Ye Olde Annual 'Three Month Holiday' Post: special Adonis Edition

Every year, teachers and university lecturers are chaffed by friends and loved ones about their 'three month holiday'. Extrapolating from the sudden presence of children on the streets for 5-6 weeks, and dimly remembered long hazy undergraduate summers spent snorting marijuana and seeing Barclay James Harvest at the 100 Club (sub: check details?), they're under the impression that educators simply down tools in about mid-April, swan off to their agreeable second homes in Tuscany/the Hamptons, and read Iris Murdoch novels or translate Das Kapital into Serbian free verse.

This year, we have the added joy of an ermine-clad lord weighing in. You remember Andrew Adonis, don't you? That wonderful night in 1997 when after months of stump speeches and solid campaigning  he overturned a massive Tory majority in the constituency of…

Oh wait.

That was Stephen Twigg. Andrew Adonis was one of those white men in suits who went to a boarding school, then Oxford, did a short stint as a research fellow – having written a D.Phil on Politics and Aristocracy – and after a few years on the FT and the Observer, fortuitously found himself doing Politics amongst the Aristocracy courtesy of being made a Baron and a government minister by his fellow private-school/Oxford chum Tony Blair. It's almost as though sex, class and whiteness open the door to power and privilege…

So having never troubled himself to get elected to anything other than Oxford City Council, Andrew found himself in charge of education policy and landed with a permanent vote in the British legislature until he dies, and £300 per day just for turning up. Turning up, that is, on a schedule that makes his imagined university look positively Stakhanovite: roughly 130-145 days per year. Still, nice work if you can get it. But not the kind of lifestyle that entitles Andy to make comments like this:

My colleagues around the country have been slightly riled by this: the very best is a long, detailed exposition by Christina de Bellaigue, who knows the Oxford system inside out. Andy was a Junior Research Fellow in Oxford in the late 80s. Oxford wasn't representative of the HE section then (or now); a JRF was an untypical position with quite low formal expectations; HE was nowhere near as bureaucratised then as it is now; student numbers were much, much lower. And as Jonathan Healey of Oxford University points out, Dr Adonis's outputs were not exactly multi-volume works, despite being employed primarily as a research specialist.

One was a book based on his dissertation; the others are rather ephemeral – and not all peer-reviewed – to the point at which my research committee, at my not-even-in-the-league-tables HE institution, would be tutting and making pointed remarks about REF-ability.

Poor Baron Lord Doctor Adonis or however he's titled seems to have missed the expansion and bureaucratisation of higher education, despite having been the Father of Fees and the Minister for Academic Mayhem under New Labour. Many better academics than me are pointing out on Twitter that the '3 month holiday' is the period in which we: a) write new lectures for next year; b) get research done (the stuff that feeds into teaching and attracts funding, the only thing promotion and hiring panels give a stuff about; c; go through the results of every single student in the institution to work out whether they've passed or graduated this year; d) do the marking; e) do the resit marking; f) counsel students who've failed or just want to see us (79 appointments over the last month for me); present at conferences to make sure we're still current; examine other universities' courses to make sure they're up to scratch; attend administrative committees; sit on progression and results boards (2 in August in my case) and so on ad infinitum. And let's spare a thought for my colleagues on courses like nursing and medicine: while Andrew coped with 8 week terms, mine are 15 weeks long (with marking and prep in between) and health courses just carry on. Spare a thought too for all those hourly-paid and 10-month contract academics who produce the amazing new work required just to get a foot in the door, while not being paid for a single hour outside the classroom. No holiday pay, no pension, no lab space, no research hours, no payment for helping students outside the class: and still they get the books written. Like me, they will be judged on the quality of their research output, regardless of their working conditions or institutional structures. Was Lord Adonis measured and monitored in this way? I very much suspect not.

Although anecdotes aren't data, I thought I'd share my working situation with you. I'm pretty ordinary: I'm a course leader (which doesn't bring cash with it, just 150 hours to design and administer the whole damn thing). My contract theoretically divides 1597 hours p.a. between teaching, research, scholarly activity, administration and the rest. I counted up almost everything I do and found myself doing 2200 hours, and sent it off to the faculty committee so that they could take away some duties and make my workload conform to contract. Instead, they left every single duty on the sheet, but invented lower hourly tariffs. This year, they have decided that I can write a book – while being permanently present in my shared office of 14 people, and available to students at all times – in 30 hours. The fact is that all universities rely on academics and support staff putting in enormous amounts of unpaid and unrecorded labour simply because some of it pleasant and much of it will benefit the students that we care about. What's shocking is that they're happy to record some of it: while they've fiddled my workload data to falsify the stats, they've cheerfully left it significantly over the contracted hours because they know that I and my colleagues are too conscientious to leave work undone.

Despite my contract saying I'm entitled to 4 working weeks of 'unbroken' leave, boards are scheduled throughout August, and faculty events throughout September. Today I attended a research seminar and wrote a conference proposal; yesterday I assisted with a student writing skills event and wrote another proposal. The day before, I went to the Faculty Learning and Teaching Conference. Last week I attended two conferences and marked a lot of resits (more to come). I'm off next week to attend the board of another HEI in my role as an external examiner for two courses: before I get there I have to read all the essays submitted for 12 modules, if they ever arrive, then write a report about the teaching, the curriculum, the feedback and the courses' suitability. Then there are the PhD students who don't go away for three months either. We have a new VLE launching in September: before then, I've got to learn how to use it, transfer everything from the old one, and design new teaching methods utilising its whizzy new features – and that's in addition to writing an entirely new module (15 new lectures on 20 new texts, 15 new seminar designs, assembling primary materials), sorting rooming out and organising my subject's Welcome Week activities. I have a PhD to examine. We also have the Course Committee findings to address, an external examiner's report to which to respond, some troubling Equalities and Diversity committee statistics to look into, two literature festivals to help organise, the Estates Committee meetings to attend, school outreach events to do, journal articles to write, book research to do, grant applications to write and union members to advise – often about workload worries, unironically. Then there are the students, who work long, long hours in their own jobs and rely on us to be available to see them at any time – and we do, because we like them and want them to do well. Our teaching hours, by the way, are 9-9.

I get to work at 8 a.m. on many days, and leave 12 hours later. My boss is usually there before me and usually still there after I go home. My management's response – from their private offices and company limos – is to announce a crackdown because we're never there, and that those who choose to do their research at home are swinging the lead.

What's most pernicious about my managers and Andrew Adonis is their implication that academia is about 'product'. While he's a little disingenuous about his own output, he clearly only values what's tangible. He – and they – refuse to value the intangible work done. How can I demonstrate that I have made students think about new things in new ways? That I have in some small way changed their lives, my life, or my field of inquiry? Sure, there are cards and emails but I'm damned if I'll produce those as evidence. I could produce a paper a month and a new module per semester (actually I'll be introducing a new one in every semester for the next three years) but volume and quality are not the same thing, despite the efforts of REF, TEF and university managers – many of whom collect performance-related pay and credit when the metrics go in their favour, but are conspicuous by their absence when there's blame to be assigned.

I know, I know: plenty of people do longer hours in harder jobs for less pay, with more domineering and even less honest management surveillance. And yet I hope you understand why people go red and even cry when you say 'three-month holiday' to them with that cheesy grin. And to be very very clear: my students are not having a three-month holiday. All of them have jobs. More than I'd like are working full-time hours (i.e. 40 hours) while studying full-time too. During the summer break a lot of them work even more hours because they have families to support or huge debts. I continually nag them to take actual holidays for their own health, but for many it's just not possible. Surprisingly few of them have holiday homes in Chiantishire…

Lord Adonis is very much not one of them.

Postscript: Lord Adonis is also going to town on all those massively overpaid Vice-Chancellors and university executives. He is entirely right to do so and I support him on this every step of the way.

Education Education Privatisation…

Good evening and welcome to tonight's live-blogging extravaganza. First up we have Chris Cook of the Financial Times (owned of course by Pearson, a big name in private educational services), then Lord Andrew Adonis on the joys of Academy schooling, a policy he masterminded under New Labour, before the Tories ran with it. As you know, I'm not a partisan chap, but I can't help thinking that anything the Tories like is likely to have a maggot nestling in its apparently firm, sweet flesh.

Academies, as you may know, take schools away from the democratic and strategic management of an elected council and give it to a 'sponsor' who may be anyone other than (perhaps) Jimmy Savile. The relaunched schools get a big chunk of cash. They're given a get out of jail free card exempting them from Freedom of Information, teacher qualifications and even things like minimum food standards. There are no more parent or staff governors. Headteachers are left to negotiate everything from toilet roll supplies to legal services. The result is dependency on consultants and profit-making suppliers. The end result is privatisation.

This is deregulation: the concept which has worked so very well in banking, health and pensioner care…

In essence, Academy Schools are the educational equivalent of New Labour and its Tory successors. Instead of the collective wisdom embodied in responsive democracy, schools are run by a Great Leader: you can see the attraction to Blair, who continually presented himself as a visionary held back by bureaucracy and the reactionary mob. Likewise Lord Adonis. He's never been elected to anything. Precisely the opposite: he has a voice and a vote in the legislature for the rest of his life without the electorate ever getting to pass judgement on whether his public presence is welcome. Without wanting to get too personal, it's tempting to diagnose a Messianic tendency in anyone named after a God… Their successors Cameron, Gove, Pickles et al. have a similarly Messianic ideology. They aren't democrats, they're meritocrats - by which they mean that those who shoulder their way through in any one field must per se be experts in whatever they turn their hands to.

So we get Academies: sealed off from parental, staff, student and social oversight or critique. They spend huge amounts of money on PR, on casting around for convenient qualifications and exam regimes. They exclude messy students, either officially or structurally. They offer 'choice': the magic word for consumerist parents with the time, money and mortgage credit to play the game – and the rest are left to fend for themselves. This is how private schools succeed: they ruthlessly pick and choose their intake and pour money into tiny classes and social cachet. Bingo!

So that's the scene set. I'll update as the evening unfurls. A moment of disclosure: my employer is the sponsor of three schools.

So here I am. About to challenge this discourse while surrounded by everyone who can sack me: Vice-Chancellor, Executive members, the lot. Oh, and Paul Uppal MP, who shot me a fairly contemptuous look. Perhaps he's read the previous entry on Vole!

Update
Well well, Adonis got his break from a council grant to go to a boarding school. So I think we can discern his ideological landscape…

Praising investment - not something for which an undemocratic change in status is required. Now scaring us with talk of Chinese graduates. I miss the days when the left was internationalist.

What's the next stage? Picks up on the contribution 'business' can make. As though giving every school an Alan Sugar is the answer. Every school needs 'Strong Leaders'. BINGO! Sadly unlike Benito, head teacher-leaders don't end up swinging from lamp-posts. They get pay-offs.

'Strong school leadership is at the heart of every educational system… I mean headteachers, managers and governors'. Academies don't have elected governors: this seems to be his major innovation. It's a self-appointed oligarchy. Goes through school leadership training system - all quite impressive. 'The principle of academies is to invest in schools with weak governance to produce dramatic improvement'. Makes call for other universities to sponsor academies - but no mention of the usual type of sponsor: fundamentalist carpet salesmen like Lord Harris, or of democracy. Then he harps on about 'businesses' as though their abilities are unquestionable.

'Teachers: more of them and better trained': higher pay for teachers helps. Adonis says he supports variable pay for teachers, which I think is desperate. Shame the government has just announced it's going to end this. Praises SE Asian and Scandinavian queues for teaching jobs. Doesn't mention that you need an MA to be a kindergarten teacher in Finland: Adonis supports Teach First, which doesn't require any qualification. You don't need one to work at an Academy.

Curriculum: need to strengthen the technical route and make apprenticeships available en masse. I totally agree. In Germany, you're not considered dumb if you attend a Technical Hochschule. Here, you really are. He's making a good case for better curricula and more care for a wider range of students. But none at all about why academies are equipped for this at all.

Adonis criticises Gove's obsession with GCSEs and calls for new, better technical qualifications for 18-year olds. Then appeals to businesses to make apprenticeships available and attractive. Points out how few businesses do provide them, or employ people under 21. He's absolutely right. Also points out that the Dept for Business, Industry and Skills has only 11 apprentices, 1 under 21. He appeals for businesses to become more community-minded and interventionist… which is all very well, except that lots of businesses are parasitic vampire squid like Starbucks and Amazon rather than cuddly local co-operatives.

He's winding up. Some soap for the local big-wigs. The big surprise is that there isn't a single word about academies. And here's a nasty little sting in the tale. The compere has a list of pre-submitted questions, and lots of the audience wasn't invited to take part. Now that's what I call event management! It looks like a debate - but it's a love in.

First question: how do we get our kids 'work-ready'? (CEO of the city council)
Adonis: more work placements. Better key skills.
Cook (FT man): schools run in collaboration businesses teaching project-based curricula [UTCs - which this university already sponsors].
Lord Bilston (Dennis Turner, ex-Labour MP). How does Labour's 'one nation' theme equate with competitive schools freed from lots of legal requirements especially the National Curriculum?
Adonis: Competition should be competition to drive up standards through strong management, local collaboration and community engagement, partnership working. But formal oversight is denied to local authorities and parents. 'Going round the local Academy, the school is transformed and it's not just about money but about leadership and not passing the buck'. I want to see competition between schools.
Bilston: 'And the role of local government?'
Adonis: 'Yes. They have a central role to play in stimulating and encouraging apprenticeships'.
Some of us: 'But not in running schools.
?: How do you feel about Academies being free to employ unqualified teachers?
Adonis: I don't generally agree.
Ken Purchase (former Labour MP): The use of statistics is dubious. A deeper cultural and historical understanding is required to parse what you've been saying. I resent the underlying criticism that teachers shouldn't accept 'second-best'. I've not met a teacher in 40 years who accepts second-best. Continual attacks on teachers is demoralising and damaging. Don't use the German example - it lead to the Nazis [oh dear]. The Sutton Trust report highlights inequality between state schools. Do you agree that non-community schools (Academies, religious schools) accelerates inequality through competition and gaming the system?
Adonis: I agree with some of that. You must seek to 'move forward'. I accept that teachers don't want to do a bad job, but standards were very poor in places. Nobody wants to go back to that. We should be proud and believe we can improve things, and we can learn from abroad. If we look inwards and backwards, we have no future. 'Let's not have an arid debate about mechanisms'.

And that's the end! No time for questions from the floor. I found that quite enlightening, though Adonis's call to avoid talking about mechanisms was a deft bit of evasiveness: the mechanisms are ideological and have the greatest impact. We can all agree that we want schools to get better, but by talking about airy generalities, he escaped any scrutiny. For instance, the language of 'community engagement' is something that Norman Fairclough and the Critical Discourse Analysis folks would really get their teeth into. It sounds nice, but it's a polite way of saying that these SuperHeads can do what they want. Meaningful, i.e. statutory or legal representation and direction by councils, parents and students is exactly what the Academies are founded to escape. How do we question the sponsors, or replace them? Answer: you can't. Similarly, we couldn't talk about what actually happens in schools: the little dodges, the tricks, the consultancies, the covert selection and exclusion: instead we got nice idealistic phrases with which nobody can disagree.

I wish Ken Purchase had stayed sane. His question started off reasonably and I was nodding along. Then he broke Godwin's Law by mentioning the Nazis and the anti-academy case is once again associated with lunacy and xenophobia. It was like a fart at a funeral. Except not as funny.

And while we're on the subject, 'debate' means, or so I thought, free and open discussion: not a magic circle of special people invited to propose a question in advance.

Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Goodnight.

Hazel Blears: shut up and feck off

Oh goody, Hazel Blears is in The Guardian telling us that it's the fault of the 'commentariat' that public political discourse has been weakened. Now as it happens, I've met Hazel twice this year, once at a party policy forum, and once randomly at Birmingham New Street Station. At the forum, she and her henchmen refused to acknowledge any dissent and made it clear that mere party members were there to support the government and nothing more, and when I talked to her at New Street she was astonishingly disloyal to Gordon and suggested we should get Alastair Campbell back (how prophetic). 

What really annoys me about this is that New Labour took several outdated lessons from the Democrats: that party members are less important than donors, that opinion polls serve only to help repackage predetermined policies, and that debate should revolve solely around marketing rather than ideology. Think on this: Howard Dean's 50 state strategy has won today. He said that Democrats should get activists out on the street in every state, not the 5 or 6 which were seen as battlegrounds. For that, you need enthusiastic volunteers and party members who aren't treated as embarrassing relics to be tapped for cash when your favourite hedge fund managers are short of a bob or two.

She also says that 'commentary has taken over from investigation or news reporting' - hardly surprising given politicians' reluctance to face anybody less cuddly than Richard and Judy. I'm so bored with Radio 4 having to say 'no minister was available for comment'. Let's be honest, Hazel. You'd rather have your awful ministerial blog and David Cameron would far rather concentrate on the toe-curlingly embarrassing Webcameron than be filletted by a decent interviewer or reporter - any defence of the political high ground from you is sheer cant.

I know I'm starting to rant now, but this got to me even more. Remember, she's having a go at journalists: 'And if you can wield influence and even power, without ever standing for office or being held to account by an electorate, it further undermines our democracy'.

Er… Peter Mandelson - Baron of Foy and Hartlepool. Now has a senior ministerial position without ever facing the electorate. He has a vote in a legislative chamber for the rest of his life, and never has to face MPs. Lord Adonis - the most malign influence on education since Margaret Thatcher snatched free milk from little children when she was an education minister. He's there for ever too. Rupert Murdoch and Paul Dacre appear to have their own keys to Downing Street: not much accountability there. The list goes on and on and on - so it's a bit rich of this appalling representative of the worst clique the party has ever seen to tell us that it's the journalists who are distorting the public sphere. 

Most astoundingly, Hazel doesn't know what she's talking about. She declares that the vast majority of political blogs are rightwing Tory sites (when actually they're just the ones that rightwing newspapers cite a lot). She's clearly not familiar with the blogosphere at all. 'Mostly', she writes, 'political blogs are written by people with a disdain for the political system and for politicians…'. She got that right: her useless and no doubt adviser-written blog lacks any passion or any sign of ideological commitment. I despise the Tory bloggers she names (Iain Dale, Guido Fawkes etc), but her rant is just the eternal cry of the know-nothing. She could start here