Ivan Webb on Education

["John McConnell" <wysowl@msn.com.au>]

The following note from Ivan may be of interest to many.

Cheerio!

John McConnell
wysowl@msn.com.au
******************************
Thanks John,

Interesting article! Particularly the following bit:

"So what is the answer? Change the system, and particularly the incentives
that link their different parts. For schools, the proper response to
exam-grade creep is to give them the resources for continuous improvement
without cheating the system....."

I might state the proposition as "For schools, the proper response to
exam-grade creep is to give them the resource OF A continuous improvement
STRATEGY."   see the following for more on resources

http://www.users.bigpond.com/ivan.webb/quality/schools/resources.htm and

http://www.users.bigpond.com/ivan.webb/quality/schools/capabilities.htm

Resources are almost never the constraint on the system - this would only
occur when everything is working perfectly.
Using what Deming taught we achieved a situation where more than 97% of the
teacher hours available (counting Principal, senior staff and all other
teaching staff as being fully available for teaching) were used for working
directly for working with children. As Principal of a school of 670 children
I taught 0.4, the APs taught 0.8 and everyone else taught fulltime. And it
was fun! And the grades went up, all were well above state average - Maths
benchmarks were 88% at grade 5 cf state average of 64%....

With the highest pupil:teacher ratio and the lowest cash allocation we had
fulltime music, PE, Library, LOTE teachers and all classes received 4-7
lessons a week with an additional teacher allocated to the class for
purposes decided by the class teacher in order to meet the needs of the
children in the class.  Lots of special & group intervention available to
implement prevention of learning failure.

Kind regards,

Ivan