Introduction

When I was trawling through my archives the other day I discovered an article I’d written around 20 years ago and never published. It was a diatribe against a government initiative of the day. I’m not sure why I didn’t publish it at the time, but I thought I’d publish an expanded and updated version of it now. The reason is that although that particular project has joined the heavenly choir (thank goodness), the points I raised no doubt apply to most projects of this nature. Here’s the article, amended to make it more generic.

As it happens, this is quite timely. The Health Secretary in England has just floated the idea of introducing an academy system into health, based on the system in education. In education, schools designated as academies are free to not follow the National Curriculum, even though when the NC was rewritten it was hailed as the best thing since sliced bread (or whatever the equivalent of sliced bread is in the field of teaching and learning). Anyway, as always the secret motto seems to be: “When in doubt, reorganise”. It doesn’t have to deal with the real problem (in this case a shortage of doctors and nurses), but it does have to look like activity. The best comment I saw was that by someone in The Times: “I wonder where the deckchairs will end up this time.” I realise I am a bit cynical, and to be honest I do try not to be, but I think George Bernard Shaw was correct when he said:

Parkinson’s Law

When you see the term "Parkinson's Law", you probably think of the adage: "Work expands to fil the time available for its completion", right? In fact, there's a lot more to it than that: C Northcote-Parkinson was a keen observer of modern life, and succinctly devised a number of "laws" by which to summarise his observations. A rather depressing  outcome of re-reading Parkinson's Law side-by-side with the average Government edtech initiative for schools (or, indeed, most government initiatives) is the realisation that "the Law" applies with equal force to the government as it once did to the Navy and all the other examples cited by Parkinson nearly fifty years ago.

Take, for example. the glossy nature of the materials. Parkinson notes that when a company acquires a new entrance lobby with no expense spared, it is in effect declaring that it has already passed its peak; in other words, that it is in decline. The reason is obvious once it's pointed out. When a company is improving or at the peak of its performance, it doesn't have the time to think about what the lobby looks like.

So how does this apply to the typical government edtech initiative? In the "early" days (which were not that long ago in real time), the termly letter was a word-processed or Acrobat document which you either received by email or downloaded from the internet. Either way, you had to print it yourself. Then one day, it was transformed into a properly printed A5 booklet, which looks nicer but has less functionality than the old cheap and cheerful (well, cheap anyway) version. This tendency is often observed in high profile projects.

I’ve seen several government edtech initiatives come and go, and one thing many of them seem to have in common are the following:

·      An abundance of paper. Huge lever arch files of the stuff.

·      The paper is of the highest possible quality. Not your bog standard 80gsm copier paper, but 100gsm glossy, and full colour.

It’s true that these days you can usually print stuff yourself from the internet, but if you go to a conference about the project be prepared to hire a van for all the paper you will be given.

Another symptom of decadence and decline in an organisation is the number of levels involved, and the sheer number of people required to keep the whole thing from collapsing like a house of cards. Thus we tend to have:

·      the Government Educational Initiative General Director

·      the Education Technology National Director

·      Senior Regional Directors

·      Senior Regional Edtech Directors

·      Regional Directors

·      Regional Edtech Director

·      School Government Edtech Initiative Managers

·      Local Authority or School District EdTech Initiative Managers

·      Local Authority or School District Edtech Initiative Managers

·      Local Authority Government Edtech Initiative senior leaders in schools

·      Education Technology Initiative (and other subject) line managers in schools and consultants – the ones doing the actual work.

A related symptom is, of course, the proliferation of acronyms as a result of the above.

In this situation it’s no wonder that it's virtually impossible for schools to recruit experienced edtech co-ordinators or computing teachers!

This is like a pyramid selling operation, in which the only way to make money is to recruit people to recruit other people: nobody actually sells anything. So, the person right at the bottom of the pyramid is doomed to failure in this regard, because all they can do is the hard graft: they have nobody to outsource it to. Similarly, with that plethora of job titles, who is actually doing any useful work? The teacher right at the bottom of the pile. Everyone else is monitoring the person below them and writing reports for the person above them.

You see this happening in any Government school edtech initiative, and there are other side effects too, which I’ll come on to in a moment. I just wanted to say that I’ve seen this play out on a microcosm level in a Local Authority. There was someone in the e-government team who was incredibly successful at bidding for grants for various projects. Some lowly fellow in that team once told me that nobody could complete any of the objectives on their five year plan because they were always being side-tracked into irrelevant projects.

I was treated to a glimpse of this once:

Ring ring.

Me: Good morning, Terry Freedman speaking.

E-government person: Hey, Terry, I’ve got some great news. I’ve managed to bid for half a million pounds to be spent on school lighting. Is that any use to you?

Me: Thank you for the opportunity, but I have nothing to do with school lighting, so I am unable to use it, I’m afraid.

I did have a choice. I could have taken the money, spent it on school lighting, and then faced the music in my annual appraisal, where I would have had to explain why none of the objectives on my plan had been achieved. Or I could have taken the money, spent it on education technology equipment, and then faced the music from another direction. Both options seemed to me to be both morally suspect and potentially career limiting.

The side effects

Firstly, despite protestations to the contrary, the guidance starts to become more and more prescriptive, not to mention spurious (for example, the three part lesson will suddenly grow suddenly grow into a four (or more) part lesson: see The 3,000 Part Computing Lesson).

Secondly, the teacher shortage will be exacerbated because the new educational initiative will draw in teachers to operate it.

Thirdly, despite all announcements to the contrary, school subject leaders will think (or be allowed to think or even encouraged to think) that the new initiative is mandatory even if it isn’t. This happened, for instance, with the Key Stage 3 ICT Strategy. Even though this was voluntary, Ofsted inspectors were encouraged to ask Heads of ICT if they had adopted it. At least, that was my experience (I was an Ofsted inspector at the time). The clear implication seemed to me to be that there was an expectation that they would adopt it. A similar thing happened with the qualification known as the English Baccalaureate.

Part of the problem lies with schools themselves, as happened with the Qualification and Curriculum Authority’s example primary school ICT units. They were intended as exemplars, and schools were expected to create and develop their own units of work. Yet years later some schools were still using the same (by now outdated) materials. I don’t blame them. For a start, the materials were pretty good, and secondly, why risk using your own initiative? (I once pointed out to the speaker from the Education Department at a conference that all the examples of best practice in their new (highly glossy, what else?) edtech initiative paper were drawn from schools that had ignored the government’s rules or suggestions.)

Fourthly, supposedly independent organisations like school inspectorates will ask school subject leaders whether they are using the materials of the new initiative, even though it’s not compulsory to do so, as I’ve touched on above.

Finally, there will be no clear evidence of any long-term benefits whatsoever. But that doesn’t matter: by the time anyone has started to wonder about that, the next initiative will be along.

See also: The trouble with government ed tech initiatives.