Mike Russell, Scotland’s Education Secretary, admitted this week that he was not “a model of perfection.” An increasing number of Russell’s colleagues from the three opposition parties are now more loudly letting it be known that they agree.

The calls for Russell to resign his post have become more frequent — and insistent — after he deliberately misled parliament by telling them in June that the funding for Scottish universities wouldn’t be cut in the next year’s budget, all the while knowing that more than £9 million in cuts were actually planned. He is also fighting off accusations from Liberal Democrats, Labour and the Conservative Party MSPs that his strained relationship with the people in the college sector led to the resignation of the Chairman of Glasgow’s Stow College Kirk Ramsay.

Although Russell apologized for delivering the wrong figures to members of parliament, that hasn’t seemed to mollify the opposition. Holyrood Parliament members from the Labour and Tory Party have outright called for him to tender his resignation. The leaders of the Liberal Democrats were more measured in their remarks, but still raised the question about whether he continues to be the right man to head the country’s education system.

Labour’s Neil Findlay said: “I think it’s time for him to go.”

Findlay said the college funding system is “opaque and complex”, with money being cut and transferred across different agencies.

He added: “It is a blatant attempt to try and camouflage the reality of what is going on by creating a funding shambles which is difficult to follow or effectively scrutinise.

Ramsay’s resignation seems to have sharpened attacks on Russell. Russell called on Ramsay to step down after news that the chairman taped a conversation between Russell and other college chiefs came to light. In his resignation letter, Ramsay said he didn’t want to continue after Russell’s “unwarranted personal attack.”

Ramsay left his job at Stow College in Glasgow claiming there was a gross over-reaction to his decision to record a large private meeting where Mr Russell made a speech on the future of the college sector. In the Scottish Parliament, Labour and Tories called for him to step down, while the Liberal Democrats asked whether he is the right man for the job.

There is as yet no movement from the SNP leadership, but the backbencher support for Russell remains high. According to the Irvine Herald, SNP MSP George Adam replied that the claims of Russell’s bullying behavior were overstated, since – as he put it – he has yet to meet anyone who was cowering in fear of the Education Secretary.

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UK Secretary of Education Michael Gove defended his commitment to rigorous testing in British schools as stemming from the fact that good exam results provide motivation to students and encourage them to continue working hard at their studies. Speaking at the Independent Academies Association conference earlier this week, Gove said that testing satisfies the part of the human brain that is “hard-wired” to look for barriers to hurdle and challenges to overcome.

He quoted American researcher Daniel T Willingham when he said that succeeding in a task that requires application provides students with “a pleasurable rush,” thus priming them to aim further and strive harder.

Quoting from Mr Willingham’s book “Why Students Don’t Like School” Mr Gove says he agrees that students are motivated to learn if they enjoy “the pleasurable rush that comes from successful thought”.

Mr Gove is set to say this is what exam success provides: “There is no feeling of satisfaction as deep or sustained as knowing we have succeeded through hard work at a task which is the upper end, or just beyond, our normal or expected level of competence.

Exams also serve those who don’t do well by making it easier to lay out study plans. Underperforming on an exam allows students to focus on the areas in which they need the most work. Thus, by practicing more and working harder, they will be able to meet and exceed the scores put up by their peers.

This is also why, in order to provide this kind of motivation, the exams must be challenging. Gove said that easy tests will prove in the long run to be worse than no tests at all. An easy exam is, at best, a chore, and passing one provides students with no motivations; even good exam results won’t spur them to push themselves. Furthermore, easy exams won’t allow both students and teachers to identify the areas of struggle, and thus they can’t be used to help kids improve.

Mr Gove is also set to tell the London conference that “examinations are a key weapon of progressives everywhere”, claiming that external tests are fairer than teacher assessment: “I am, as it happens, a huge fan of teacher assessment, properly designed and administered but teacher assessment alone cannot bring the benefits proper external testing can secure.”

Mr Gove is also expected to argue that school league tables have helped to overcome prejudice against schools in disadvantaged areas.

After being appraised on Gove’s speech, the head of the National Union of Teachers Christine Blower dismissed his assertions, and said that the Minister is misguided in characterizing GCSEs as “easy.”

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Another example of social media’s power to influence education policy has come from a group of UK head teachers who have joined together on Twitter — as the Heads’ Roundtable – to bring real reform to the education system in Britain. After being announced in The Guardian, the group’s Twitter account jumped to nearly 2,500 followers overnight and continues to grow.

Inspired by the GCSE grading controversy which has been playing out since this spring — and which drove an outpouring of protest from teachers, students and administrators online and off — blogger and entrepreneur Ian Gilbert came up with the idea of harnessing that outrage to achieve a real change in education policy.

Recognizing that there exists a limit to how much online venting can truly accomplish, Gilbert decided to bring together a group of secondary head teachers and form a new pressure group that aims to bring Labour into power, and current shadow education secretary Stephen Twigg out of the shadows and atop the Education Department.

When they met to discuss their agenda with the Guardian’s reporter, Gilbert explained that they were mainly guided by the idea that the education policy being implemented by the Coalition was failing teachers, administrators, schools and students. He understands that much of the frustration currently being expressed by professionals in the education field is partially based on a feeling that the only viable alternative offered by the Labour Party wasn’t really all that viable.

So, the group has set themselves a very ambitious goal. Not only will they campaign for Labour during the next general election, but will also work to put their own stamp on the party’s education policy.

The group – which has no name yet – met at the Guardian’s offices to discuss their ideas. So what is good in the current landscape? The heads, from a mixture of maintained and academy schools, who were joined by Dr Phil Wood from Leicester University’s school of education, cite the focus on disadvantaged pupils and the release of data as being the most positive developments.

Those in the room found plenty to criticize about the policies pursued by both parties. Coming in for equal amount of derision was the newly proposed English Baccalaureate Certificates, and Labour’s pet certification: the Tech Bacc.

“We are moving back to a ‘sheep and goats system’ that will stratify society in terms of attainment and potential,” said Ros McMullen, principal of the David Young community academy in Leeds.

“We need to be able to measure improvement and this requires an objective measure where students’ attainment is judged against an unmoving standard, not one where only a certain percentage of students are allowed to hit certain grades. People should be talking about this.”

To streamline their policy goals, the group created a six-point plan for reforming education:

1) Schools should be assessed in a range of ways, not just judged by the numbers achieving specific grades and levels in examinations and tests respectively;

2) Ofsted should be replaced by local partnerships that would hold schools to account and help them to improve;

3) The curriculum and assessment should be taken out of political control and given to an independent agency (under licence for 20 years);

4) The government should encourage small families of local schools in preference to large national chains;

5) “Norm referencing” in exam grading is not fair, ie capping the number of students who can achieve a certain grade. There shouldn’t be a cap on what individual pupils can achieve;

6) School accountability measures should encourage collaboration between schools and explicitly develop systems leadership.

Interested parties can visit the Heads’ Roundtable website and follow the movement on Twitter at @HeadsRoundtable.

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In a column for The Daily Telegraph, James O’Shaughnessy writes that David Cameron was right to say that Britain stands at a crossroads. In a speech at the Conservative Party conference, Cameron said that unless the country places its focus on improving education, along with reducing welfare dependency and the national debt, this could be the beginning of Britain’s long-term decline.

It is no overstatement to say that English schools are mired in mediocrity. On last year’s league tables, 40% of schools were ranked merely satisfactory or worse. According to Sir Michael Wilshaw, the chief inspector of schools, even the word itself is somewhat of a fig-leaf, as the schools marked “satisfactory” often produce academic outcomes that are distinctly sub-par.

The question is, what steps can the Government take to put the country’s school system back on track?

The first piece of good news is that the academy programme is working. According to both the National Audit Office and the London School of Economics, failing schools that have been turned into academies under new sponsors are performing better than those that did not. So the expansion of the academies programme will help raise standards, as will the influence of innovative new free schools. But ultimately this policy was designed to turn round a few hundred schools, not for helping the thousands of schools that now need to improve.

O’Shaughnessy suggests that Gove start encouraging academies to organize into groups that will share a single mission and form one legal and financial entity. Recent data suggest that such groups maintain academic standards that are even higher than individual academies and bring a higher quality of education to students at their campuses.

Any government assistance to the academies and academy chains can generate great returns. For example, successful organizations could serve as training grounds for the next generation of educators, says O’Shaughnessy. Furthermore, that could serve as a solution of last resort for those schools that have been converted into academies yet are still failing. The management of such schools can be turned over to a successful chain for further overhaul.

Still, even supporting academy chains might not take the school system all the way from mediocrity to excellence. To do that, the Government must be open to all ideas — including those offered by the private sector. Any school that fails to improve within the boundaries of government oversight, should be thrown open to private sector operators.

 The school and its assets would stay in the charitable sector, but they would be able to access the expertise of private providers who would be paid by results. Any objections to the private sector trying where the state and voluntary sectors have failed should be dismissed for what they are – ideological prejudice. There are countless examples of the private sector delivering excellent services to citizens across the public sector, from the NHS to special educational needs provision. Mainstream schooling should be no different.

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In his speech at the annual UK Labour party conference, party leader Ed Miliband will be making a commitment to draw on his own state school background to guide his education policy. To the party faithful, Miliband promises that he will reform the academic system that he sees as failing nearly half of British youth that currently provides a second-rate vocational education of little use of the country’s employers.

At the conference to be held in Manchester, Miliband will say that unlike the plan put forward by the Tory party, which he deems as targeting “a narrower and narrower elite,” Labour wants to work to provide a real alternative to those who don’t end up going to university after graduating from secondary school. And in contrast to the educational initiative championed by Tony Blair meant to increase the percentage of British students enrolling in university, Miliband is instead calling for improvement in vocational education offered to students between the ages of 14 and 18.

Repeatedly drawing on his own experience at a London comprehensive – implicitly contrasting his own schooling with the Eton-educated David Cameron’s – he will say that although for a quarter of a century children successful at exams have found the world open up, for the remainder school has offered very little and they have found themselves written off.

His schooling at Haverstock school in north London taught him “a lot more than just how to pass exams”, he will say. “It taught people how to get on with each other, whoever they are and wherever they’re from. I will always be grateful because I know I would not be standing here today as leader of the Labour party without my comprehensive school education.”

Miliband’s background as a son of Jewish immigrants escaping from Nazi-occupied Europe will play a part in drawing a distinction between him and Cameron. He said that he owes his position today to the tolerance, understanding and support of his countrymen during the time his family struggled to establish itself. He said that his background played a part in understanding the needs of today’s students looking for a clear vocational path towards a good job and a career — something that will serve as the goal for a new qualification for 18-year-olds called the Technical Baccalaureate.

In order to make sure that multiple paths are available to those who obtain the new qualification, it will also require a study of mathematics and English until students turn 18.

He will also propose a German style shakeup of post-18 apprenticeships, in which companies, on an industry or regional basis, can sign legally enforceable agreements requiring all participating firms to pay a levy to cover the cost of training, so – ending the scourge of freeloading companies refusing to pay the costs of apprenticeships, but stealing skilled staff from firms that do train.

He will also give businesses control of the £1bn budget of the Skills Agency.

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Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg is attempting to explain to his Liberal Democrat supporters why he stepped back from his party’s campaign pledge not to allow any increases in university tuition.

The Daily Telegraph reported that while recording a political speech to be broadcast during the Lib Dem Party Conference that will take place this week, Clegg said he made the pledge without being fully cognizant of the financial situation facing the country, and now believes that the plan championed by his Tory partners in government — to triple the maximum tuition universities can charge — was the correct path all along.

Clegg also admits that many of his supporters and fellow party members criticized his choice to support the tuition hike and other actions of Government. In the video he said that the promise was made “with the best of intention,” but without full information, and promised to never again make promises that he wasn’t 100% certain his party could fulfill.

He will say: “I’d like to take this opportunity to put a few things straight….Many of you tell me you’re glad that at a time of real economic uncertainty, we put aside our political differences to provide our country with stable leadership. But, I also meet people who are disappointed and angry that we couldn’t keep all our promises – above all our promise not to raise tuition fees.”

Keeping university fees at the same level they had always been would have cost too much money at the time when the treasury was already sapped by the ongoing Europe-wide recession. However, there’s no good way to tiptoe about the fact the pledge was made and wasn’t kept, and for that he is sorry, he added.

The fortunes of the Liberal Democrat party are closely tied to the issue of tuition fees, as Clegg’s acquiescence to having them tripled mere months after the new Government took office so alienated his base that subsequent polls placed the party’s support at less than 10%. There are some who are speculating that the party might not survive the next general election scheduled to take place in 2015.

Clegg said that it was impossible to continue avoiding the disappointment expressed by his constituents, and he made an independent decision to use the platform provided by the Party Conference to apologize for not keeping his word.

Despite opposition from his advisers, Mr Clegg is keen to “draw a line” about speculation over his leadership at next week’s Liberal Democrat conference and believes the time has now come to directly address critics within his party.

Senior sources say that Mr Clegg is not “expecting absolution” but believes it is now time to “fess up and move on.”

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This comes a week after the Home Office stripped London Metropolitan University of its power to sponsor to foreign students following the conclusion of an investigation which revealed a quarter of LMU students should not have been let into the country.

The UK Border Agency is also being blamed for the problem as it appear they abandoned the previous slate of immigration checks before the new monitoring system was properly in place.

Margaret Hodge is chairwoman of the Public Accounts Committee:

“It is extraordinary that the UK Border Agency introduced its new points based system for students before proper controls were in place to replace the old ones.

“The result of the Agency’s poorly planned and ill-thought out course of action was chaos: an immediate high level of abuse of the new system and a surge in the number of student visas.

“In 2009 the number of migrants who abused the student route to work rather than study went up by as much as 40,000 to 50,000.

“Since then, the Agency has been playing catch-up, continually adjusting the rules and procedures in order to try and tackle abuse.”

The new system placed the onus on sponsoring institutions to demonstrate that their students were in the country legitimately, which replaced the previous system that saw immigration officers assess foreign students with spot checks and interviews to determine authenticity. The gap between the old system being abandoned and the new system becoming fully operational lasted nearly a year according to the PAC, and this gap created a surge in fraudulently obtained visas and abuse of the system.

Mrs Hodge said: “Despite the surge in the number of people abusing the student route, the Agency has not done enough to remove those who are here illegally.

“Even where it has been told by colleges that so-called students are not studying, it has been unacceptably slow to act.

The new focus on reducing student immigration numbers is in part because they represent the largest immigration category. Removing the illegal entries is seen as key to the government’s ability to meet its Coalition pledge to reduce net migration below 100,000 a year by 2015.

However the crackdown is also being criticized by some for its potential to damage the reputation the UK has for providing top quality higher education for foreign students, and the loss of these students will cause financial hardship to many universities. Richard Bacon, MP for South Norfolk, said that it was a mistake to treat foreign students as unwelcome interlopers.

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Graham Brady, Chairman of the England’s 1922 Committee (a committee of backbench Conservative Members of Parliament), has gone on the record in support of giving local authorities more of a say in education decisions, shifting the power traditionally held by the central government. Graham has long been a promoter of the nascent “free-school” movement in the country, believing that the independently-run institutions could go a long way towards solving the issues with the country’s education system.

But Brady is saying that the rules that prohibit the new schools from practicing selective admission is severely limiting their potential to make a difference in their communities. He specifically mentioned a situation with private grammar schools where the selection criteria is so stringent that they’ve come to be thought of as elitist. The reality of the situation is that since government is unable to provide enough grammar school spaces to England’s kids, the competitions for the spaces available is bound to get fierce.

The opening of selective schools has been banned in England since the Labour party introduced legislation to do so in 1998. Ten years later, this move was also endorsed by the front bench of the Conservative party, which promoted Brady to his post as the shadow Europe minister. Fewer than 200 grammar schools currently operate in the country after most of them were converted to non-selection-based comprehensives nearly 50 years ago.

In recent months, some councils have attempted to use loopholes in the schools admissions code to expand the number of grammar places – building “annexes” of existing schools in new towns several miles away.

But Mr Brady said this failed to go far enough as it still blocked any expansion in areas that failed to contain existing grammar schools.

“You can select for a ballet school, or for a music college, but if you say, ‘We’d like a school that specialises in the more academic end of the scale,’ then that’s forbidden except in those places where it already exists,” he said.

He said that with the government already moving in the direction of local accountability, maintaining the ban on selective admission simply limits parents’ choices at a time when increased choice is what government policy is meant to promote. He said that the reason grammars have become so selective is because with so few operating, parents are more eager than ever to secure a place. In some top schools, up to 10 children are competing for a single classroom spot.

School choice has been at the forefront of England’s education debate in light of the fact that a recent shortage in primary school places have led to many children being placed in primary schools to which they did not even apply as local councils have struggled to accommodate a growing primary-aged population.

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The fixed pay scale, strongly supported by England’s teachers unions, which standardizes teacher salaries across the nation, has resulted in severe understaffing and possibly led to poorer student performance, researchers find. The data shows that schools’ inability to recruit and retain quality teachers, especially in areas where private schools provide more competitive salaries, might have lowered the average GCSE results by as much as one grade level.

Students attending schools in Manchester, Birmingham and the Home Counties were particularly impacted, according to the lead researcher, Professor Carol Propper of Bristol University. Overall, the insistence of the unions that uniform salary levels be preserved in all regions had a high likelihood of substantially retarding student outcomes.

The findings come at a time when the debate about public sector pay has reached fever pitch. Chancellor George Osborne has already announced his intention to overhaul the salary system for all public sector workers, including teachers, and would set salary ranges based on those paid to private sector workers employed in the region. The coalition government said that the changes would not only make the public sector job market more competitive, it would also lead to increased economic growth.

The proposal has already drawn threats to strike from unions representing the workers affected, but according to Professor Popper the opposition to the reforms is wrong-headed — especially in the education sector.

But Prof Propper said: “The nature of teaching in England means a large proportion of the work is discretionary – time spent lesson planning, engagement in after-school programmes, time invested in particular children – so there is scope for reductions in effort in response to lower relative wages.
“Our findings present strong evidence that the centralised wage setting of teachers’ pay has a negative impact on pupils’ learning.”

Average classroom teachers currently receive £34,700 a year.

Although the salary levels for teachers are the same across England, there have already been some concessions to the realities of both the job market and the general cost of living. Teachers employed in London and its environs receive an additional £5,000 in pay to cover the additional expense of living in the city.

In the latest study, academics analysed exam results from almost 3,300 schools staffed by 200,000 teachers between 2002 and 2008. They also compared staff salaries in schools to average wage levels among other adults working within a 30km radius.

The study showed that a 10 per cent increase in the local average wage outside schools – relative to teachers’ salaries – resulted in a “loss of one exam grade per pupil in the high-stakes end of secondary school examinations”.

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Michael Gove was busy working on a major overhaul to the UK education when his radical plans were leaked. His idea to bring back the O-Level and scrap GCSEs in a bid to raise standards predictably drew the ire of teaching unions and Liberal Democrats in Parliament. Gove was swiftly summoned to the Commons to explain, but instead of backing down as seen so often in politics, Gove simply laid out his compelling plans that would involve scrapping the much hated and restrictive National Curriculum and move back towards a rigorous O-Level with a broader and tougher syllabus.

The Telegraph counters the critics’ arguments that Gove is taking education back in time:

It is the future with which Mr Gove is obsessed: namely, building a nation with the skills and knowledge to compete in the 21st century, and rekindling social mobility by providing bright pupils with the education to match their intellect. To that end, he is borrowing – as with his similar remodelling of the primary school curriculum – not from the days of blackboards and mortar boards, but from the best practices of Britain’s global rivals.

The advent of GCSEs and the scrapping of grammar schools heralded the dawn of a one-size-fits all exam system that was championed by advocates of universal mediocrity in the name of equality. The Telegraph argues that what the current system did was fail pupils at both ends of the intellectual spectrum.

It is not just the quality of the exams that is the problem, but the overly prescriptive, teach-to-the-test culture that they promote, which sees schools focus remorselessly on dragging pupils over the barrier between a D and a C grade, rather than cultivating a wider spirit of learning and inquiry.

Gove’s plans include creating a single exam board for each subject; an idea which should end the competition between exam boards to offer, and sell, the easiest possible exam.

Last summer, 23 per cent more youngsters had good GCSE pass rates than in 1995-96. In part, this reflects real progress but it also reflects the fact that exams have been made easier.

Whether Gove can successfully bulldoze his plans through a hostile force consisting of teachers unions already prepared to strike over pension changes, and Liberal Democrats, who are ostensibly his Coalition partners and have previously shown themselves willing to dissolve the partnership if they don’t get their own way on pet issues, remains to be seen. One thing is for certain though, Gove is probably the most dynamic and driven Education Secretary Britain has seen in the post war era and perhaps sadly for education is endearing himself so much to Tory loyalists that he may be promoted to weightier office before completing his education revolution.

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