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British Education Secretary sets out vision for character and resilience
Sounds worthy but this is just a distraction from the failure of many British schoolchildren to reach basic academic goals. If you look busy, people might think you are achieving things. Teaching character in British State schools is a bit of a laugh. It's more of a "Lord of the Flies" environment in many school playgrounds
Character and resilience are as crucial to young people’s future success as academic qualifications, Education Secretary Damian Hinds said today.
Addressing the Church of England Foundation for Educational Leadership conference today (7 February), Mr Hinds laid out the 5 Foundations for Building Character and pledged to work with schools and external organisations, including membership bodies and charities, to help every child access activities within each of those foundations.
To make this happen the Education Secretary announced:
Plans for an audit of the availability of out of school activities across the country, to help understand where more focus is needed to increase access and choice. The Government will also work with organisations to look at how it can support greater provision in areas where it is limited.
A call on businesses and charities to offer more work experience and volunteer placements to young people.
Relaunching the Department for Education’s Character Awards, which highlight innovative or outstanding programmes that develop a wide variety of character traits including conscientiousness, drive and perseverance, as well as virtues, for other schools to learn from.
A new advisory group, led by Ian Bauckham - who led the work to update the Relationships, Sex and Health Education guidance for schools - will now develop a new framework to help teachers and school leaders identify the types of opportunities that will help support their pupils to build character. The framework will also provide a self-assessment tool for schools to check how well they are doing.
Alongside this work Mr Hinds also underlined the significance of pupils learning about the importance of positive personal attributes – such as self-respect and self-worth, honesty, courage, kindness, generosity, trustworthiness and a sense of justice - as part of the new Relationships, Sex and Health Education curriculum.
These wide ranging proposals are aimed at building on the great work already being done by many schools to ensure young people build strong and positive relationships and embrace the character and resilience needed to deal with life’s inevitable challenges.
In his speech the Education Secretary said:
Character and resilience are the qualities, the inner resources that we call on to get us through the frustrations and setbacks that are part and parcel of life. How do we instil this in young people, how do we make sure they are ready to make their way in the world as robust and confident individuals?
I have heard repeatedly from teachers, parents and young people themselves about the areas of activity that will help develop character and resilience. They combine elements that will stretch and challenge and will help young people think, develop and grow and which will enhance their self-esteem and their confidence.
This is not about a DfE plan for building character. It has to be about schools learning from other schools, it’s about business pitching in when it can, it’s about community groups speaking up and inviting schools in. It’s about individual adults volunteering. All of us need to work together using the wide range of resources and experts that there are out there.
Today’s announcements follow a series of activities to help schools focus on more than just academic achievement. These include:
Ofsted’s plans to introduce a new inspection framework that will specifically look at how schools will ensure a child’s education is about more than just exams.
A £2.5million programme with the British Council to ensure more children, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, are able to go on school exchanges and benefit from the opportunity of experiencing other cultures first hand.
New research by the Social Mobility Commission looking at the impact of extra-curricular activities on social mobility. This will help ensure the most effective practices are scaled up and targeted at the areas that need them most.
The 5 Foundations for Building Character cover a number of key areas - sport, creativity, performing, volunteering and membership, and the world of work. In his speech Mr Hinds said that these activities are a crucial part of a child’s development and will teach them the qualities that cannot solely be learned in the classroom.
These key areas cover an extensive list of activities. The foundations are:
Sport – which includes competitive sport and activities such as running, martial arts, swimming and purposeful recreational activities, such as rock climbing, hiking, orienteering, gym programmes, yoga or learning to ride a bike.
Creativity – this involves all creative activities from coding, arts and crafts, writing, graphic design, film making and music composition.
Performing – activities could include dance, theatre and drama, musical performance, choir, debating or public speaking.
Volunteering & Membership – brings together teams for practical action in the service of others or groups, such as volunteering, litter-picking, fundraising, any structured youth programmes or uniformed groups like Beavers, Brownies, Cubs, Guides, Scouts, Cadets and Duke of Edinburgh.
World of work – practical experience of the world of work, work experience or entrepreneurship. For primary age children, this may involve opportunities to meet role models from different jobs.
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More Colleges are Saying ‘No’ to Student Loans
Students Should Explore Other Options
The federal student loan program is, in my judgment, the single biggest public policy mistake made in American higher education in the last century. The February 2019 issue of the Review of Financial Studies includes still another detailed empirical study (by David Lucca, Taylor Nadauld, and Karen Shen of the New York Federal Reserve Bank) confirming what former Education Secretary Bill Bennett said in 1987: most of the benefits from federal student loan programs accrue to colleges, not students attending them. Increase subsidized loans to students by $1000, colleges will typically raise their sticker tuition price by about $600. The newest study adds another wrinkle: it appears higher federal assistance also leads to somewhat lower institutional student financial support, so the net tuition growth from increased federal aid might be even greater than the already strong results shown with respect to published tuition fees.
With this in mind, I have long argued (and do in my book Restoring the Promise, out May 1) that we need to reduce or eliminate federal student loan programs and find other ways of financing schooling, such as private income share agreements. But a new development is modestly accelerating the achievement of that goal: some schools are just saying no to student loans, no longer administering federal student loan programs on behalf of their students. For decades a few schools have done this, such as Grove City and Hillsdale colleges. But now it has spread to a number of community colleges.
Several large California community colleges are turning down federal student loan assistance for their students, a requirement under a new “free college” bill providing one-year free tuition for California community college students. Bruce Baron, chancellor of the large (24,000 students) San Bernardino Community College district, is quoted in Inside Higher Ed: “When we had the federal student loan program, we had an extremely high default rate.” He added, regarding the use of student loan money, “My observation…is if you get a student loan and go to the college bookstore to buy textbooks, you may also walk out with sweatshirts and a few other things.” Apparently, that kind of thinking has led many North Carolina schools to also leave the federal system.
Under federal law, if a school’s student loan default rate exceeds 30%, it loses eligibility to receive federal funds. Very few schools are at that figure, but some are well above 20%. For years, higher education reformers of many political stripes have urged Congress to require schools to have more “skin in the game,” meaning they have to share funding the financial shortfall arising from students reneging on repayment of loan obligations. If strong “skin in the game” legislation were to pass, elite selective admissions schools would feel no impact, but lowly endowed small liberal arts colleges, obscure state universities with mediocre reputations, historically black colleges and universities, and community colleges could face extinction—they are vulnerable to having to make big payments given the high loan default rates of their students. Many already are in tenuous shape financially even before “skin in the game” rules.
It may sound cruel and insensitive to the poor since low-income persons disproportionately attend these schools with many high-risk students. Yet too many of them are not graduating, but nonetheless face two burdens: first a crushing financial obligation of repaying loans when their post-schooling income is quite low, and second a sense of failure arising from not achieving their educational goal. We need to help many of these students in ways that are likely to be more successful and less costly, such as sending them to non-degree training for a year or so resulting in a skills certificate qualifying them for very specific jobs such as welding, being a paramedic, or driving a big truck. And perhaps we should finance this training by private income share agreements rather than a failed bureaucratic federal student loan system that is a primary cause of soaring tuition fees.
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Australia: Men are rated as better teachers of some university subjects and people from foreign countries are rated as less successful teachers generally
A lot of Leftist bias here. All men (and women) are not equal! Horrors! That the Dean of Science at UNSW wants to "smash" things sounds very Trotskyite. Why is anybody surprised that men are better at teaching some things and that people who don't speak English well are rated as less successful teachers in general? Only a Leftist would be surprised
Students are more likely to rate male university teachers higher than their female counterparts in some areas of STEM and Business, according to Australia’s largest review of student experience surveys.
The study, published today in PLOS ONE, examined almost 525,000 individual student experience surveys from UNSW Sydney students from 2010-2016 across five faculties. It is the first study to examine the interaction between gender and cultural bias.
“These results have enormous flow-on effects for society, beyond education, as over 40% of the Australian population now go to university, and graduates may carry these biases with them into the workforce,” said Associate Professor Yanan Fan, lead author on the study and statistician from UNSW Science.
The study showed that in Business and Science, a male teacher from an English-speaking background was more than twice as likely to get a higher score on a student evaluation than a female teacher from a non-English speaking background. In Engineering, there wasn’t a significant swing against female teachers, except male English-speaking teachers were 1.4 times more likely to get a higher score than teachers in all other categories. For Medicine, local students were more likely to give lower scores to female teachers from non-English speaking backgrounds.
“In the Business and Science faculties in particular, male English-speaking teachers have the highest probability of getting the highest possible grade at six, out of six possible scores,” Associate Professor Fan said.
In Arts and Social Sciences, there was no statistically significant bias against female teachers. The results suggest that where there is a larger proportion of female teachers, such as in Arts and Social Sciences, there is less bias. Bias was observed, however, against male non-English speaking background teachers when evaluated by local students.
“The results show universities must be models of equity and diversity in order to breakdown inequalities that persist in even the most progressive of workplaces,” said Professor Merlin Crossley, UNSW Deputy Vice-Chancellor Academic.
Dean of Science at UNSW and co-author of the study, Professor Emma Johnston, says encouraging more women at the professorial level, in leadership positions and in membership of key committees will help shrink these biases.
“We need to continue to support women at all levels of academia in STEM across Australia, in order to smash stereotypes that create the partiality that exists within our community.”
Media release. Contact: Lucy Carroll, l.carroll@unsw.edu.au
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