So what will a family do if they can no longer afford £35k per year for each child? Should we imagine that they'll switch directly to a nearby comprehensive school? Nah, not going to happen – they value the social cachet and the contacts the kiddies make to do that. They'll switch to a slightly cheaper school. There will be spaces since these cheaper schools will also have a few levers, and this will happen all the way down to the tiny, cheap independent schools.

The biggest, most expensive schools will survive, even if they have to sell off their equestrian centre or cut funding to their Dubai subsidiary. Small schools fail all the time – two have closed near me in the last few years, and other schools happily absorbed the displaced students.

Schools have spent the last few years nudging up fees and squeezing budgets and sslaries, while they will itemise some charges separately do they won't attract VAT. Building projects and capital investments will attract VAT rebates. So the actual fee increase will be substantially less than 20%, which many families can afford without too much fuss.

So why are the big independent schools fighting so hard? Perhaps the biggest hit will be to the £200-£500k salaries of the heads and bursars? I'm sure they'll survive the imposition of VAT though.

And since teachers get 11 weeks holiday (plus the bank holidays), it is difficult to challenge the view that it is a valuable perk.

So why does it bug me when we are attacked for our laziness? Because of the belief that worth can be measured in hours and the explicit assumption that long holidays equates with less work than other workers. And, generally, this is not true.

Government workload research regularly finds teacher hours around 50 hours per week term-time, which amounts to around 2000 hours per year, not including work done during the holidays (and this is verified by independent studies, such as from PWC). This compares to the figure for 'all professionals' of 39 hours which, taking 44 weeks worked (6 weeks holiday plus public holidays), comes to 1700 hours. Or, to put it another way, the average professional would need to work for 50 weeks of 39 hours to match the 39 weeks of 50 hours for the average teacher.

So, as they say, do the math.

From 1988 these courses were replaced with the GCSE, the General Certificate for Secondary Educations, aimed at allowing education which allowed almost every child to receive a grade, and the concept of pass and fail were largely retired as educationally unhelpful. The grade range was increased at first to A to G, with a U still technically available but in practice mostly unused unless exam papers were not submitted. Later an A* was added to increase discrimination at the top. A to G were all passes, and typically one to two percent were graded U, ungraded.

Roll on to 2017, and GCSEs are reformed, with one change being that the grades now run from 9 down to 1 (and U for the unlikely 'ungraded' as before), with a 1 being approximately equivalent to the old G grade. The biggest difference though is not in the specific grading as defined in regulations, but in the political viewpoint. The government of the UK, in the form of the Department for Education, “recognises grade 4 and above as a 'standard pass' … a credible achievement … that should be valued as a passport to future study and employment.” Those not reaching a grade 4 in English or Mathematics are required to continue to study them for another two years.

Even the government doesn't use the word 'fail' in its documentation, and certainly no 'standard pass' is mentioned in the GCSE regulations, so it is worrying to see schools, parents and children all talking about the need to 'pass' GCSE exams by reaching a grade 4. Children who get a 3 are referred to as having 'failed', rather than 'achieving a grade 3'. This was never an issue with the letter graded GCSEs before 2017, but the government seems to believe that insisting on 'rigorous standards' is a way to motivate children.

It is understandable that when a minister of state dismisses low grades as fails, parents and children are going to absorb the denigration, but teachers ought to know better. Taking a child with learning difficulties or a chaotic and traumatic home life, and helping them to progress from a grade 1 through to a grade 3, coaxing and supporting them as they go, should be celebrated. It used to be, but the 'fail' label has permeated throughout the education sector of the UK. It is a political fiction and it should be challenged for the sake of the education of the most vulnerable in society for whom a grade 3 can be seen as a great success.

In my mind it is about getting to grips with a subject at a conceptual level, understanding the links and implications, and learning enough facts and skills to be able to be able to demonstrate that understanding.

The bulk of my students naturally see the lessons and exams as tasks to complete with as little effort as possible. I say naturally, because that is how they have been trained for years to see their education: bite-sized chunks to reproduce in modularised exams since primary school, ideas that are so simple that a bright pupil can learn without any effort and a less bright one by rote memorisation. These students who have made it onto my Physics course have been successful in that environment, and it is often hard for them to adapt to the holistic demands of A level that are more suited to their abilities as clever sixteen-year-olds. The Paradox of Hard Work

The biggest problem I find with students is not that, under pressure for the first time, they don’t work, but that they don’t make the effort to learn. I get asked by parents why their child is not getting the grade As that they got the year or two before. Their child, they tell me, is spending hours working at home to improve their performance, working through past exam papers and doing more and more exam practice.

The reason, perhaps, is that they have been spoiled. All their teachers work under the Damocles Sword of national exams, the results of which are naively used to rank schools and judge whether teachers deserve their annual pay rise. Many know that teaching the subject is the best way to produce deep learning, but nearly everyone ends up teaching to the test, with weeks to months every year taken up with exam practice and mock exams. There are exam papers for homework and past exam questions for revision exercises and class tests.

Eat, drink and breathe the exams. Technique is everything.

So of course, in my classes, the first time a topic gets difficult, students resort to one of three actions: conscientious study; blinkers or extreme hope.

Conscientious Study

The recommended route to success. It involves a full commitment to learning what is taught and thinking about it in a structured way, supported by a revision schedule and a small amount of exam preparation work. Rarely attempted.

Blinkers

This second action is worrying, since this represents a large group of rather well motivated students who expect to be successful. Mathematically strong students, finding grades slipping as the course progresses, decide that what is needed, and what worked last year, is to practise answering exam questions. Again and again and again. After an initial boost to test scores, improvements stall and further efforts produce diminishing returns and the pressure to `work harder’. Problem solving skills (really, just learning a few standard techniques) are shallow and can not remove the need for deep conceptual understanding.

Extreme Hope

The most common action by far is to do nothing and hope that everything will sink in eventually. Students are discomfited by the nagging feeling that they ought to be doing something, but prefer to do something else out of class. This has ever been so with students, and there is little to be done short of compulsion. The more they fail, the harder they hope. This is very hard to rectify. If regular testing results in low scores, students can become acclimatised to them, so instead of prompting reflection and behaviour modification, low grades simply prompt hope that next time will be better. And continued disappointment leads to a belief that the causes are external, someone else's fault or due to the nature of the subject not fitting with the student's strengths.

It doesn't help that many exams, especially in the earlier years of secondary education, can reward rote learning of knowledge or exam techniques, so it trains students and teacher to stick to bad habits. And it takes a brave headmaster or principle to try to change the culture to one that might result in some initial reduction in grades, even if following well tested and researched methods will be far better in the long run. Perverse incentives rule across the education sector.

Why is there so little open access? The biggest reason is that this national park is 95% owned by eight men: dukes, barons, viscounts and baronets. These eight own the land, and take rent off farmers, but you can't really count this income stream as earnings because they never did even buy the land. It has been granted over the centuries to influential aristocrats who performed a service to another aristocrat or the monarch. It was gifted, even though other people had been living and working on the land continually from the neolithic, through the bronze and iron ages, up to the present. Saxon and Roman settlements and artefacts are commonplace. But a distant King claimed the area, and he gave it to a friend or rival who then arrived to build castles and secure their claim and start their wealth extraction from the local people.

So why do they persist? For the same reason that we haven't taxed billionaires out of existence – they have influence with law makers, which they use ruthlessly to create a financial and legal system that protects their special status and wealth. They are able to shield their property and investments from inheritance tax, they can extract income from inherited wealth and many bolster their status through ceremonial roles. Ceremonial roles are granted by the King or inherited, so that they can appear to be 'important', an indispensable part of the fabric of society, so society gives them a free ride on their 'old-wealth' hoarding of land and treasure which it wouldn't afford wealthy businessmen or other new-wealth individuals.

And the keystone that holds this all in place is the monarch, the uber-aristocrat who is so absorbed into the constitution of the nation that any attempt to separate the monarch from the operation of the state fails in the face of the complexity of the problem in a country that has no unified constitutional documents and relies on historic precedent for so much of its functioning. Parliamentary powers are derived from the monarch, barristers are Kings Counsels, the military swear allegiance to the King as a proxy for the nation.

But there is no public desire for a change in the status of the royal family, no widespread pressure to turn them into private citizens, so the dukes and viscounts who dominate the county in land ownership and influence will remain. Without a republic there will be no nationalisation of land in the national park, and no public ownership of a public treasure.

OK, so I object to anyone flying our national flag who feels the need for the word England to be printed across the middle. It smacks of the far-right Little-Englanders protesting the arrival of refugees from war zones on the basis that they want to take jobs that should by all rights be left vacant by born-and-bread Englishmen. But is there a better reason for banning the flags flown from car doors?

Flags are not very aerodynamic, and cause drag, making the car burn more petrol than normal. It amounts to one to two percent more drag than normal, so over the couple of months before and during the World Cup in Qatar each car with a pair of small flags will, on average, use an extra five litres (or a gallon) of petrol.

If a million cars in England (almost typed the UK there — but no-one in Scotland will be flying the Cross of St George!) had two flags each, that amounts to five million litres of petrol spent dragging flags around the country’s roads.

Banning these silly little flags would have the same environmental effect as shutting down a large power station for five days, and save British motorists over five million pounds of expense. It is enough petrol to fill two Olympic sized swimming pools. This might be OK, since swimming pools are shutting down due to the current cost of heating them, but this oil has better uses if it must be drilled from the ground at all.

It will only have a miniscule effect on global warming, but with the cost of living crisis in full flow, a few quid saved would be worth something. So what is holding the government back in these days of austerity? Stow the flags in support of England!

Physics teachers are fortunate (I am among friends, so I can speak frankly): ours is a subject the relevance and importance of which are beyond question, and which is intrinsically fascinating to anyone whose mind has not been corrupted by bad teaching or poisoned by dogma and superstition. I have never felt the need to “sell” physics, and efforts to do so under the banner “physics is fun” seem to me demeaning. Lay out our wares attractively in the marketplace of ideas and eager buyers will flock to us.

What we have on offer is nothing less than an explanation of how matter behaves on the most fundamental level. It is a story that is magnificent (by good fortune or divine benevolence), coherent (at least that is the goal), plausible (though far from obvious) and true (that is the most remarkable thing about it). It is imperfect and unfinished (of course), but always improving. It is, moreover, amazingly powerful and extraordinarily useful. Our job is to tell this story – even, if we are lucky, to add a sentence or a paragraph to it. And why not tell it with style and grace?

Physics World

He goes on to criticise the gimmickry that is supposed to gain better attention from students. He has this to say about the advent of flash cards and electronic clickers:

They can be powerfully effective in the hands of an inspired expert like Mazur, but I have seen them reduced to distracting gimmicks by less-capable instructors. What concerns me, however, is the unspoken message reliance on such devices may convey: (1) this stuff is boring; and (2) I cannot rely on you to pay attention. Now, point (2) may be valid, but point (1) is so utterly and perniciously false that one should, in my view, avoid anything that is even remotely open to such an interpretation.

The point is made that any new approach to teaching will produce measurable improvements, but only because of the enthusiasm of the practitioner. Infectious enthusiasm is most likely the key, and not all teachers have that, so maybe the gadgets help these classes. But I'm not convinced.

Griffiths was known as a great lecturer and scorned such fashions. You can watch one of his lectures here.

The Problem

A recent open evening at my college produced plenty of potential students to start Physics A Level next year, but there was a distinctive pattern in their origin: very many of them were currently at two schools on the other side of town and these talked enthusiastically about their current Physics teacher. However, there were hardly any from the very large comprehensive just a few hundred metres up the road (or indeed from several other close schools.)

Without being able to talk to those non-attenders, I cannot be sure, but one likely reason stands out. There is no Physics teacher at the school, and there hasn't been one for years. Now, this is by no means uncommon. A major report on the supply and retention of Physics teachers published in 2008 by The Centre for Education and Employment Research said

it was possible to predict with 84% accuracy whether a school would have any physics specialists, essentially from whether it had a sixth form, its region, whether it had specialist status in science, engineering or technology, and the ability of its pupils as indicated by GCSE results. … Few schools with high ability children, low eligibility for free school meals and low special needs were without a physics specialist, but this was true of over half those with poor GCSE results and a high intake with special needs. Of the school types, grammars, voluntary controlled and faith schools tended to come off best, and small schools worst.

My area has secondary schools up to age 16, with a sixth form college for the 16-18 age group. One school with a sixth form in a town close by has a full complement of Physics teachers, as does my sixth form college, though I think that each of the local 11-16 schools has few or none. I say 'I think', because it is difficult to find out without contacts in the schools: they don't exactly advertise the fact on their websites, especially now most of them offer 'separate sciences', including GCSE Physics. It would be embarrassing. What they do claim, however, is that they have no science teacher vacancies. I am suspicious of this practice, though, since the secondary schools with sixth forms elsewhere in the county are content to publish a staff list complete with their specialisms (Biology, Chemistry or Physics) instead of the generic Science Teacher label. See my previous post on this problem: Biologists Shouldn't Teach Physics.

Complications

Physics teachers, naturally, can make good use or their rarity. As most schools in the country are in want of a Physics teacher, they can pick and choose their school. A large proportion of Physics teachers want the intellectual stimulus of some A Level teaching and a good working environment, leaving 11-16 schools, especially in large urban areas where behaviour can be a problem, in a difficult position. The same report adds that

…turnover and moves to other schools were somewhat higher for physics specialists than for teachers in the other core subjects. The main driver of wastage in physics is retirement, which contributes a quarter of the total turnover and half the wastage. Nearly three times as many physics leavers as biology leavers were aged over 50. Some of the retirements were normal age, but most were premature, often stemming from a sense of dissatisfaction. About half the physics teachers were resigning to go to other state schools. The main reasons were promotion, re-location and wanting to get away from their present school.

This picking and choosing means that school are in a stiff competition for these people. But they often do not compete, so their pupils lose out.

Solutions

In many other industries the shortage would be eased but matching the rewards to the importance and difficulty of recruitment, but as national pay bargaining with the unions rules out differential pay, schools must be imaginative:

• Create 'Physics and Maths' posts and the associated training courses, to allow teachers to avoid having to teach the other sciences. Biology teaching is not very popular with Physics graduates – a quarter of Physics qualified trainees abandon physics to teach Maths.
• Offer posts with responsibility. These come with extra money, and can be tailored to keep the burden low.
• Make more use of the discretionary payments that are already allowed for recruitment and retention purposes, but which are rarely used.
• Bite the bullet, and advertise higher salaries for Physics teachers willing to teach in schools that cannot otherwise attract applicants. This should encourage the small number of teachers spread out more evenly and according to demand.
• Lastly, encourage more Physics graduates into teaching by moving to a fully differential pay structure.

Why are the first three points not used more often to ease shortages?

I suspect head teachers are keen to believe that all science teachers should be able to teach all the sciences. This is obviously untrue, but is a popular conceit (I have only come across one non-Physics colleague who could understand Newton's First Law of Motion, for example, despite that topic being an integral part of the balanced science curriculum taught by non-specialists to all 11-year-olds).

The final two points provide the only reliable medium to long term solution for the the crisis. However, the educational establishment, such as it is, has followed the tradition of being politically rather left of centre, and there is a strong feeling that all teachers should be treated equally. The leftist teaching unions, which have a strong interest in solving the problem of chronic specialist teacher shortages, reject the dilution of their power in national pay bargaining negotiations, are the main stumbling block on the way to ending the crisis in state schools, even the new City Academies which have flexibility in their pay awards.

Independent schools can already compete financially for teachers – how many of these schools are short of a Physics master? – so extending the market in teachers to state comprehensive could reverse the long decline in specialist Physics teacher recruitment.

Well, that's just dandy, as it is really no more than a plausible sounding 'just so' story. Without the technical terms the explanation is empty. “The wind turbine has something about it that makes electricity from wind” has nothing of substance and only a patina of education. The answers are routinely consistent with the idea that energy is a sort of fluid with some physical reality, akin to the caloric whose existence was disproved when Joule showed that heat was a method of energy transfer.

So how do bright pupils routinely get through secondary school physics lessons without a working understanding of the relationship between work and energy?

The short answer is: biology teachers.

Well, not their existence per se, but their willingness to teach physics topics about which they know nothing. That, and the connivance of school managers and government ministers who pretend that every biologist, chemist, environmental scientist, biochemist, physicist, engineer, geologist, metallurgist and zoologist can be treated as a generic science teacher, and should be able to teach any science specialism to any class up to age sixteen.

Of course, that is a self-serving cynical delusion. Cynical, because having that belief allows a head teacher to claim that their school has no vacancies, even when, as is the case with at least one school that feeds to my sixth form, they have had no physics teacher for several years. That school even takes the brightest pupils and teaches them more than the minimalist physics in the 'double science' GCSE, dragging them through separate biology, chemistry and physics courses without even bothering to employ a specialist physics teacher.

But does it matter? Can't a graduate scientist teach any of the simple topics that appear in the secondary curriculum, as long as they refrain from teaching A levels?

The response must be a clear 'no'. It should be shouted from the rooftops and at all education ministers, head teachers and science department heads. Specialist science teachers are not interchangeable. Biologists, especially, do not understand physics. They are often required to teach Newton’s Laws of Motion and Energy to the younger secondary pupils, but I have yet to meet a biology teacher who understands them even in the shallowest terms.

Asked about his willingness to teach from a position of ignorance, a biologist Head of Science shrugged it off with a “Well, that’s physics”, while more recently qualified teachers say they think that they teach physics better than the specialists as their difficulties with it themselves puts them closer to the children’s’ experiences. Honestly! I have heard both comments several times.

Secondary schools in inner-city areas, schools without sixth-forms and those whose managers insist on making physics teachers teach biology and the biology teachers physics, will continue to lose physics teachers, and pupils will fail to see the wonder and coherence of physics.

(originally written 2008)

It is easy, under the pressure of exams, to focus on revising the material as easily and quickly as possible. Creating and reading through summaries can give you that warm feeling of having made rapid progress. You copied key points from your textbook yesterday, and reading through your notes it all looks familiar and you feel that it has been learned. You go into class and your teacher reviews what was covered last lesson, and you recognise all that is said. You become more confident that you are done, that reading through your notes again before the exam will get you through comfortably. But the exam doesn't go well, so next time you work harder, write more notes, listen more carefully to the teacher in the reviews. You work harder and harder, but the grade improvements don't come. What is going wrong? The problem is that the students efforts are being directed towards inefficient methods. Practising the shovelling in of knowledge does not effectively improve your ability to retrieve that knowledge on demand. Working hard on giving yourself opportunities to recognise what you read only serves to verify that you have learned something, when what is needed is to develop the ability to recall that something when it is needed. Developing this different skill needs a different approach.

Short and Long Term Memory

There are two forms of memory important here, and two processes for each. There is long term memory, and short term memory, and for each memory there is a storage strength and a retrieval strength. The main errors made by learners, and their teachers, is to rely on tasks that focus either on retrieval from short term memory or on developing memory storage strength, when the target is to improve the retrieval strength of long term memories.

Common activities in classrooms, such as end of lesson quizzes or the banks of similar problems as is common in Mathematics lessons, can rely more on short term than long term memories. Once you have done the first exercise,and have recalled the strategy that was taught a few moments ago, you just have to do the same thing throughout the whole exercise until you reach the end of the page. There is little need to draw on long term memories in this type of task, so the skills practised will often fade rapidly after the lesson has ended.

Similarly, reading or recognition based tasks, such as reviewing notes or completing multiple choice questions where all the answers are there in front of you, focus on the storage strength of the memories instead of developing the ability to retrieve that same information or strategy. This type of activity can feel rewarding at the time if you recognise the material, but there better ways to ensure that you can perform well when you need to draw on that knowledge.

Focussing of Retrieving from Long Term Memory

There are two aspects to remembering: if you want to be able to recall memories, then you need to specifically practice retrieving them, at the same time as ensuring you are retrieving them from long term storage and not the transient short term working memory in which you hold disposable knowledge. If you practise retrieval immediately after learning or reviewing material than you will slow down the progress of that information into easily available long term memories. Similarly, reading the information you want to be able to recall is not very effective at developing your ability to remember things when the written material is not available to you.

Strategies

There are three simple strategies that all teachers and students should be aware of: retrieval practice, spacing, and interleaving. The first emphasises the retrieval over the storage aspects of the memory, while the others focus on accessing long term rather than short term storage.

Retrieval Practice

An example will help here. Imagine you are the teacher starting a lesson which builds on a concept from a lesson last week. You believe, correctly, that the students will not yet have a strong recollection of the material, so to help them along you spend the first few minutes recapping the key points from that lesson, then move onto today's extensions. What has happened in the students' heads? They have listened carefully, perhaps, but it is the teacher that has practised the retrieval of the ideas, not the students. They have passively checked that they have some stored memories of what you have described. It might improve the storage strength of those memories, but they are unlikely to have improved their abilities to recall that material on demand in the future.

A simple switch by the teacher from a recap to a recall practice exercise significantly improves the essential recall strengths of the memories. This can be as simple as a brain dump (“Everyone, in two minutes write everything you can remember about ...”), or a think-pair-share task with three short questions (“OK, without looking at your notes, write the answers, then discuss with your neighbour.”), or a pre-prepared short online quiz. That's it. Students can do it themselves at home, and even flash-cards can work well with this strategy, as long as they write the answers, or say it out loud, before turning the card over to check. Too many people read the front of the flash-card, then turn it over to check their hunch that they knew the answer, but without practising the recall process before reading the answer defeats the purpose of the exercise.

The key is to declare an answer from memory before checking you're right. That practice then instant feedback cycle has been shown to be very effective at developing the recall strength of memories.

Spacing

Practising the recalling skill right after learning something has benefits, but since you are recalling from short term memory you are not developing the recall strength of the long term memory of that item. You need to allow the idea to fade from short term storage, then any recollection you do will be from the long term storage and it will be strengthened by the process.

A simple strategy is to give a class a test on last week's content, instead of what they have just learned. Or test this lesson's work, but always include a question or two from an earlier topic. Doing some recall practice tasks at the end of the lesson students learned will be improved by delaying it until the start of the next lesson. And so on. It should be no surprise that practising the retrieval of memories improves that ability over time, but sadly many students and teachers are keen on sticking to the traditional approaches that have been transmitted to teachers from their student experiences without modification.

Interleaving

When you have a series of near identical problems to solve, especially common in STEM courses, after you have recalled a strategy for question 1, question 2 them becomes a case of simply retrieving from short term memory what you did a moment ago. It would be more effective if you can force the retrieval from long term storage for every question, and this can be done by interleaving questions with even slightly different demands into the one exercise. So, for example, instead of having twenty questions on dividing fractions, mix in questions on adding or multiplying fractions so the student has to select a different strategy each time instead of just doing the same as last time. The key is to enforce the retrieval of a strategy or fact each time, so that the practised recollection is happening from long term rather than short term memories.

Improving Student Progress Through Picking the Low Hanging Fruit

Every teacher should be aware of these strategies and be using them every day in the classroom or lecture hall. Even if they are not, we should be teaching them to the students so they can make better use of their time. Some will want to do the easy thing of continuing with the comfortable and familiar processes they have used somewhat successfully for years. But others can really benefit from making more efficient use of their, or their students', time. These modifications to the practice of learning are simple and can be incorporated easily into most schemes of work and lessons, and into private revision schedules.