Dominic Cummings - In his own words

[Gfamily]

Some methods will have been based on research that was conducted with best scientific practice

But you seem to basically find this unacceptable.

[sheldrake]

Some methods will have been based on research that was conducted with best scientific practice

But you seem to basically find this unacceptable.

No. I think it is inevitable that there would be political fallout for an administration that was reported to be conducting experiments without the parents' consent. If a parent chose a school because they believed reading was taught by a method they liked, and were then told 'no, we've been told by the Dept of Education that we must..' that would be very unpopular.

Wealthy parents who sent their kids private would always have a way out of this, ofc.

Dominic Cummings is a political adviser and is attuned to these things.

[Gfamily]

Some methods will have been based on research that was conducted with best scientific practice

But you seem to basically find this unacceptable.

No. I think it is inevitable that there would be political fallout for an administration that was reported to be conducting experiments without the parents' consent. If a parent chose a school because they believed reading was taught by a method they liked, and were then told 'no, we've been told by the Dept of Education that we must..' that would be very unpopular.

Wealthy parents who sent their kids private would always have a way out of this, ofc.

Dominic Cummings is a political adviser and is attuned to these things.

So you are proposing something (hypothetical Government mandated trials of speculative approaches) from your own fevered imaginings, and making your objections clear on the basis that parents are the best people to determine how best to teach reading.
I'd be interested to know why you think you're the best person to gauge how to ensure that children become proficient readers?

But you appear to have had no problems with Government enforcement of a single approach to reading learning - without evidence that it is the best approach for all learners.

[sheldrake]

But you seem to basically find this unacceptable.

No. I think it is inevitable that there would be political fallout for an administration that was reported to be conducting experiments without the parents' consent. If a parent chose a school because they believed reading was taught by a method they liked, and were then told 'no, we've been told by the Dept of Education that we must..' that would be very unpopular.

Wealthy parents who sent their kids private would always have a way out of this, ofc.

Dominic Cummings is a political adviser and is attuned to these things.

So you are proposing something (hypothetical Government mandated trials of speculative approaches) from your own fevered imaginings, and making your objections clear on the basis that parents are the best people to determine how best to teach reading.
I'd be interested to know why you think you're the best person to gauge how to ensure that children become proficient readers?

But you appear to have had no problems with Government enforcement of a single approach to reading learning - without evidence that it is the best approach for all learners.

Nothing came from my own 'fevered imaginings'. You were the person who was surprised that informed consent would be needed when somebody else raised it as an issue. The scenario I've described is one where an experiment goes ahead without informed consent.

I'm a political realist. You're not attuned to what would annoy voters in the way Cummings is. It doesn't have to be logical. That's the thing you're not processing.

[Little waster]

If I wanted to test say whether dropping the motorway speed limit to 55mph saved lives ideally I would run a trial where one section of motorway trialled the new speed limit and compare it to an equivalent section where the limit stayed the same. There would be no suggestion of getting the informed consent of the drivers affected.

Similarly if a school wanted to trial synthetic phonics or free school breakfasts or banning energy drinks or whatever to see if it improved student performance, would informed consent be required?

Yes. If you try to experiment on my children with a methodology for teaching reading that I don't agree with I will be very f.cking annoyed and possibly try to move them to a school in the other experiment arm, or go private if I'm in the 5%.

Sheldrake you do understand that experimenting with new teaching methodologies happens in every lesson in every classroom in every school in the country? Every INSET day is some variant of “SLT have decided to try out approach X to manage behaviour, teach spelling, aid retention, whatever; make sure you are doing it when we randomly wander into your class over the next few weeks”. At no point is this ever passed by the parents for their individual approval. A term later the whole rigmarole is went through again without ever letting the changes bed in or assess whether it worked. At the end of the year, results are up or results are down, behaviour is better or behaviour is worse, attendance is up or attendance is down and there is no godly way of working out what if anything you did had any real impact.

I know one of my local high schools is fanatical about the Kagan Method and extols it’s virtues with a missionary zeal. This is integrated throughout the school in every class and every lesson in every subject. Despite which it gets a solitary mention on the schools website halfway through a lengthy pdf that I only found by actively searching for it. Can we really say the parents at that school have given any real informed consent about how their children are taught. 99% of parents will have no idea what Kagan is, and of the 1% that do 99% will have no strong feelings one way or the other.

Now the school itself is “Outstanding” and nationally renowned. It’s Outstanding. It uses Kagan. Is it Outstanding because it is Kagan? Is it Outstanding despite it being Kagan? Is it Outstanding regardless of Kagan? Who can say, if we knew then we could perhaps improve education across the country.

Dominic Cummings understands this

The arrogance and ignorance encapsulated in that statement is classic Sheldrake.

Cummings whole approach to educational policy was to implement whatever he thought (without much basis) were good ideas without the informed consent of the parents or the buy-in from the teachers; a nationwide, generational experiment ran by Cummings on every children in the country with no regard for the prior research and no way of assessing its impact divorced from everything else going on educationally and socially. Goldacre dared to suggest that running a pilot study along RCT lines first might be sensible and so rapidly got showed the door.

If you as a parent disagree with the sole use of phonics to teach reading and writing, tough, it is now a legal requirement that every state school teach it just that way. If you as a teacher look at the kids in front of you and think “you know, with this class and these kids I really should do it another way” then your job is at risk and disciplinary action will soon follow.

[Gfamily]

But you think that if a teacher thinks "this might work, I'll give it a go - and see if it works better", then another letter has to go in each child's bag and a follow up letter two days later.
Like, that's going to be popular.

[Little waster]

No. I think it is inevitable that there would be political fallout for an administration that was reported to be conducting experiments without the parents' consent. If a parent chose a school because they believed reading was taught by a method they liked, and were then told 'no, we've been told by the Dept of Education that we must..' that would be very unpopular.

Dominic Cummings is a political adviser and is attuned to these things.

You really haven’t been paying attention to the Tories educational policies of the last decade have you?

[sheldrake]

No. I think it is inevitable that there would be political fallout for an administration that was reported to be conducting experiments without the parents' consent. If a parent chose a school because they believed reading was taught by a method they liked, and were then told 'no, we've been told by the Dept of Education that we must..' that would be very unpopular.

Dominic Cummings is a political adviser and is attuned to these things.

You really haven’t been paying attention to the Tories educational policies of the last decade have you?

The things the tories did were very popular with parents, just not with teaching unions. To the point where a Labour voting friend of mine praised the new focus on grammar, spelling and punctuation for a solid 5 minutes as a rebuttal to my point about how standards had declined despite increased budgets.. then changed the subject when I pointed out it was a Gove/Cummings initiative that unions and education officials had complained about.

[Gfamily]

No. I think it is inevitable that there would be political fallout for an administration that was reported to be conducting experiments without the parents' consent. If a parent chose a school because they believed reading was taught by a method they liked, and were then told 'no, we've been told by the Dept of Education that we must..' that would be very unpopular.

Dominic Cummings is a political adviser and is attuned to these things.

You really haven’t been paying attention to the Tories educational policies of the last decade have you?

The things the tories did were very popular with parents, just not with teaching unions. To the point where a Labour voting friend of mine praised the new focus on grammar, spelling and punctuation for a solid 5 minutes as a rebuttal to my point about how standards had declined despite increased budgets.. then changed the subject when I pointed out it was a Gove/Cummings initiative that unions and education officials had complained about.

I don't know if you're familiar with the term "if you can't measure what's valuable, you give value to what you can measure".

Is there any specific value in an 11 year old being able to describe what a "fronted adverbial" is? Being unsure of what it means, a parent may be impressed that their child got a mark in their SATS for knowing - but is that really useful, or is it a phrase that can be used in writing a sentence, whether or not you know what it is?

Lots of things may be popular, but they're not necessarily helpful.

If "what is popular" becomes more important than "what is good", then we are lost - and Cummings has led idiots like you down that path.

[sheldrake]

You really haven’t been paying attention to the Tories educational policies of the last decade have you?

The things the tories did were very popular with parents, just not with teaching unions. To the point where a Labour voting friend of mine praised the new focus on grammar, spelling and punctuation for a solid 5 minutes as a rebuttal to my point about how standards had declined despite increased budgets.. then changed the subject when I pointed out it was a Gove/Cummings initiative that unions and education officials had complained about.

I don't know if you're familiar with the term "if you can't measure what's valuable, you give value to what you can measure".

Is there any specific value in an 11 year old being able to describe what a "fronted adverbial" is? Being unsure of what it means, a parent may be impressed that their child got a mark in their SATS for knowing - but is that really useful, or is it a phrase that can be used in writing a sentence, whether or not you know what it is?

Lots of things may be popular, but they're not necessarily helpful.

If "what is popular" becomes more important than "what is good", then we are lost - and Cummings has led idiots like you down that path.

Yes, I think there is value in a child learning the formal grammar of their own language. I think that can help them think about it more analytically, and gives them a framework that they can help fit other languages into when the time comes to learn them. You are a bad judge of what is good as well as of what is popular.

It's silly that you keep calling me an idiot. It makes you sound petulant.

I knew many posts ago that you were going to keep charging down the path of the parents consent being irrelevant to you because you were sure they were wrong. Technocracies always come to a horrible end.

[Ken McKenzie]

The things the tories did were very popular with parent

I can understand why the entire 2017 electoral campaign and its postmortems has been erased from your memory, but that is absolute bollocks.

Why, if what Gove and Cummings did was so ace, was Gove sacked from the DoE and Cummings banished from Government? Why did the Government then spend considerable time and effort (although not enough) trying to fix some of their changes, particularly to teacher recruitment (still screwed as a result of their weird animus towards university teacher training) and various forms of pastoral support.

Better still, simply come to my kids' primary school at any 3:15 in the safe Tory seat I live in and smarm to them 'Of course, the things the Tories did to education are very popular with parents'.

Perhaps you can help with the f.cking fundraiser to pay for the SEN assistants we need. We could charge the parents a quid a pop to chuck things at you whilst you inform them that they're out of touch elitists for not agreeing with you.

[sheldrake]

The things the tories did were very popular with parent

I can understand why the entire 2017 electoral campaign and its postmortems has been erased from your memory, but that is absolute bollocks.

Why, if what Gove and Cummings did was so ace, was Gove sacked from the DoE and Cummings banished from Government? Why did the Government then spend considerable time and effort (although not enough) trying to fix some of their changes, particularly to teacher recruitment (still screwed as a result of their weird animus towards university teacher training) and various forms of pastoral support.

Gove lasted 4 years in the post and was moved as part of a wide-ranging reshuffle based on the judgement of Cameron. I don't think Cameron's judgement is a good benchmark.

Better still, simply come to my kids' primary school at any 3:15 in the safe Tory seat I live in and smarm to them 'Of course, the things the Tories did to education are very popular with parents'.

Perhaps you can help with the f.cking fundraiser to pay for the SEN assistants we need. We could charge the parents a quid a pop to chuck things at you whilst you inform them that they're out of touch elitists for not agreeing with you.

You're obviously living in a different community to me and have forgotten that the tories won the last 4 general elections.

[JQH]

Duplicate post

[JQH]

We need a "like" button.
For Ken's post I mean.

[snoozeofreason]

Is there any specific value in an 11 year old being able to describe what a "fronted adverbial" is?

I must admit that I didn't know what a fronted adverbial was until I read your post and Googled it, but now that I have I can see that it is quite a useful thing to know, because it's a construction that so frequently appears in literature - "In the licorice fields at Pontefract/My love and I did meet", "By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept", and so on. I am not sure I would have wanted to learn it at 11, but certainly it would have been useful to know it somewhere around that age, because it is a useful thing to have a name for when you get asked to discuss literary texts and explain how writers achieve particular effects.

Anyway it is now my favourite phrase, and I shall be dropping it into conversation as often as I can, just to show how clever I am.

[snoozeofreason]

Damn hit quote button instead of edit. I am obviously not clever at all.

[JQH]

I did the same thing. Obviously catching.

[Ken McKenzie]

Gove lasted 4 years in the post and was moved as part of a wide-ranging reshuffle based on the judgement of Cameron.

BING! You don't know the answer.

Here's a tip, sheldrake. This is the wrong forum to pretend to expertise you don't have.

[Gfamily]

The things the tories did were very popular with parents, just not with teaching unions. To the point where a Labour voting friend of mine praised the new focus on grammar, spelling and punctuation for a solid 5 minutes as a rebuttal to my point about how standards had declined despite increased budgets.. then changed the subject when I pointed out it was a Gove/Cummings initiative that unions and education officials had complained about.

I don't know if you're familiar with the term "if you can't measure what's valuable, you give value to what you can measure".

Is there any specific value in an 11 year old being able to describe what a "fronted adverbial" is? Being unsure of what it means, a parent may be impressed that their child got a mark in their SATS for knowing - but is that really useful, or is it a phrase that can be used in writing a sentence, whether or not you know what it is?

Lots of things may be popular, but they're not necessarily helpful.

If "what is popular" becomes more important than "what is good", then we are lost - and Cummings has led idiots like you down that path.

Yes, I think there is value in a child learning the formal grammar of their own language. I think that can help them think about it more analytically, and gives them a framework that they can help fit other languages into when the time comes to learn them.

English has a very informal grammar, and the fact that schools have to teach children that using "fronted adverbials" in their writing wins points does not teach them to use it analytically. It's a stylistic thing, mistaking it for a grammar thing is a mistake.

You are a bad judge of what is good as well as of what is popular.

You overestimate your judgement of what is good

It's silly that you keep calling me an idiot. It makes you sound petulant.

I'm sorry, but you keep on proving that you are an idiot.

I knew many posts ago that you were going to keep charging down the path of the parents consent being irrelevant to you because you were sure they were wrong. Technocracies always come to a horrible end.

Wrong, wrong, missed apostrophe, wrong, wrong.

[sheldrake]

Gove lasted 4 years in the post and was moved as part of a wide-ranging reshuffle based on the judgement of Cameron.

BING! You don't know the answer.

Here's a tip, sheldrake. This is the wrong forum to pretend to expertise you don't have.

Ho ho ho. This is not the erudite place some people imagine it to be.

Gove annoyed the educational establishment and Nick Clegg. He held the post longer than anybody since David Blunkett.

[Little waster]

The things the tories did were very popular with parents,

Given this is from the same poster who claimed the Irish Sea border was very popular with the DUP, i’ll treat this similarly unevidenced claim with all the respect it is due.


But for arguments sakes let’s assume it is, even then it doesn’t answer the internal incoherency of your argument that any attempt to formally assess whether one teaching intervention works better than another is impossible, inhumane and undemocratic but it is OK for a technocrat like Cummings to unilaterally unleash a whole blizzard of them without any parental consent, reference to the evidence or attempt to assess impact.

Nor have you explained to me how I, as a parent, can opt my child out of Cummings mad scheme without recourse to an expensive private school I can come nowhere near affording.

[Ken McKenzie]

Gove annoyed the educational establishment and Nick Clegg

Which 'educational establishment'? There are a number of competing sets of interests in education, sheldrake, a rather simple point that even you ought to have been able to pick up. I often wish there was a unified 'educational establishment' of the kind the remedial end of the Right fondly imagine and then getting people to actually work together would be less like herding cats.

As for the idea that 'annoying Nick Clegg' would have got someone with Gove's clout amongst key media contacts and funders sacked from Government, well it's certainly a point of view.

I know you don't know, you know you don't know, everyone knows you don't know. Let's move on.

[sheldrake]

The things the tories did were very popular with parents,

Given this is from the same poster who claimed the Irish Sea border was very popular with the DUP, i’ll treat this similarly unevidenced claim with all the respect it is due.

The tories won a majority in 2015 after 5 years of coalition and 4 years of Gove in charge of education.

But for arguments sakes let’s assume it is, even then it doesn’t answer the internal incoherency of your argument that any attempt to formally assess whether one teaching intervention works better than another is impossible, inhumane and undemocratic but it is OK for a technocrat like Cummings to unilaterally unleash a whole blizzard of them without any parental consent, reference to the evidence or attempt to assess impact.

Nor have you explained to me how I, as a parent, can opt my child out of Cummings mad scheme without recourse to an expensive private school I can come nowhere near affording.

Voucher schemes and parental choice would be a great help to the poor here.

[snoozeofreason]

Is there any specific value in an 11 year old being able to describe what a "fronted adverbial" is?

I must admit that I didn't know what a fronted adverbial was until I read your post and Googled it, but now that I have I can see that it is quite a useful thing to know, because it's a construction that so frequently appears in literature - "In the licorice fields at Pontefract/My love and I did meet", "By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept", and so on. I am not sure I would have wanted to learn it at 11, but certainly it would have been useful to know it somewhere around that age, because it is a useful thing to have a name for when you get asked to discuss literary texts and explain how writers achieve particular effects.

Anyway it is now my favourite phrase, and I shall be dropping it into conversation as often as I can, just to show how clever I am.

Elder son is home for the holidays, so I have just wasted half an hour of his time and mine trying to sort out how fronted adverbials work in Japanese (that being what he studies when he isn't at home). The answer seems to be that, as a consistently head-final language, Japanese normally has adverbials in the fronted position. If you reversed the order and placed them at the end of the phrase, it wouldn't sound literary, as the mirror image equivalent does in English, it would just sound informal, the way a sentence might if you hadn't really worked out what you wanted to say before you started out on it. More fronted adverbial news will come your way as soon as we have it.

[sheldrake]

Gove annoyed the educational establishment and Nick Clegg

Which 'educational establishment'? There are a number of competing sets of interests in education, sheldrake, a rather simple point that even you ought to have been able to pick up. I often wish there was a unified 'educational establishment' of the kind the remedial end of the Right fondly imagine and then getting people to actually work together would be less like herding cats.

They didnt have to be a single unified organisation to share certain philosophies and interests.

As for the idea that 'annoying Nick Clegg' would have got someone with Gove's clout amongst key media contacts and funders sacked from Government, well it's certainly a point of view.

He was the lib dem leader in a con/lib coalition that Cameron mistakenly expected to continue after the next election. Yes he could get people reshuffled.

I know you don't know, you know you don't know, everyone knows you don't know. Let's move on.

I know and you dont. Prove otherwise.