallying to their defence.
The reasons for this deeply significant shift are various. One is the growing unpopularity of a government that, more clearly every day, has made a disastrously wrong call on the economy. A second is that people are beginning to join things up. Grimly, the fates of higher education and of the national health service are now seen as linked. Both are grand 20th-century social projects under neo-liberal fire.
A third, of course, is that the government's reforms are now better understood. Paradoxically, the more they unravel as workable solutions to the challenges facing universities in the post-crunch era, the more their ideological foundations are exposed. It is the illiberality and philistinism, reductionism and instrumentalism, which so offend the silent majority with higher aspirations and nobler ideals.
As a result, the contest is moving on to new ground. Very few people now expect these arrangements to produce an enduring settlement. In just over a year, the original proposals of the Browne committee have already been modified almost to death. Lots more "adjustments" are likely, sooner rather than later.
But it is the government's ideological assault on academic values, and its indifference to the social consequences of its policies, that have provoked the growing anger. Those who are attached to old academic habits and those who care deeply about higher education's social purpose have joined together in a strengthening opposition.
At a recent conference, the distinguished historian Keith Thomas called for the creation of a "society for the protection of English universities". The fact that such an organisation is now thought to be necessary shows how much the ground is shifting.
Headteachers are divided about the ethics of academy status. But how many now feel they have little choice?
In September 2010, 32 schools in England started term as shiny new "converter" academies. By the start of the 2011 academic year, there were 981, and by 1 December, a further 163 had made the switch.
Given that there are 20,000-odd schools in England that might not seem a lot. But the pace at which governing bodies in certain local authorities have decided to opt for academy status meant that by September, in 50 council areas, over a quarter of the secondary schools had already converted. More are in the process of doing so and more still are awaiting a decision as to whether they may. That has resulted in some headteachers feeling under great pressure to ditch their local authority maintained status, even if they have serious reservations about doing so. The question now being asked is: will a tipping point be reached, when heads feel they have no options left, and all the dominoes fall?
"I think [Michael] Gove has been incredibly clever to equate the new academies with 'outstanding', so outstanding schools were chasing the money and the kudos," says one headteacher.
There is a fear expressed by some heads that once a certain number of neighbouring schools have opted out, theirs could been seen as less attractive by parents. "We felt that with an increasing number of schools in Surrey that had converted or planned to, there was a potential tipping point being approached," says Alex Russell, headteacher at Epsom and Ewell high school, which made the switch at the start of this autumn term. "That raised concerns for us as to what centralised support would be in place once that had happened." Surrey has 53 secondary schools, of which around 30 have either converted or are considering the option.
In 23 local authority areas, over half of secondary schools had converted by September, but in a few – Warrington, Knowsley, Bury and Blackpool – not a single secondary had chosen to opt out. That has now changed, with only Blackpool secondaries still resisting academy conversion.
In London, some boroughs have no converter academies and others have several. Kate Frood, headteacher at Eleanor Palmer primary in Camden, says resistance to the policy is strong and she has "no sense of anyone being at tipping point yet".
"There is a real collegiality and commitment to our highly effective officers and supportive council and diocese, who have always prioritised schools funding," she says. "Issues such as SEN placements, exclusions and equity of building improvements are well managed and you get a sense that governing bodies genuinely work for the community of schools."
But, she adds, if one decides to switch, things could change. "As soon as some schools go, the worry is that they will inevitably become more selective or more attractive to parents and those left will become the poor relations – in terms of admissions and SEN overload, for example."
One head who won't countenance the idea is Elliott Furneaux. He leads the 'outstanding' Heathfield community school in Taunton, and for him, it's a question of doing right by the most vulnerable children in the area. "We feel we have a responsibility beyond our catchment," he says. "The governors felt from the start that for us, it was morally not possible to take a decision that massively advantaged us at the expense of others. And the overwhelming majority of teachers feel that the new system will not benefit vulnerable children."
And if his governing body felt at some future point that resistance was futile? "I would resign at that point," says Furneaux, "because you can't lead something convincingly that you don't believe in."
Another secondary head at a school in West Yorkshire says: "I fervently hope that we don't reach a tipping point." After "a huge amount of thought" he and his chair of governors are likely to recommend no conversion for the coming year, "but should the local picture change to leave a 'rump' of maintained schools, and particularly if our closest 'competitor' were to convert, it would be difficult to resist."
If schools feel under pressure to convert without being expert and stable enough to manage their additional responsibilities, it could be a disaster for pupils, staff and community alike, he points out. Not all schools – even good ones – have the capacity to employ staff, run buildings and manage their finances. Of course, there's extra money to buy in support from private providers, but the Department for Education has made it plain that the enormous sums dished out in the early days of academy conversions are no longer on offer.
All the same, it seems some schools are so desperate to avoid the cuts that they are converting to academy status simply in order to get their hands on the pooled element of funding that is "given back" to them from the local authority pot.
In a survey of 1,471 schools earlier this year by the Association of School and College Leaders, 72% of those planning academy conversion said they were doing so to avoid budget cuts. Admitting as much has caused uproar; at the comprehensive Prince Henry's grammar in Otley, near Leeds, teachers have taken repeated strike action and half the governors have resigned in protest at plans to become an academy, which even supporters acknowledge is primarily for financial reasons.
At St Dominic's primary school in South Woodchester, the headteacher, Margaret Smith, says that she was only persuaded of the merits of conversion because of the opportunity to forge stronger links with a big Catholic secondary in nearby Gloucester, St Peter's, which was was also going for academy status.
Smith makes the point that in Gloucestershire, "an awful lot of the schools have already gone". She's right – approaching two thirds of the county's secondaries have converted – and they've taken a large proportion of the collective pot with them. With yet another big secondary school about to make the switch, Smith was concerned at the future funding for her small rural primary, particularly given that Gloucestershire may soon operate "needs-led" funding. This means that St Dominic's could face cuts: a significant benefit of becoming an academy will be that Smith is allowed to carry forward more than the 8% of any unspent budget she's currently permitted to retain. That simple fact means she can now guarantee the school's staffing levels for the next three years.
Philosophically, however, says Smith, this was "not the way I'd have wanted to go, because I think the local authority was the sensible way of sharing the money. I've always had high regard for the county, they've always been very good to us, and we will still be buying in their services."
If schools are looking to their local authorities to give them reasons to resist the pressure to convert, however, it seems they may not get them. "At no time has the local authority come banging saying if you don't go, we'll do this, this and this to help you," comments one headteacher. "There's a resignation towards it. There's a feeling of 'where's the leadership from the local authority?'"
Despite reservations, he chose to recommend academy status for his school, and says he sees undoubted benefits. But he worries greatly about what safeguards exist to ensure the new academies maintain support for the most vulnerable children.
In public, he says, he now has to champion academy status and make it work for his pupils. "But privately," he says, "many of my colleagues feel that this is driven by central government dogma, and we have no alternative but to comply."
Mary O'Hara meets a Cambridge historian who is among the government's fiercest academic critics
Simon Szreter has much to say on many subjects, but when making a point he regards as significant, the Cambridge historian and higher education activist doesn't waste a word. "Its not possible yet to buy your way into the Russell Group universities – you still have to do extremely well in exams. But it is possible of course to [get an] extremely well resourced education and hope that does the trick."
Szreter is recollecting a time in the early 1990s when he was conducting research on how the UK's long-term economic performance is shaped by factors such as the education of its workforce. While "fishing around" for measures of investment in education, he stumbled across data showing that there had been "an enormous disinvestment" in state schools, with tens of thousands of teachers laid off during the 1980s.
"I wasn't aware that this had happened," he says. "Then I looked at the private schools and that's when I got … angry about this, because I realised that actually the private schools had been going in the opposite direction. By the time Labour took power in '97, it was true that private schools had almost exactly twice the numbers of teachers per pupil in their staff rooms as state schools had. They always had an advantage, but this advantage had now doubled. That's never been revisited," he adds.
It is over a decade since the research, but that it galvanised Szreter to dig deeper into the education system is unmistakable. In the years since, he has, among other things, made his way to a professorship and founded the History and Policy website, an initiative designed to inject greater historical insight into policymaking, but it is his forays into education activism that have set him apart.
Szreter, based at St. John's College, Cambridge, has emerged as a leading light among academics protesting against the coalition government's higher education policy and, in particular, the controversial trebling of tuition fees. As a co-author of the "alternative white paper" earlier this year, he was pivotal in publicly articulating a series of pointed criticisms of current policy, namely what many regard as the privatisation of higher education by transferring the cost of funding from the public purse. In a newspaper article, he stridently disputed claims that tight public finances are a justification for cuts by drawing heavily and convincingly on historical precedent.
"Despite a postwar austerity far harsher than the one we face today – and a level of national debt over twice as high – the nation found the resources to massively expand and publicly fund its secondary schools and their teaching staff."
Since the financial crisis of 2008, he has become noticeably more outspoken, accusing the coalition of "paying for the profligacy of the banks" while systematically undermining higher education by radically withdrawing public funds, and of "cutting at both ends" the state primary and secondary education sector by abolishing the EMA [education maintenance allowance] for 16- to 18-year-olds and closing Sure Start for infants.
"The big story," he insists, "is undoubtedly higher education and further education". The raising of university fees may be a clear focal point for protest, but what seems to exercise him most is what underlies it: the long-term shift from financing higher education directly out of general taxation towards raising funds via "risky" private finance.
"There have been 20 years in which governments have very happily expanded the higher education and further education sector rapidly … but they have put nothing like commensurate resources into the system," he says. The corresponding "managerial revolution", which encouraged universities to be more corporate and show they are offering value for money, has starved it of essential resources, he argues.
But it is the over-reliance by successive governments on structuring student loans through "complex financial instruments" that could prove most devastating for the future of higher education, he says, and it is this that people need to pay attention to. Talking about the fallout of the financial crisis, he says emphatically: "We are not even over this [crisis] and the government is already quite happily talking about packaging up our younger generation's futures into a set of complicated loan instruments that it will place with the very sector of the economy that's caused all this."
This is all the more critical, he suggests, in the context of government ministers drafting radical policies based on what he believes to be ill-thought-through, "flimsy" consultations. He is particularly scathing of the "feeble" higher education white paper and the Browne review on tuition fees. "They don't have reasoning in them. They don't have evidence of any compelling nature in them. They have assertion and belief. It isn't just scary, it's fundamentally undemocratic, it's fundamentally dishonest and its unworthy of any government to be legislating on these kinds of documents because it hasn't taken the trouble to consult. It's acting as if it knows the answers in a very brazen way."
He reserves particular ire for the way in which the coalition government apparently calculated the projected average annual fees students would have to pay (£7,500 as opposed to the top fee rate of £9,000, which the majority of institutions originally opted for). Referring to a recent interview with the universities minister, David Willetts, in this paper during which the minister failed to explain the calculations, Szreter says: "[It is a] dreadful hypocrisy that Willetts can casually acknowledge that, with all the analytical fire-power of a government department of specialists including economists at his disposal, that he took some kind of punter's guess at the fee levels to set." Not mincing his words, he adds: "Breathtaking irresponsibility, moral vacuosity and, given his attempt to portray himself as a bleeding heart for The Pinch generation, a rank hypocrite."
If students and a few academics have been at the forefront of protests, when it comes to how universities have responded to government policy, Szreter believes they have been slow to fully grasp the ramifications of recent policy – although he thinks this is changing.
"I think the university world can look to itself and take some responsibility for having become a little too disconnected [from] ordinary people's cares and worries and with what is going on in the economy. I think it is now waking up to the fact that it has to engage with this because its own institutions and ways of doing things are being very severely put under pressure. I think it's correct that academics have only finally, in this last 12 months, woken up to what has been an extremely gradual process."
He insists he feels supported by his university and has never felt pressured to back off from protesting. When it comes to individual academics, he says many are largely ignorant of the true nature of the challenges, which might explain the lack of a groundswell of activists. "To be brutally honest, I think it's still the case that most colleagues don't really know much about this. After all, most academics are fairly obsessed with their own research subjects and they're busy with their teaching. You've got to invest a lot of time to find out what's going on. I think most colleagues are probably at least concerned if not very well informed."
Szreter is perhaps at his most passionate talking about student activists with whom he is undeniably closely aligned. He was on the London march in November last year when thousands of students were subjected to kettling and saw first-hand what he regards as police intimidation. "You had government ministers talking about how we supported the protesters in Cairo and how we were standing at one with them, but we might have to use water canon on our own students. The naked hypocrisy of it is just unbelievable."
He says it was "a very heartening experience" to be alongside students in Cambridge during an occupation in November 2010 of the university's Senate House. "They were asking me to wear my academic gown, because they said it made them feel more secure that some of the senior members of the university were there in a supporting role. In some ways, I thought it was the first time my academic gown had served a really useful purpose."
So what, if anything, will actually halt the current policy juggernaut? Szreter says there is a need to keep arguing and to "use reason and evidence" to highlight what's wrong and to make recommendations for how it can be fixed. Ever the historian, he points to the fact that in the past, momentous progressive changes to the education system – such as the provision of universal secondary education – were brought about despite ideological objections or cost.
Coming back to the spectre of fee hikes and private finance, he says the danger is that universities will lose their role in society as places of critical thought, instead becoming more like "sausage factories" churning out unquestioning people to meet the demands of the market. He concludes with an enigmatic reference to a blockbuster movie where citizens are oblivious to the reality they inhabit. "If you follow the logic of the markets, you end up in The Matrix."
Place your cut of meat in a water tank and just add explosives
Before John Long applied his expertise to the problem, people tried many ways to make meat more tender — chewing it, pounding it, soaking it in enzymes.
The report, Hydrodyne Exploding Meat Tenderness, published in 1998 by the US department of agriculture (USDA), describes Long's act of creation as "a peacetime use for explosives".
"Throughout John Long's career as a mechanical engineer, he worked with explosives at Lawrence Livermore [National Laboratory]. His mission: preparing the Nation's defence. He always wondered if the explosives he studied could be used for peaceful ends — like tenderising meat. Then, after more than 10 years of retirement and long after the Cold War's end, he began pursuing the Hydrodyne concept in earnest".
The article explains that in 1992, Long teamed up with a meat scientist, Morse Solomon. Their first set-up was "an ordinary plastic drum filled with water and fitted with a steel plate at the bottom to reflect shock waves from an explosion". By 1998, Long and Solomon were stuffing meat, water and explosives into a 7,000lb (3,180kg) steel tank covered with an 8ft (2.4m) steel dome.
This official USDA story of how it all began looks past the fact that another man, Charles Godfrey of Berkeley, California, obtained a patent in 1970 for his "apparatus for tenderising food". Godfrey's first sentence blasts away all confusion: "An article of food is tenderised by placing it in water and detonating an explosive charge in the vicinity thereof".
Godfrey explains his method: "A cut of meat desired to be tenderised is placed under water within a tank. In view of the tendency of the meat to float, it may be necessary to tie the meat in position by a string ... A compressive pressure wave travelling at a speed higher than the velocity of sound may be generated in the water by a means, such as a charge of high explosive, which is supported above the meat by any suitable means, such as the leads which are used to ignite the detonator of the high explosive".
Once the idea was out there, other scientists took to experimenting with beef, pork, chicken, and other things that went boom. A study in 2006 alluded to a scientist named Schilling who showed that "the hydrodynamic shock wave ... did not affect the colour of cooked broiler breast meat."
A pamphlet from the National Cattlemen's Beef Association bragged that the "technology has been shown to improve the tenderness of beef by 30-80% and, the tougher the piece of meat, the greater the magnitude of improvement".
But so far the process works well only for small, sub-industrial quantities. The niggling problem, when applying explosives to heaps of flesh, is how to tenderise without pulverising.
Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize
The UK's leading expert on gangs says the official inquiry into what caused the summer riots is woefully inadequate
Not too many academics have finished up with a broken nose as a consequence of their research. But few academics spend long periods talking to young people on deprived estates. The threat of violence, then, is an occupational hazard for Professor Simon Hallsworth, director of the Centre for Social and Evaluation Research at London Metropolitan University, and the UK's leading expert on gang culture.
Two years ago, the threat became a reality after he took a short cut through "a dodgy part of Hackney". "I finished up on the ground being kicked by a group who mugged me." But he seems sanguine. "You either let that kind of thing get to you or you don't. At least it gives you an appreciation of the violence that is a regular part of so many lives because of conditions that they can't escape from."
What there are not, he maintains, are as many organised gangs as the media and the government would have us believe. "Those that do exist are a lot more fluid and lack the hierarchical structure that the stereotype attributes to them," he says. In the 10 years in which he has been engaged in research on gangs, he says, "they've been blamed for just about everything from drugs to the sexual abuse of women to dangerous dogs. But if you could eliminate gang culture tomorrow, all those things would still be going on and you'd still have disorder."
David Cameron's response to the August riots, he argues, was nothing more than a "scapegoating strategy" that stigmatises the black community and what is now dismissed as a "feral underclass". By lumping many complex issues together under the label of gang culture, the government has absolved itself of any responsibility for what Hallsworth believes is a crisis in the neo-liberal economic theory that has held sway since the early 1980s.
"There was an almost unquestioning acceptance of Cameron's claims across the mass media," he says. Only the Guardian is absolved, in his view, as the paper has embarked on the first empirical study of the riots in collaboration with the London School of Economics.
Hallsworth's reaction has been a transatlantic collaboration with Dr David Brotherton from John Jay College, New York. Together they have produced Urban Disorder and Gangs: A Critique and a Warning, published online as part of the Runnymede [Trust] Perspectives series.
They call for hard questions to be asked about "the perverse form of capitalism" that governments appear committed to on both sides of the Atlantic. "It is not working for the many in a society of escalating inequality and disadvantage where upward mobility is now a thing of the past."
In 1981, Hallsworth arrived in Brixton, moving into a flat the day after the first riots began. At least it gave him an insight that would prove invaluable in his later academic career. "Lord Scarman, who drew up his report on the '80s disturbances, was a patrician figure steeped in the values of the welfare state," he says. "He knew that society was to blame as well as the rioters. Today, official attempts to understand are woefully inadequate."
He dismisses yesterday's interim report by the Riots, Communities and Victims Panel, chaired by the former chief executive of Jobcentre Plus, as "a superficial glossy brochure" before adding: "It tells us nothing new about the riots; tells us nothing more about the profile of the rioters than we already knew; profiles statistics already in the public domain, and it is written in a style that makes the mistake of assuming that sound bites constitute serious analysis. Worryingly, it begins and ends with the assumption that if you listen to people enough – mostly non-rioters – and list what they say, that constitutes an explanation. As to solutions, it leaves us with, by and large, more of the same already being rolled out, including the over-use of prison, which it does not challenge or question."
One fundamental change over the last 30 years, Hallsworth believes, is the transition from a welfare state to what he calls a security state. "We have the widespread use of CCTV, a much more coercive attitude by the authorities and the biggest prison population in Europe. And that was before the riots. No longer is there any aspiration to be universally inclusive and aim for full employment. The requirement for a cheap and flexible labour force is paramount.
"So these youngsters live in a society where you're judged by how you dress and the type of phone you carry, yet they're excluded from jobs that provide the means to buy them."
They conclude their critique by suggesting that now is the time to mobilise youth. "Only this time round, it means investing in them and their communities; not law-enforcement agencies and a new gang-suppression industry."
At a time, however, when reducing the budget deficit is the only game in town, Hallsworth has no illusion that his advice will be taken seriously in government circles any time soon.
Our Guardian Teacher Network this week has resources to help you and your pupils get involved with National Tree Week
Every school in the UK is being urged to plant a tree in its grounds as part of National Tree Week (26 November - 4 December). The initiative has been running since 1975, and it is estimated that more than one million trees will be planted by the end of this week alone. If you would like to get involved – or even just encourage your pupils to learn a bit more about trees – there are a variety of resources on the Guardian Teacher Network that can help. The Tree Council is responsible for organising National Tree Week, and the charity has published a range of useful tips on how and where to plant trees. It has also produced a poster that you can use to advertise your tree-planting event, along with an interactive map showing what else is going on in your area and around the UK.
The Woodland Trust provides free trees for schools and youth groups to plant, and the charity has produced a 70-page activity booklet to tie in with National Tree Week. Ideas include a winter scavenger hunt, tips for how to create "ice art" using natural objects such as pine cones and leaf skeletons, a tree-themed crossword and examples of different techniques that can be used when painting or drawing pictures of trees.
One of the Woodland Trust's most popular resources is its Woodland Log Booklet. Suitable for use at KS1 and KS2, it encourages pupils to think about and record what they see, hear, smell and touch on a woodland adventure. The booklet includes space for creative writing, sketching and note-making, as well as for sticking in any woodland treasures found along the way.
For helping primary pupils to identify different species of tree, the Woodland Trust has produced a twig identification sheet that can be used during winter, and a leaf hunt sheet useful for identifying any fallen leaves. Older pupils can learn more about the identification and classification of living things with this science lesson created by the Guardian.
Additional information about trees – including their importance as a home for animals and their role as "the world's lungs" – is contained in this Education Guardian article. Useful for reading comprehension tasks, the article can be used by pupils to research why some trees lose their leaves in the autumn and what the words "chlorophyll" and "photosynthesis" mean. The article includes a link to a short animation about how to calculate the age of a tree by counting its rings and instructions for how to make a clinometer, a device that can be used to measure the height of a tree.
• The Guardian Teacher Network offers thousands of lesson plans and interactive materials. To see, and to share your own resources, go to http://teachers.guardian.co.uk. There are hundreds of jobs on the site and schools can advertise free before Christmas http://schoolsjobs.guardian.co.uk
We ask teachers and parents how they will explain this week's teachers' strike to pupils
Paul Luxmoore, headteacher of Dane Court Grammar school in Broadstairs, Kent
Our students haven't known widespread strike action in their lifetimes, so I don't think many of them can see beyond having an unexpected day off school. Of course, if it were to continue over a prolonged period, as it did in the 1980s, they could start to feel quite miffed. I'd expect our teachers to use their common sense when answering pupils' questions about the strikes. And I hope some might see it as an opportunity to discuss some big political issues: the recession, collective debt and the economy, for example.
Colin Goffin, assistant headteacher and media teacher at the Benjamin Britten High school in Lowestoft, Suffolk
Our students are mostly quite excited about the prospect of an extra day off, but we have had some discussions about the strikes. In media studies, we've been looking at how the teachers' decision to strike has been covered in different newspapers. I've also used it as an opportunity to talk to older students about employment contracts, asking them "What would happen if you got a job and then your employer changed your contract so you had to work different hours or get paid less money?"
Catherine Bourne, English teacher
I won't be striking. I do understand why others are, but in the current economic climate, there are plenty of people in other professions having a tough time of it who are not withdrawing their labour. That's exactly what I'll tell the students. I didn't go into teaching for the money – I went into it because I wanted to make a difference to children's lives. For me personally, there are many more significant issues to get fired up about, such as the introduction of the new Ebacc qualification and how the government is making vocational qualifications such as the BTec almost worthless.
Jackie Schneider, primary school music teacher at Poplar primary school and St Teresa's in the London Borough of Merton
As with all aspects of education, my guiding principle is: always tell the truth, in an accessible way. So if children ask me what the strike is all about, I'll tell them that this is a last resort, that teachers are withdrawing labour because they have a major disagreement with the government and, after all other means of negotiation have failed, it is their democratic right to strike.
Vincent McGarry, health and social care lecturer at Canterbury College
I teach 16- to 19-year-olds, so they are very aware of the strikes from the news. I've told them that I don't want to strike; I don't want to lose a day's pay and let them down. But in the long run, if we succeed, we are making an impact that's going to benefit them. They are all health and social care students so are likely to be public sector workers eventually themselves. By the time our students are retiring, the pension could have had three or four more reductions. The student union – which all of our students are members of – voted in support of the strike, so we feel we have some solidarity.
Jenny Scully, parent, Huyton, Liverpool
My kids are rejoicing at having an extra day off. I have explained why the teachers are striking, and that, while I agree with their reasons, thousands of parents will suffer by having to take time off work, potentially losing a day's pay. Plus the kids will lose a day's education. You could argue "it's only one day", but it's a day of education lost that is being paid for by the taxpayer. It's also highly unlikely that one day will have any impact, which could lead to a series of strikes. This could prove detrimental to children's education.
A new IPPR report finds that though many are very good, a significant minority of madrasas, supplementary schools for Muslim children, have poor teaching standards, use corporal punishment and do not conduct CRB checks on staff
Seven four- and five-year-olds stream into the classroom and sit down quietly. All look extremely smart in impractical white uniforms. Books are taken out and the pupils turn to where the class left off last time.
This is no ordinary reception class. It doesn't start till 6pm, and the children in the classroom at Crown Hills community college, Leicester, will spend the next 90 minutes studying Arabic and prayer. Welcome to Crown Hills madrasa. Ahmed Burani, "five and a half", says he loves coming here five days a week. He particularly likes Arabic. "I know my numbers and colours," he says proudly.
Ahmed is one of 250,000 Muslim children attending roughly 2,000 madrasas in the UK. Children typically attend for up to two hours every night until the age of 14-15. Most madrasas operate out of mosques, but a sizeable number are based in schools or community centres. Some are run informally in private homes. Over a quarter have more than 140 pupils a week.
While many make a valuable contribution to society, new research by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), to be published tomorrow, has found that a significant minority do not provide adequate standards of teaching or child protection.
"Madrasas have the potential to positively influence Muslim children's development, allow pupils to explore and understand their own identity and strengthen community cohesion" the report concludes. "However, this is held back by poor teaching standards and narrow curricula in many madrasas."
Some, it points out, are still using corporal punishment because the law does not prohibit this in "supplementary" schools. Madrasa staff can use "reasonable punishment" as a legal defence for any physical action against children. Physical punishment was banned from mainstream schools in 1987. "Madrasas were sometimes seen to use excessively strict approaches to discipline," the report notes. "In a small number of cases, the discipline used was seen to be detrimental to the welfare of children."
IPPR's survey of 179 madrasas also highlights concerns about how well pupils are kept safe. Supplementary schools are exempt from the requirement on other organisations working with children to conduct CRB (Criminal Records Bureau) checks of staff and volunteers. Although the research reveals that most have a child protection policy and carry out CRB checks on staff, a significant minority do not.
"The current legal situation leaves children without sufficient protection," the authors say. There is "a massive loophole" in safeguarding children in madrasas and other supplementary schools. "All supplementary schools, including faith ones, should be required by law to CRB-check their staff," they say. In addition, the report calls on the government to extend the ban on physical punishment to supplementary schools and for madrasa staff to undergo much more training on how to implement child protection policies.
The report also highlights a lack of adequate teacher training and modern teaching methods. Only 14% of madrasas insist on qualified teacher status for staff. More emphasis is placed on teachers' religious credentials, with 57% of madrasas requiring theological training and three quarters using imams to teach. But 10% of madrasas said there were no minimum qualifications for their teachers whatsoever.
The report reveals that most madrasas want better connections with their local communities and are keen to develop closer ties with mainstream schools. To do this, they need more support and encouragement from local authorities, the madrasas say. But researchers found some councils were much more proactive than others, with Bradford, Kirklees and Leicester councils leading the way.
Mohammed Patel, coordinator of the safeguarding in madrasas project at the Federation of Muslim Organisations, estimates that there are 85 madrasas in Leicestershire. Of these, 66 have signed up to the safeguarding project, a collaboration between the FMO, Leicester council and the police. "95% of madrasas in our project have CRB-checked all their staff and over the last three years, more than 500 people have taken up the training we provide," he says. As a result, Patel says, none of the 66 madrasas uses corporal punishment. "Forget the smacking, pinching, hitting with a pencil, or making a child stand up or sending them outside the classroom. We say there should be no form of punishment at all in madrasas."
But there's more to do on safeguarding he says. "Not all madrasa teachers have training in special needs and many don't have teaching qualifications." To help, the FMO has teamed up with Uplands primary school, which is to provide madrasa teachers with training in teaching methods and behaviour management.
A "zero tolerance" scheme to protect children was launched in September. Madrasas that sign up must have a child protection policy and staff must be given training. Accredited madrasas will be awarded a certificate and the FMO will go back every year to check progress.
Crown Hills madrasa highlights what can be achieved with training and good community ties. The madrasa is organised along school lines, with classes arranged by academic year. Lessons are fun, says Sheikh Ibrahim Mogra, head of the madrasa. All 20 staff are CRB-checked and receive training, including in child protection. Corporal punishment is prohibited. "Not a single child is scared of me," he says.
Anna Bawden
Demand for Islamic education in England is growing fast and schools – official and unofficial – are springing up to meet it. Now some local authorities are concerned that there is insufficient regulation
At about eight o'clock on a dull autumnal morning, a mother is preparing breakfast for her young son in the kitchen of an unassuming private house on a little modern estate in Leicester. The doorbell rings. Outside, a series of people carriers and estate cars are rolling up one by one; out of them tumbling a succession of children in twos and threes, all in traditional Islamic dress.
By 8.30, 26 children – some of them only just old enough for school, some almost grown – are sitting in tight rows on the floor of a little inner room, reciting morning prayers in Arabic and in English. By 9.30, the conservatory has become an infant classroom, the dining room has been taken over by the juniors and in the living room, year 7 and 8 girls are preparing to spread their geography projects across the laminate flooring.
By now, the mother has vanished – she doesn't want her name or address to be used, she says, because already families are turning up at odd hours asking to look round the "school" – and Fatima D'Oyen, director of Manara Education, has taken charge with her small team of staff.
There's no doubting that the Manara academy is a most unusual educational institution. But it's also part of a national trend. Although the number of Islamic schools is still small – around 140 at the latest count, just 12 of them state-funded – it is growing fast. About 60 of these schools have opened in the last 10 years; several in the last couple of months. And the demand from parents seems to be huge – one school in Birmingham recently attracted 1,500 applications for just 60 places. At least five Islamic schools have recently applied to be free schools, although so far only one has been approved.
Manara is one of two Islamic schools that have opened in Leicester this autumn – although in its case, the word "school" can only be used loosely. Manara operates just three mornings a week, and its pupils are registered as home-educated.
Because Manara operates on a part-time basis, it does not need to register with the Department for Education as a school. But the rise in the number of Islamic schools has raised some concerns. Leicester City Council has called for national guidance to ensure that parents who send their children to "flexi schools" like Manara can be sure the staff have criminal record checks and their buildings are safe. And in some areas, full-time schools have opened without registration – meaning that there are no checks on the suitability of their staff or the quality of their curriculum.
D'Oyen aims to open a fully registered, full-time school next year. Until recently, she was the headteacher of another Muslim school in Leicester, but left earlier this year – and decided to start her own school. She quickly found that the formalities required were much more cumbersome than in her native US, where she had previously helped to set up an Islamic school in New Mexico.
"The Department for Education wanted everything done six months in advance; they wanted a plan of the building, they wanted to come and inspect," she says. "They wanted to see our curriculum plans in detail – a lot of rigmarole. And we wanted to be open in September. So legally we are a private tuition service – like a supplementary school, but during the day."
Despite its unconventional setting – D'Oyen was invited to tea with the family who live here and seized on the idea that the house could be turned into a school – the children seem contented and the curriculum varied. Manara is experimenting with Montessori teaching methods, and religious education includes moral and personal discussions as well as study of the Qur'an. The time spent by many children learning the Qur'an at madrasas – often 10 hours a week or more – can rob them of their childhood, D'Oyen believes, and she hopes to provide a more humane alternative. The pupils will learn about gardening and alternative technologies, and have access to the garden, which is used as an outdoor classroom.
"We'd like to teach a long morning, which would include some Islamic education, and then in the afternoons children would have more choice of activities – arts, crafts, PE," D'Oyen says. "We want the children to have creativity in their lives, and to follow some of their interests."
She foresees no problems at all in finding pupils – another Islamic school in Leicester already has five applications for each place. The demand from Muslim parents for an education outside the mainstream is growing, she says.
Others in the Muslim world agree with her. Dr Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, founder of the Muslim Institute thinktank, says there is a growing feeling among Muslim parents that mainstream schools are not serving their children well: "If schools are focused on raising standards and on ensuring that there is discipline, I think most people are happy with that," he says. "But more and more parents are concerned about the quality of education, and about discipline."
Yet in some areas, situations have arisen that have caused concern. A headteacher in the north of England, who asked not to be identified, described how an Islamic school had opened up two years ago without permission opposite her own primary school. "It operated for about six months without registration, and then it was forced to close. It didn't take long before it was registered and reopened again," she says. "Some lovely ladies came to see me and they invited me and my deputy to see what was happening there. But I have to say I found the whole thing very worrying indeed – it's just so divisive." She had been trained as an Ofsted inspector, she said, and did not believe that the school would have been allowed to operate in the state sector. Its buildings, even after renovation, were unsuitable, she said, and its curriculum was too narrow, with every lesson being linked in some way to the Qur'an or the life of the Prophet Muhammad.
The Association of Muslim Schools, set up 20 years ago to support a then-tiny band of institutions, acknowledges that in response to a growing demand for Islamic education, a number of full-time schools have opened without proper formalities.
"The Department for Education is in constant contact with us, and they do tell us if someone's operating without registration," says Shazad Mohammed, the director of the association. "Then we visit to stress the importance of registering – the local authorities have to know where the children are, for safeguarding purposes. We strongly discourage this – it is illegal to operate without registration."
But it is hardly surprising that there should be some breaches, he adds – the UK has two and a half million Muslims, and the number is rising fast. The majority are aged between 13 and 25. One highly regarded Muslim school, the Al-Hijrah school in Birmingham, has introduced a lottery system to allocate places because up to 25 parents are competing for each one.
In Leicester, the city council says it is anticipating a rise in the number of "flexi schools" like Manara, and it has asked the government to address the issue. "It is anticipated that this form of education may become more common, and the local authority has asked that the Department for Education consider producing national guidance for parents and providers around the quality of provision, including criminal record checks, health and safety and planning permission," it said in a statement.
The DfE welcomed Leicester's commitment to working with home educators, but did not respond to requests for a comment on whether there should be more regulation of the sector.
But for Fatima D'Oyen, the road ahead seems clear. Leicester's home education inspector paid her a visit this month, and was apparently impressed. Attempts to regulate the sector further would be counterproductive, she argues. "My perspective is that 95% of parents can be trusted to do what is best for their children," she says. "I don't believe it is either possible or desirable to try to regulate, especially if the desire to do so comes from racism or misplaced paternalism. The reality is that most Muslims setting up or working at Islamic schools, whether part-time, full-time, supplementary or otherwise, do so out of a sense of altruism and wanting to help children get a good education."
Academies and free schools will do as much harm to our education system as charter schools are doing in the US, says Melissa Benn
It is amazing how quickly you can discourage a nation. Just 18 months ago, Michael Gove kicked off his controversial tenure at the Department for Education with apparently definitive claims, backed by international test evidence, of UK state school failure and the need for a radical new approach.
Last year, Sweden was the model for reform. The government barely mentions Sweden these days, not since it emerged that its free schools produce marginally improved results, but increased social segregation. Now the emphasis has shifted to America, another mediocre international performer, yet already proving a dangerous template for aggressive fast-paced reform over here.
Most people have heard of the American charter schools, which currently educate over one and a half million children, but few understand the conditions under which their highly partial success occurs or what their impact is. Nor do they grasp what their equivalents here in England — academies and free schools — could mean for our education system in the long term.
The model goes something like this: a set of new schools, apparently dedicated to radically improved education of the poor, is set up in competition to existing public provision. Heavily backed by corporate or philanthropic interests, with some working on a "for profit" basis, they are reliant on high-stakes results, strict discipline, a punitive approach to teachers and unions, and tend to have more control over their admissions, higher rates of exclusion, and to take fewer students with special needs or those for whom English is not their first language.
Meanwhile, public (state) schools, many suffering toxic spending cuts, drowning in often unjustified public and political criticism, must continue to educate anyone who comes through their gates, making the alternative new model look shinier still. Yet many still provide an outstanding education, particularly in deprived areas. Sound familiar?
One of the most high-profile critics of charter schools is Diane Ravitch, a former assistant secretary of state for education under George H W Bush, who is now fighting against the role of choice, high-stakes testing and the dominance of massive corporations in US education, all of which, she believes, are damaging to the concept of universal quality public education.
It was interesting to watch the softly spoken Ravitch in debate recently with Geoffrey Canada, the charismatic chief executive of the Harlem Children's Zone, the most high-profile charter network, eulogised in the 2010 pro-charter documentary Waiting For Superman.
HCZ offers a stern, test-driven education to a select few. As Canada admitted, part of HCZ's success lies in turfing out those students who don't make the grade. Its impressive cradle-to-college social support system, underwritten by tens of millions of dollars of private funding, is not replicable on a national scale.
Other charter networks are much less successful. According to the authoritative 2009 Stanford Credo study, 17% outperform public schools, 46% show no difference and 37% get lower results.
There are worrying parallels with the way things are developing here. We are seeing the rapid growth of private interests in education, with some of the more effective chains granted significant influence in national educational debate. Here, too, we are presented with "miracle academies" but a range of unanswered questions about admissions, exclusions, sources of additional funding and pedagogy.
Here, too, our system is being torn up at its foundations, yet there is only a mixed picture of improvement. According to the latest Ofsted report, the proportion of academies judged good or outstanding is similar to that for all secondary schools.
Yet Gove's "quiet revolution" continues unabated. Under the new Education Act, only academies and free schools can now be set up. No new community schools. Many maintained schools continue to be under intense pressure to become academies. Some governors report being asked to special briefings on the achievements of the US charter school model, followed up by invitations to join one of the new educational chains.
Longer term, these developments risk pitting school against school, easing the way for for-profit providers into a key public service, alienating many teachers and undermining across-the-board educational progress. Surely we have learned by now not to blindly follow the US into unproven and expensive policy disasters?
• School Wars: the Battle for Britain's Education, by Melissa Benn, is published by Verso Books
The shadow universities minister tells Harriet Swain that she is keen to have a battle of brains with David Willetts over government policy and the HE white paper
On her first evening as an undergraduate, Shabana Mahmood, the new shadow higher education minister, recalls feeling distinctly strange. "I was born and raised in Birmingham, which is a very diverse city, so I always knew lots of people who were like me," she says. "My first night in Oxford I was the only one of my kind in the room. It was really odd. That had never happened to me before."
As one of only three female Muslim MPs, she still stands out among the crowd of politicians and policy wonks milling around her Westminster offices. But after just a year and a half in parliament, during which she has risen rapidly through a junior position in the shadow Home Office team to her present role, she looks relaxed and completely at home.
Nor is she phased by the prospect of mentally wrestling with her opposite number, "Two Brains" David Willetts, at the despatch box. In fact, she can hardly wait, having relished her times speaking from the floor of parliament on Home Office issues. "I used to be a barrister so that's me in my comfort zone," she says, giving the first of many hearty laughs.
And she has quite a few issues to debate with Willetts. First, fees. The Labour leader, Ed Miliband, announced in September that if Labour came to power tomorrow, next year's tuition fee cap would drop from £9,000 to £6,000. This would be funded by scrapping a corporation tax cut for banks and asking future graduates earning more than £65,000 to repay their loans at a higher interest rate.
Labour's proposal shows that whatever the government may claim about being forced to raise the fee cap so high because of the budget deficit, it could have made different choices, argues Mahmood, who supported Miliband in the Labour leadership contest.
It would also make unnecessary the other major proposal in the higher education white paper – the so-called "core and margin" plan to allow universities to recruit unlimited numbers of students who achieve AAB or above at A-level, but make 20,000 of the places now available across the sector dependent on bids from institutions that charge under £7,500.
This Mahmood describes as "completely confused and chaotic", "almost in making-it-up-as-we-go-along territory, which is just not acceptable".
She is also "very, very concerned" about encouraging for-profit providers in higher education and plans to focus heavily on this when the white paper comes before parliament. She is particularly worried about the government's plan to make it easier to obtain a university title, because of the quality assurance implications.
On all these questions she is firm about what Labour would do if it was in power now – lower fees, scrap the core and margin idea, stop encouraging private providers – but cautious about committing herself or the party to actions after a 2015 election.
Labour will keep to the principles of students making a fair contribution to the costs of their education and of those benefiting the most paying the most, and since a graduate tax adheres to those principles it is not off the table, she says. But she is looking at many different systems and wants to see what the shape of the sector is in 2015. "If we can do more, we will do more," she says. But "I'm not going to put forward a position now, lead students up the garden path and change my mind later on … I think they have had enough of that".
She sees responding to issues raised by the white paper as only part of her job. Also a priority is to look at what universities are fundamentally for. She is drawing up a strategy to do this and hopes to have it in place before Christmas. Her first thoughts are that universities should be drivers of growth and she is keen to encourage more collaboration between institutions and between institutions and business. But for her, the diversity of the UK's university system is one of its strengths and higher education's value is not just economic. "I think there is an important role beyond their economic and research and innovation value," she says. "There is their cultural value as well because they become part of the identity of a city or of a region. Universities imbibe information and people, and then stuff happens."
One policy area on which she is already clear – and becomes quite animated — is post-qualification admissions, which she strongly supports. Why is she so keen? "Because I watched my sister go through clearing and it's a nightmare," she says.
Mahmood, 31, is a committed Brummie, who attended Small Heath comprehensive school and King Edward VI Camp Hill girls' grammar, and was involved in the Labour party from a young age. She has three siblings, including a twin brother and says: "I made them work during my election campaign" – big laugh – "very very hard."
Her father, a civil engineer, is chairman of the local Labour party and he and her mother wanted all their children to go to university, which they did. "I suppose in a stereotypical Asian way they really valued academic achievement and wanted their children in professions," says Mahmood. She worked as an indemnity litigator before becoming an MP. Her sister is an NHS manager and her brothers work in computing and accountancy.
At Oxford, she became president of the junior common room at her college, Lincoln, but otherwise deliberately avoided student politics, preferring to engage with the many views different from her own. "Although I was never attracted to the other side, as it were, it was quite interesting for me to at least test myself."
Widening parliament
She recalls the feeling of being different when she entered parliament as MP for Ladywood in May 2010, becoming not only one of the first female Muslim MPs, but one of the first six Asian women there. "Certainly I think it reminds me on a regular basis that parliament has got a lot more work to do if it wants to look more like the people it represents," she says, criticising the fact that so many MPs have never worked anywhere outside Westminster. "Part of its relevance is in its ability to represent the country, and that's not just a thing about race or religious minorities. That's about a diverse experience that people bring."
What Mahmood does share with Willetts, and indeed with both the Conservative and Labour education spokesmen, Stephen Twigg and Michael Gove, is an Oxford degree.
Since her undergraduate days, which she loved, she has mentored prospective students from disadvantaged backgrounds and admits that in the past she viewed issues of fair access through the prism of Oxbridge. "But immediately getting into the job, I thought I mustn't do this. This is not just limited to Oxbridge or the Russell Group, the widening participation agenda is much broader than that."
She is critical of the government's decision to axe the AimHigher scheme, which encouraged young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to consider university, and wants to encourage engagement between universities, schools and colleges to change perceptions among some young people that higher education is not for them.
But she wants an open and honest dialogue about the challenges as well as benefits they might find, such as being the only one of their kind in a room.
"I'm a fairly self-confident person so I didn't let it bother me," she says. "But I thought it was odd and if I was less self-confident I might have been completely freaked out. It might have held me back."
Academics have tackled the issue of whether chalk dust is harmful to health – rather belatedly, you may think
At long last, after millions of students in thousands of classrooms have freely and incautiously breathed trillions of breaths, there's a report about the question: How much chalk dust enters the air when a teacher uses a blackboard?
The study, Assessment of Airborne Fine Particulate Matter and Particle Size Distribution in Settled Chalk Dust During Writing and Dusting Exercises in a Classroom, was done by Deepanjan Majumdar, DG Gajghate, Pradeep Pipalatkar and CV Chalapati Rao of the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute in Nehru Marg, India.
The team weighed each piece of chalk before and after using it. They collected chalk dust from the air, and also the dust that fell on to a long sheet of paper laid over the base of the blackboard.
Their experiment featured three kinds of chalk, one blackboard, an eraser, an aerosol spectrometer (to measure and record the amount of dust floating in the air), and a Cilas model 1180 particle-size analyser.
The researchers tried to ensure maximally pure conditions for the measurements. "All the windows and the only door were closed airtight", the "fans present in the classroom were not operated", and "personal movement in the classroom was completely restricted during the experiment to minimise resuspension of dust from floor".
The report explains that in schools that still use chalk, teachers brave the greatest direct risk: "During teaching, entry of chalk dust in the respiratory system through nasopharyngeal region and mouth could be extensive in teachers due to their proximity to the board and frequent opening of mouth during lectures and occasional gasping and heavier breathing due to exhaustion. As per current state of knowledge on particulate matter vis-a-vis chalk dust, it "may remain suspended in air for some time before settling on the floor and body parts of the teachers and pupils".
The scientists acknowledge that chalk and chalkboards these days are being supplanted, in many schools, by whiteboards and other more modern, less intrinsically dusty technology. But chalk still enjoys wide usage in many countries.
The study, published in the journal Indoor and Built Environment, ruefully concludes: "Though real-time airborne chalk dust generation was found to be low in this study … and did not contain toxic materials, chalk dust could be harmful to allergic persons and may cause lacrimation and breathing troubles in the long run and certainly is a constant nuisance in classrooms as it may soil clothes, body parts, audiovisual aids and study materials."
• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize
The Guardian Teacher Network this week has lots of resources for use with pupils to ensure they are aware of road safety, and what to do if they see an accident
Road accidents are the single biggest cause of death and injury among young people, making road safety a topic that is worth revisiting.
Road Safety Week (21-27 November) is organised by the accident-prevention charity, Brake, and the theme of this year's event is Too Young to Die. The aim is to raise awareness of how to improve road safety and the charity has materials to get you started. These include an introductory guide to teaching road safety, online games for early years and primary, and videos suitable for use with older pupils.
The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) has a range of assemblies about road safety that can be used throughout the school year. Suitable for use from KS1 to KS4, topics covered include the need for young children to hold an adult's hand when near a road, the importance of cycle helmets, and issues to be aware of when learning to drive.
Rural road safety is the theme of a RoSPA teaching pack for KS1 and KS2. The resource is intended to help children in rural areas improve their road safety skills by delivering messages across a range of curriculum areas including maths, English, geography and ICT.
RoSPA has also produced a set of road safety workbooks for use with young learners of English. In the workbooks, a number of road safety key words, phrases and messages are written in Bengali, Punjabi, Urdu and Polish as well as in English. A teacher's guide accompanies the resource, created in response to statistics that show that children with no or poorly-developed English language skills are over-represented in road accidents.
The British Red Cross has produced an assembly pack about what to do if you witness a road accident. Suitable for use at KS2 and KS3, the kit contains a drama performance demonstrating five first-aid principles that young people and adults can use. It also includes ideas for follow-up activities that look at road safety issues from both a UK and international perspective. A separate document contains a set of images to support the assembly.
The theme of first aid can be explored further with some British Red Cross PowerPoint presentations suitable for use with pupils aged 11 to 16. First aid basics 1 explains how to put someone in the recovery position, while First aid basics 2 looks at how to assess if a person is unconscious and how to perform CPR. Teacher's notes for First aid basics 1 and First Aid basics 2 are also available.
Free schools get spiritual, students get nasty and the Skills Funding Agency chief clams up
Enough to make humanists hopping mad
News that the founders of the Maharishi free school, which follows the teachings of the Beatles' spiritual guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, are hoping to open two more like it hasn't gone down well with the British Humanist Association (BHA). It issued a press release earlier this month objecting to the plans on the basis that Maharishi schools teach transcendental meditation, which "adheres to a number of beliefs based on spiritual teachings that lack evidence" – and also, they claim, teaches levitation.
David Hughes, a spokesman for the Maharishi free school, confirmed that there are plans to open two schools – in Richmond, south-west London, and in Suffolk. If there is sufficient demand for the schools, a bid will be made to the Department for Education (DfE) in February.
Cynics will be relieved to learn there is "absolutely no truth" in the idea that public money is being used to teach children how to levitate. The "misunderstanding" could have come about because the BHA is getting mixed up with "yogic flying", Hughes explains, which is an extension of the transcendental meditation technique and involves "hopping" rather than levitation.
Meanwhile, the BHA is also campaigning against an application by Christian Family Schools Ltd to open a free school. The organisation already runs two private schools in Sheffield, including Bethany school, whose science curriculum seems to have a lot about God in it. The Sheffield Christian free school's curriculum would be "broadly based on nine themes found in the early chapters of the book of Genesis". With all these unusual applications in the pipeline, anyone tasked with vetting them for the DfE will need the patience of a saint.
Can Obama stop bullying in Reigate?
A website that encourages students to spread malicious rumours has got one college principal so outraged he has written to Barack Obama asking him to shut down the US-based site.
Many of the comments on littlegossip.com seem little short of cyberbullying. In the case of Reigate sixth-form college in Surrey, whose students have posted more than 300 comments to date, slurs range from mildly insulting ("needs a haircut") to offensive or defamatory ("looks like a bender" and "child molester"). Students can also rate rumours as true or false, and add comments to gossip posted by others.
College principal Mark Ruspoli decided to contact the White House after being told by a DfE official that the department couldn't help because littlegossip.com is US based. Ruspoli has also started an online petition.
What concerns him most is that, while the terms and conditions state clearly that schoolchildren between the age of 11-18 should not be using the site, there are no rules about colleges, whose students can be as young as 14.
About 120 colleges are now listed on the site. It seems especially popular at Bridgwater College in Somerset, whose principal, Fiona McMillan, is president of the Association of Colleges. Its students have posted more than 700 comments on littlegossip to date.
Meanwhile, Ruspoli is still awaiting a reply from Mr President.
Not enough said
Some college principals seemed distinctly unimpressed by the Skills Funding Agency (SFA) chief Geoff Russell's contribution to the Association of Colleges' (AoC) annual conference last week. While delegates were expecting a speech, Russell talked for just a few minutes before saying, "That's all I have to say really", and opening up the floor to questions.
But perhaps he could be forgiven for sounding a bit lacklustre. The SFA has recently come under fire from the Treasury for funding adult apprenticeships for employees of big companies such as Asda and Morrisons – which can be completed in as little as 13 weeks – rather than creating new jobs. In a time of record youth unemployment, it is a strategy that couldn't be more unpopular.
And earlier this month, the skills minister, John Hayes, announced a review of the SFA, fuelling speculation that it could be the next casualty in the quango bonfire. There was more grumbling about the speech at the AoC gala dinner, where one college principal was overheard saying of Russell: "I give him three months."
David Cannadine tells Michael Gove to keep syllabus intact and make subject compulsory to age of 16
Towards the end of a typically barnstorming performance at the Hay Festival in May last year, during which Niall Ferguson had rubbished the way history was taught in this country, the spotlight was turned towards the audience to reveal that the new education secretary, Michael Gove, had snuck into the event and was sitting somewhere near the back. And after a few not entirely convincing exchanges of surprise along the lines of "Fancy seeing you here!", "You're marvellous", "No, you're marvellous", Gove offered Ferguson a job on the spot to help reform the history curriculum.
The message from both men was clear. The country had gone to the dogs, and the teaching of history was partly to blame. Under 13 years of a Labour government, the nation's schoolchildren had learned little more than a few episodic soundbites about the Nazis, and consequently had no real understanding of, or pride in, the country's past achievements. Put the Great back into Britain, celebrate the past, forget the post-colonial apologias, and the little blighters will stop stabbing one another and get off their butts and start looking for a job. Here was a post-election narrative for the new coalition government looking to reassure the Tory heartlands that a back-to-basics, common-sense approach to education was firmly in hand.
Wisely, perhaps, Gove chose to consult not just Ferguson. Instead, using the contacts book that mysteriously opens up for new ministers, he also invited several other well-known historians, including Simon Schama and Richard Evans, to contribute their suggestions for the wholesale reform of history teaching. Somewhere not far into the process, he also asked David Cannadine, Dodge Professor of History at Princeton – and, with Ferguson and Schama, yet another of the UK's top academic exports to the US – for his thoughts. Eighteen months down the line, Gove might rather be wishing he hadn't.
Like Gove and Ferguson, Cannadine has also taken a profound interest in how history is taught in state schools; unlike them, he didn't think that relying on hearsay and ideology was the best way to decide public policy. "There had been a great many theories about how history had been taught over time," Cannadine says, "but no one had done any detailed research to provide the evidence to back them up." So about two and a half years ago Cannadine, along with two research fellows, Jenny Keating and Nicola Sheldon, funded by the Linbury Trust and the Institute of Historical Research, set out to find the empirical data, and this week their findings are published in The Right Kind of History.
What emerges clearly is that there never was a golden, sentimental age of history education in which everyone came out of school knowing the names and dates of every king and queen or marvelling in a triumphalist past. "If you go through the records," says Cannadine, "it's clear that up until the second world war, history was only ever taught to a very small elite, and even thereafter, it's hardly been a mainstream subject. Along with Albania, we're one of the few countries in which history hasn't been compulsory beyond 14. And with only two or three hours a week timetabled up until that age, the chances of pupils acquiring a comprehensive grounding in the subject are slim."
Nor does Cannadine believe the fault lies with the national curriculum, which was introduced under the Thatcher government in 1988 in response to similar concerns that standards of teaching had dropped and something needed to be done. "It's become fashionable to knock the history curriculum for being too episodic and for pupils not learning enough about how the past interconnects, but the real problem is that there is not enough time to teach everything," Cannadine says. "If you examine the history curriculum carefully, it does actually cover pretty much everything you might want students to know; the problem is there isn't enough time to teach it. So inevitably there are going to be gaps in people's learning. And it was always like this, even before the national curriculum. Back in the 1930s, the Tudors were the equivalent of the modern-day Nazis, with everyone complaining that pupils spent far too much time on the Tudors at the expense of other periods."
Furthermore, history has incorporated many more areas of study in schools over the last 50 years; where once it was mainly restricted to wars, diplomacy and a bit of economics, it now incorporates race, gender and social issues. So a further dilution of a subject kept within a fixed time-frame was almost unavoidable.
If the history curriculum isn't fit for purpose, then Cannadine believes we should be looking no further than the politicians and Whitehall for the culprits, as when Kenneth Baker et al were drafting the original curriculum in the 80s it was always intended that history should become compulsory until the age of 16. At the last minute, though, Kenneth Clarke, then education secretary, decided to retain the status quo, and ever since history teachers have been forced to cram a syllabus originally intended to be learned over five years into three. As a direct consequence, those students who did choose to continue history to GCSE were frequently forced to cover much the same syllabus in key stage 4 as they had in key stage 3 – only in rather greater depth. It doesn't take a lot of working out to realise why so many students complain that history is repetitive and boring.
Cannadine thinks the answer is quite straightforward. Leave the curriculum alone and go back to teaching it the way it was always intended to be taught, by making it compulsory to 16. "I'm not naïve," he says. "I'm quite sure that in some schools history isn't always taught as well it should be. One should never be complacent about standards. But the same is almost certainly true of every other subject you care to mention and no one is proposing a wholesale reform of the curriculum in those areas."
Which raises an interesting question. Why is it that some subjects, such as maths and physics, are seen as objectively neutral – their syllabus a matter for academic discussion alone – while others, such as history, are considered so important to the national psyche that so many people feel the need to have an opinion about it? Part of the answer is that many of us know – or think we know – more history than science and therefore have some kind of entitlement, but it's also true that our culture loads history, more than any other subject, with a moral narrative. It has become one of the means through which we tell stories about ourselves and shape our national identity.
For those of the Ferguson school, this bending of history to a narrative, interpretative arc presents few problems. And if confined to a few university lecture halls, it probably serves a purpose. Ferguson has built his career on counterfactual history and championing unfashionable rightwing causes, and if he has forced other liberal academics to rethink and defend their positions more carefully, then all well and good. Yet Cannadine believes it should have no role in how history is taught in school.
"History should never be used merely as a means of relaying a desired national narrative," he says. "Putin is doing just that in Russia at the moment by insisting that some aspects of the Soviet regime should be taught in a more sympathetic light. There are also calls in some American states to rewrite their teaching of slavery. This can't be right. If a country has cause to feel awkward about its past, then so be it. We should be grown-up enough to deal with it. Which isn't to say we should wallow in guilt; rather that we should accept the good and bad equally without giving either greater emphasis."
Outsiders to the current history curriculum consultation might also be curious about why it is that three of Gove's most high-profile advisers – Ferguson, Schama and Cannadine – are spending most of their time working in the US. Cannadine insists there's nothing that odd about it. "Just one of those things. A coincidence." But of course, it isn't really, as it highlights problems Gove might also want to address rather higher up the education food chain. The reason top British academics end up overseas is not just because they get paid so much more there, but because they are left on their own to teach what they want, how they want to, without constant interference or being forced to churn out a designated number of papers every four years for the research assessment exercise or its replacement.
Looked at another way, though, what Ferguson, Schama and Cannadine also highlight is that Britain has managed to turn out historians of international stature despite never having had a Govian age of rose-tinted national identity in the classroom. What's more, while Britain has produced historians of many other countries, who are recognised as experts in those countries, there are very few – if any – overseas historians who are recognised as of the same rank as our own custodians of British history. And if that were to change in the future, it would be more likely due to the decline in language teaching – and the consequent inability to work from original sources – than to a fall in the standards of history teaching.
All of which, as Cannadine admits, leaves Gove with a dilemma. "I suspect he might find it politically difficult not to change the national curriculum," he says, "as it's the easiest thing to do and also what many people want him to do. But there's really no need. The biggest and most necessary change is to make history compulsory to 16, but doing that will create other pressures on the timetable. Still, he's had a copy of the book on his desk since September, and if he needs any help writing the speech explaining what really needs to be done, he only has to call me."
So the ball is in Gove's court. To learn from history, or be condemned to repeat its mistakes.
• The headline on this article was amended on 18 November to reflect the fact that although David Cannadine works in the US, he is originally from Birmingham.
• The Right Kind of History by David Cannadine, Jenny Keating and Nicola Sheldon is available from Guardian Books. To order a copy for £11.99 with free UK p&p, call 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop
Only the Treasury benefits from the proposal to waive future inspections for schools that Ofsted judges outstanding, says Estelle Morris
A little noticed clause in the education bill that has just completed its passage through parliament could just herald a significant shift in assumptions that have underpinned our education system for the last 20 years.
From next year, schools judged by Ofsted to be outstanding will no longer be inspected. Under pressure, the government has identified a number of triggers that could lead to an inspection, but the thrust is clear – regular inspection is considered an unnecessary burden on our highest-performing schools.
The school itself can request an inspection, but it will have to pay – perhaps an indication that this measure is as much about saving money as anything. And apart from the Treasury, I can't see any winners.
Standards, in even our best schools, can decline rapidly; parents will no longer have up-to-date inspection information and inspectors won't regularly see the full range of schools, which could influence their judgments. A child could go through a school without it ever being inspected.
External inspection has earned its place in the education landscape. Ofsted has gathered a wealth of information – from both high-performing and underperforming schools – and it has contributed to higher standards.
The change is even more worrying when seen against the wider shifts in education policy. Schools have been subject to significant and relentless change over the last 30 years; government has never been as active or interested in this area of its responsibilities. These decades have seen not only a battle of ideas, but also a search to find which levers are most effective in influencing change. Governments have passed laws, issued edicts, spent money and invented new structures. Their relationship with the profession has swung from naming and shaming to praising and encouraging.
Yet whatever the policy differences between the political parties, there is now some consensus about the need to shift from centralised control. All politicians talk about trusting teachers and their professional decisions. The days of major government initiatives are gone; they wouldn't sit well in the wider political context of devolution and localism.
Yet no politician, no matter what their commitment to devolving power, can afford to completely relinquish all the levers. Government has a responsibility to its electorate and it needs some way of delivering on this.
Over recent years, government has settled on a formula that offers local flexibility but maintains a national framework – more decisions devolved to schools, but government holding schools to account through national inspection, curriculum and testing.
Which brings me back to dropping Ofsted inspections for outstanding schools. Some schools will also be freed from the obligation to teach the national curriculum or to employ qualified teachers.
So as more freedoms are granted to individual schools, government will, for some schools, give up two of its three accountability measures.
I think the education secretary is a true believer in devolution and small government, but I'd be surprised if he didn't want to retain some means of influencing schools – which might explain why he has announced so many policy changes on testing: new reading tests for six-year-olds; a revised test for 11-year-olds; the introduction of the English baccalaureate at GCSE; changes to course work at GCSE and A-level; a revamp of vocational qualifications.
For those schools freed from inspection, and which choose to opt out of as much of the national curriculum as allowed, these test results will be the main way in which they are held accountable for what they do.
This could be the way to resolve the conflict between localism and the need for national standards: as long as the results are delivered, just get on with it.
Yet I remain uneasy about this. If the only national measure of success is test results, we will value even more what we can test and risk even further undervaluing those things we can't. Subjects not in the English baccalaureate are already being pushed out in some schools. This trend might grow significantly.
If, however, I am wrong and ministers really are going to give up all their centralised powers, let's just see what happens the first time a previously high–performing school hits the headlines – and hasn't been inspected for a decade.
Finland's education system is already praised worldwide. Now, as its population becomes more diverse, it is setting a great example when it comes to educating its immigrant children, too
In Finland, it is customary for children to line up their shoes outside the classroom and to learn in their stockinged feet. Outside classroom 3C at Laakavuori primary in Helsinki, there are only four pairs of shoes and they include the scuffed trainers of a 12-year-old boy and the sparkly pumps of a seven-year-old girl.
Inside, four children – Anastasia, Artur, Kevin and Arthur – are taking in the basics of the Finnish language. Their teacher points at a picture of a jacket and articulates the word slowly – "takki". The children mouth it back. A teaching assistant, sitting at the back, joins in.
Anastasia, Artur, Kevin and Arthur arrived in Finland with their families less than two months ago. Like most newcomers here, they come from Russia and Estonia. Fortunately for them, their parents have chosen a country that has much to teach other nations when it comes to educating young immigrants.
Finland is seen by many outsiders as monocultural – its foreign-born citizens make up just 5% of its population, compared to about 11.5% in the UK. But, over the last 15 years, Finland has diversified at a faster rate than any other European country. By 2020, a fifth of Helsinki's pupils are expected to have been born elsewhere – the majority in Russia, Estonia, Somalia and the former Yugoslavia.
At Laakavuori primary, in the poorer, eastern part of Helsinki, 45% of pupils have a language other than Finnish as their mother tongue. And yet they achieve as much as others in more affluent areas of the country, where there are few, if any, immigrants.
Politicians and policy-makers the world over have admired Finland's education system for the fact that, over the last decade, its 15-year-olds have consistently had the highest – or among the highest – standards in reading, maths and science when compared with most of the developed countries of the world. Every three years, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) administers a numeracy, literacy and science test to about 470,000 15-year-olds in 65 countries, known as the Programme for International Student Assessment. In the most recent Pisa study, in 2009, Finland came third out of 65 countries, while the UK was 25th. In the 2006 Pisa study, Finland came top and the UK 14th.
Much of Finland's success has been attributed to the high prestige associated with being a teacher and the fact that it is as hard for Finns to win a place on a teacher training course as it is for them to get into law or medical school.
But another aspect of Finland's success – getting children whose first language is not Finnish up to the high standards of their classmates – appears to have been overlooked by the education tourists.
Anastasia, Artur, Kevin and Arthur stay in their class of four with a teacher and teaching assistant for 25 hours a week – for every subject except sports and arts. It can be anything between six months and a year before they are judged to have mastered Finnish and are ready to be placed into their correct year group.
It's no surprise that with this kind of immersion, half of Laakavuori's pupils – including a high proportion of those who come not speaking a word of Finnish – go on to pass the aptitude test that admits them to prestigious academic high schools.
It says something, too, about Finland's attitude that since the 1980s, the state has paid for Somali teachers to help young Somalis living in Finland to expand their vocabulary in their native language, too.
Helsinki's education department estimates that just over 11,000 pupils – almost 2% – have state-funded tuition in a mother tongue that isn't Finnish, before or after their other classes.
In England, meanwhile, a grant for schools to employ and train teachers to help pupils whose first language is not English has been scrapped.
Finland, on the other hand, has had what it describes as a "positive discrimination" policy since the 1990s. It gives schools extra funds if they are situated in relatively poor areas or have a disproportionately high number of children with special needs. It tops up these funds with €1,000 (£875) a year for each child on the school's roll who has lived in Finland for less than four years.
"The government rightly recognises that it is more intensive to teach in an area like my school," says Janne-Pekka Nurmi, principal of Laakavuori.
This sounds just like a more generous version of our pupil premium – the £488 that schools in England receive annually for each pupil they enrol who is eligible for free school meals. But there's a crucial difference. From next September, our government will be publishing what schools spend this on and, in time, will publish its suggestions of how best the pupil premium can be spent. In Finland, they simply leave it to the teachers.
Laakavuori primary has used this premium to employ social workers and psychologists a few days a week. The principal says this helps to "detect early problems and deal with them quickly".
It's not just in primary schools that young immigrants are helped. Helsinki's education department is running a pilot project that puts 15- and 16-year-old immigrants in touch with "social instructors" to ensure they fit in with Finnish society and don't drop out of school. Extraordinarily, these instructors work to find the young people friends to socialise with as well as helping them to find the services and careers advice they need.
Naldic (National Association for Language Development in the Curriculum) represents teachers in UK schools who specialise in educating pupils whose first language is not English. Amy Thompson, its chair, says that in England, the needs of non-English-speaking young immigrants are "no longer recognised as distinct from the needs of all pupils in terms of policy and funding". "The English system of 'sink or swim' needs to be brought in line, not only with Finland, but with English-speaking countries across the world that provide dedicated funding, curriculum and support for learners for whom English is an additional language," she says.
To many, a comparison between Finland and the UK is unfair. Finland's entire pupil population amounts to just 600,000, while that of England and Wales tops 7 million. Finland wants to promote skilled immigrants to compensate for an emerging labour shortage due to its ageing population, while in England, the aim is to reduce net migration to under 100,000 by 2015.
In Finland, unlike in the UK, an influx of immigrants is still new to the country.
Not everyone in Finland is quite so friendly towards newcomers. In April, The Finns – a populist nationalist party that wants to limit humanitarian immigration to refugee quotas – won 19% of the vote in the parliamentary election, becoming the largest opposition party in Finland.
A growing number of Finns are said to be removing their children from ethnically diverse primary schools, and some are reported to be demanding a cap on the number of non-Finns in a classroom.
But Finland's teachers and educationists are adamant that they will fight this on all fronts. They say that what they provide for young immigrants works.
Meanwhile, says Thompson, England should look at Finland's impressive procedures for the education of bilingual pupils. A national survey carried out by Naldic and the National Union of Teachers in February found that over 60% of respondents believed that support for pupils for whom English was an additional language and for bilingual learners had significantly deteriorated over the last six months. In England, she says, "the situation is becoming worse by the day".
• Parents can send children aged between eight months and five years to free daycare. At age six, there is a year of pre-school
• All full-time pupils get free lunches
• Basic compulsory education starts at age seven and ends at age 16
• At 16, pupils either go to vocational school or an upper secondary school. Upper secondary schools tend to be for those who want to go on to university, although it is possible to study for degrees from vocational schools
• There are no league tables or inspections and the only national exam is at the age of 18 or 19
• Finland has no university fees for home or EU students
We ask education experts for their verdicts
Rob Appelby, art teacher, Herne Bay high school, Kent
It's not necessarily that teachers know less about IT – it's just that they don't know how to teach it. The curriculum always seems to be lagging behind. My students don't want to learn how to make Excel spreadsheets or PowerPoint presentations – they want something far more eclectic that really taps into their individual interests.
Karen Davies, head of learning resources, Science Museum
Kids are very experimental and really push boundaries, but adults tend to be more cautious. That's why students often seem to know more than their teachers – it's a confidence thing. Yes, there are lots of things we can learn from young people, but children need frameworks and structures to help them learn – and that's what teachers provide.
Sam Dutton, developer advocate for Chrome at Google
Kids are very knowledgable as consumers, but they don't necessarily know how the technologies work. There is this sense of computers being like a mysterious black box. It's quite a passive way of looking at technology, so this is where teachers come in. I'd love to see schools being a lot more proactive, teaching kids skills like computer programming.
Russell Hobby, general secretary, the National Association of Head Teachers
Nowadays the average teenager does know more about IT than their teacher but that has its plus points. When students have to help out their teacher, it can be a big boost to their self-esteem. But technology can't be taught as a standalone subject – it should be integrated in all lessons.
Julie Thorpe, head of school and youth programmes, Co-operative College, Manchester
My own sons spent three years learning about Word, Excel and PowerPoint. It seems a shame to invest so much time and energy in teaching students how to use applications they could probably work out for themselves. I'd like to see children involved in activities that would stretch both teachers and pupils, for example, taking PCs apart and rebuilding them with new components.
• Janet Murray was talking to delegates at the Guardian's Innovation in Education annual summit. See reports from the event at EducationGuardian.co.uk
3D is the hottest thing in cinema and television ... and fertile new ground for academic study
Steven Spielberg's 3D film The Adventures of Tintin took £25.5m in ticket sales around the world. And 3D is also entering Britain's homes, via expensive TV sets. Proponents of the format claim it is the future of media viewing.
But, according to Owen Weetch, of the University of Warwick, 3D isn't always worth the extra cash or spectacle-wearing and only some genres and films are improved by the format. "I started to investigate 3D cinema about six months before Avatar was released, when there was a great deal of advance publicity keen to tout 3D as the future of cinema, comparable to the introduction of sound or colour," says Weetch. "I was interested in whether this would be the case, or if it would simply be 'the emperor's new clothes'."
Watching films or researching other criticism and analysis of 3D, Weetch noticed a lot of condemnation of the format. "Critics such as Roger Ebert and Mark Kermode are opposed," he says, "and a recent study by L Mark Carrier of California State University suggests that the medium produces headaches, eyestrain and trouble with vision and 'there aren't any benefits in terms of understanding the movie better'."
Weetch disagrees. Some films are well worth the effort of 3D, he says. "In my research I investigate specific genres and how previous alterations to the cinematic image's width and depth – such as deep focus and wider screens – have impacted on those genres' representational strategies. Genres that in some way depend on the space or environment in which their stories take place certainly do benefit – exponentially – from the additional dimension."
Take Avatar, the 3D James Cameron-directed blockbuster that smashed all records to become the fastest movie ever to achieve $1bn in world ticket sales . "It's a science fiction spectacular about humans engaging with a new, alien space," says Weetch, "so a stereoscopic [3D] staging that emphasises deep space guides the audience into the story world. This aligns the viewer more forcefully with the protagonists, who are themselves exploring this space, and so heightens the immersive thrill of the story."
Horror films are another genre where it is worth paying for 3D, Weetch believes. "They have traditionally seized on the dark shadows at the edge of the frame to scare their audiences and 3D can use its extension of screen space to create unprecedented dark spaces, out of which threats might leap. The object of terror might have been hiding right in front of your nose while you've been scanning the distance."
Scary stuff – but not as terrifying as the academic's musings on Jackass 3D. "When a film's focus is on bodies moving through space, as in musicals, dance films and slapstick comedy, the impression of that movement becomes more palpable in 3D," Weetch says. "Jackass 3D and Pina 3D exploited this masterfully. For the person who finds one of the Jackass boys tying a remote-controlled helicopter to their penis amusing, surely that's going to be funnier if the helicopter flies out of the screen."
But not all 3D experiences are worthwhile. "It costs more to go to a 3D film, so you want it to at least try to earn its money," says Weetch. "The worst examples tend to be films converted to 3D in post-production, for example Alice in Wonderland 3D.
Like Avatar, it's about somebody entering a strange new world, but is filled with dull, flat compositions that display no real attempt to engage with the third dimension. "With conversion, you get a very artificial sense of flat objects being layered atop one another like cardboard cut-outs, rather than an honest sense of depth or curvature."
Some film-makers use 3D as an excuse to forego other, potentially more important parts of a viewer's experience, Weetch adds. He flags up the example of Sanctum, this year's 3D underwater adventure. "It made an honest attempt to engage with the aesthetic of depth, but was let down elsewhere, by rote storytelling or ineffectual direction. While 3D is one of many textual strategies that can contribute to thematic and narrative unity, it isn't necessarily effective on its own." Some filmmakers, Weetch adds, exploit viewers: "they think they can make money by foisting depth on to something shallow, and it simply doesn't work that way."
In the context of funding cuts to academia and questions over "Mickey Mouse degrees", Weetch admits he does face accusations that the films he studies are "not exactly serious or particularly highbrow." But that, he says, "presumes that 3D can't contribute to films that are concerned with characters and ideas, which I'd attribute to ignorance and snobbery. Tintin, The Hole in 3D, and Kung-Fu Panda 2 all contain psychoanalytic sequences where characters retreat mentally into their past, and 3D layering expressively portrays the inner workings of their minds."
Does success as an artist bring you more sexual conquests? Well, yes and no, say researchers
To deal with their realisation that some artists get a lot of sex while others get little or none, Helen Clegg, Daniel Nettle and Dorothy Miell made use of an ancient tool – a tool that mathematicians count among the sexiest of mankind's inventions. The logarithm.
The trio had joined forces, as they later described it, to "investigate the relationship between mating success and artistic success in a sample of 236 visual artists".
Clegg is a University of Northampton senior lecturer in psychology, Nettle a professor of behavioural science at Newcastle University and Miell the head of the College of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Edinburgh.
Their report, called Status and Mating Success Amongst Visual Artists, appears in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.
The study gives us barely any numerical detail. It says only this: "The distribution of number of sexual partners for these participants was highly skewed with a minimum of 0 and a maximum of 250 (M=10.67). Therefore, the data were converted to a log scale and [we performed our analysis] using this scale."
That "M=10.67" is the median. Half of the 236 artists had had, each of them, fewer than 10.67 lovers. The other artists each had had in excess of 10.67 bedmates. Or so they told the researchers.
Two lovers. Twenty lovers. Two hundred lovers. They seem almost to be from different universes, the collections of five or six lovers, versus the serial harems of 100 or 200. How to talk coherently about a hodgepodge of small and big numbers?
You do it with logarithms. Roughly speaking (I don't have room here to go into much detail), the logarithm of a particular number tells – measures, really – how many extra digits that number has.
The number 1 has no extra digits. Its logarithm is zero. The number 10 has one extra digit. Its logarithm is 1. The number 100 has two extra digits; its logarithm is 2. The logarithm of 101 is ever-so-slightly bigger than 2 (it's about 2.0043). The logarithm of 250 is bigger still (about 2.3979).
The logarithm is a concise, rough way to compare things across vast scales of bigness and smallness. That painter who's got a new girlfriend every few months? About log 2. That lonely graffiti gal whom everyone shuns? Log zero, it seems.
The researchers used logarithms also when they tried to understand a related set of numbers.
They had computed what they call the "mating strategy index" of the various artists. "Each one-night stand gained one point, each relationship up to a month two points, and soon up to each relationship 10 years or over, which gained eight points. The total number of points for each person was added up and divided by their total number of relationships."
After tiptoeing through all their data and computations, the artists-and-sex researchers decided that "more successful male artists had more sexual partners than less successful artists, but this did not hold for female artists".
• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize
Very few academies are sponsored by private schools - and there's little ministers can do
Private schools are in an assertive mood. They've claimed victory in a long-running dispute with the Charity Commission over what they do to justify charitable status. And they've shrugged off pressure from the government to get more involved in its academies' programme.
The latest independent school head to rebuke ministers is Dr Helen Wright, president of the Girls' Schools Association. In a speech today, she warns:
"The government must be careful, I believe, in drawing us in the independent sector in to bolster their new academies or to prop up other failing schools. This might curry favour in some political quarters but who will really benefit if we are forced to provide the teachers, classrooms and the expertise that should have been provided by successive governments?"
Dr Wright argues that while private schools may be capable of "succeeding where the state has failed", their prime duty is to their own fee-payers.
"Why should our parents – most of whom struggle hard to pay the fees to educate their children – prop up the state system and so effectively pay twice?"
The best riposte to this was made by Andrew Adonis, who pointed out in a lecture this summer that "by far the single largest source of new teachers in private schools is experienced teachers in state schools, whereas traffic the other way is minimal." The pupil-teacher ratio in private schools is close to half that of state schools (9.4 to 1, compared with 16.6 to 1).
Adonis' powerful lecture is worth reading. In it, he argues that every successful private school should sponsor an academy.
"And by sponsoring academies I don't just mean advice and assistance, the loan of playing fields and the odd teacher, etc. I mean the private school or foundation taking complete responsibility for the governance and leadership of an academy or academies, and staking their reputation on their success as they currently do on the success of their fee-paying schools."
Opening up a few more places to poorer children might be good for the social mix of independent schools. But it will do nothing to create more good schools - or build a "truly world class education system," Adonis argues.
Some private schools are already sponsoring academies. But it is a small proportion. Out of 319 sponsored academies which opened under Labour and the coalition, just 17 have private schools or private school foundations as the lead sponsor.
The majority of these schools are sponsored by City livery companies, such as the Mercers Company, which is also trustee of the foundation behind St Paul's School - the ancient public school attended by George Osborne.
None of the 45 which opened their doors in September are backed by private schools. David Cameron is critical of the segregation between private and state schools - rightly calling it "one of the biggest wasted opportunities in our country today". But aside from honourable exceptions like Wellington College, there's little support from the private sector for the government's reforms.
It matters. As Adonis put it in his lecture: "We do indeed have a coalition government – a coalition between Eton and Westminster. It is only a slightly broader coalition which funds, manages and entertains the country too." If we are ever to be one nation, we need the two sectors to work together, he argues.
Dr Wright accepts that private schools have "an undeniable moral imperative" to educate broader society. She suggests that the government's demands will "begin to be fair" if the pupil premium meant students could opt out of the state system and bring state funding with them.
Even at the best of times, it's unlikely that any government would divert money from state education to bolster private schools. In an era of austerity, offering a carrot like that is an extremely unlikely prospect. Dr Wright's words illustrate the extent to which the stick has been taken away.