Roche Limit

2022-01-25

Rapid Email Triage

In another effort to manage my burgeoning work email inbox, I have been trying to train colleagues to write emails in a way that makes it quicker to digest and decide on suitable actions. Many emails are written as narratives, so that you need to wade all the way through several hundred works before you find out there is nothing I need to know or do. They have subject lines like 'Third Form' or 'Thursday Afternoon', which tell me nothing useful.

Bottom Line Up Top is a military habit of putting the key information at the beginning, with an informative subject line and the main points summarised right in the first paragraph, with supporting information further down. So a subject of 'ACTION: All 3rd Form tutors needed at breaktime meeting Thursday' would let you triage immediately. The detailed subject line means that you don't need to open the email right now, and many people could delete immediately.

So, I have been sending emails with subject lines starting with 'ACTION: ', 'INFO: ' and 'REQUEST: ', hoping that others will start doing the same, while telling colleagues that if they want me to not delete their emails without opening them they need to make it clear in the subject line what it is about.

Has it worked? Sort of. I am deleting emails at a wicked rate based on what I can see from the inbox view without opening them, working on the assumption that if I make a mistake in deleting an important email then I will get a nagging follow up eventually. One senior manager has taken up the habit though, so I live in hope that it might become a workplace policy eventually.

I have become dependent on a small programming project which I wrote in Python to learn the language some years ago. It was done as preparation for teaching Computer Science, and as is recommended in tutorials, you should pick a project that matters. The one I chose was to extend the functions of the Zim desktop wiki application[1] which I use for planning courses and lessons — it is a simple text processing script that ended up with fix upon kludge and is now impossible to maintain or extend. It has the sort of structure and code style I would be embarrassed for my students to see, except as a warning to think before you code.

I have been meaning to tackle this low level, but irritating, problem for a while, but since I use it dozens of times a day I have not had the courage or time to sort it out. But over the festive break I have been playing with VimWiki, a personal wiki running inside of Vim, my favoured text and code editor. It seems quick to use without a mouse, an advantage for me, while the file structures (plain text files) and markdown syntax are almost identical. A quick bit of configuring VimWiki and I could access the same files that I usually accessed with Zim. All I needed was to create an index page to replace the GUI stuff and I was up and running with all my old data intact and accessible.

Now, with an incentive to finally rewrite my text processing script, I found a couple of hours to commit and the code is now a fraction of the size, more elegant and idiomatic, making proper use of Python features. There is extra functionality that better suits my current workflows, and sleeker code that will be easy to modify in the future. I can start the new term next week with no interruptions and a new keyboard based wiki for my planning tasks, all without leaving Vim.

[1] Zim – A Desktop Wiki [2] VimWiki – A personal wiki for Vim

The Status Quo in Schools

The internet is not an entirely safe environment for children to roam freely, that is certain. The question is how schools should act in the children's best interests.

There are plenty of options, but schools usually rely heavily on surveillance and filtering to provide some coercion and a hard boundary. Coercion, as every time a child tries to access a forbidden site a warning will flash on the screen to warn that their actions have been recorded by the school. A hard boundary, because, well, erm, that's not so clear. The management say it is to protect students from accessing inappropriate material or sites, but that can't be true, can it, when they know every child carries an always connected 4G mobile phone?

The effort and expense that is made to secure the school broadband is huge, from renting commercial filtering services and network equipment, to the time and goodwill spent trying to ensure that no-one has installed VPN software on their school-issued iPads or laptops. And it is all for nought, since any child can simply switch away from the monitored, hobbled and usually slow school WiFi to an unmonitored personal phone and their unfiltered mobile connection.

It's a Moral Hazard

So what are the children learning from this process? Is it how to stay safe on the internet when they are not in school? Are they actually being protected from online bullying and grooming or from seeing adult content? No, they are seeing the normalisation of online surveillance and the demonisation of VPN services that could keep them safe out of school.

As a pedagogical strategy, it is not a good idea to “teach to the test” since it undermines efforts to develop a child's interest in understanding the subjects more than the assessment methods. Similarly, focussing on the needs of the school bureaucracy and scaring students away from learning about essential security precautions is not in anyone's interest. It risks presenting security as performative theatre instead of a key life skill.

Historical Developments

The English eductional system, up until the late 1980s, was focussed on the General Certificate for Education (GCE), taken at Ordinary (or O) Level (for 16-year-olds) and Advanced (A) Level (taken at 18). Both were aimed at providing the most academic students a route into sixth form college and on to university degrees, and they would be considered thoroughly inaccessable in today's climate. There were other courses, set at a lower standard, such as the CSE, but they were not well regarded.

Depite the elitist course arrangements, schools could focus largely on their teaching and the pupils' needs, as there was little in the way of oversight. There were no league tables and no exam results focussed Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted). As someone who was educated under this system, my experence was that the teachers were not particularly bothered about the exam results. This meant that much of the teaching was lacklustre, but the best teachers could really focus on the learning experience.

Exams then were really designed for academic selection. A fixed proportion of students on each course were awarded a each grade every year. The primary role for the grades was to sort students into the right level of higher education institution, so a level of stability year on year was desirable.

Grade Inflation

Enter the GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education), which switched the assessments from the O Levels' norm-referencing to a criterion referenced system. Exam grade boundaries are primarily calculated against a set of subject specific atatements, best-fit criteria that a student must match to be awarded any particular grade. The exam boards who set the exams review the results every year to ensure consistency from year to year, under the supervision of the national Office for Qualifications (Ofqual). But Ofqual allows a certain tolerance in the grading each year, and it turns out that the variations compared to previous years us uniformly upwards towards slightly higher grade averages, peaking in the 90s with a grade inflation of a grade every two or three years.

Combined with the publication of grade outcomes per subject as fine as individual schools, this produced an annual carnival of celebration as school performance records tumble every year for most schools, and successive governments claim responsibility for the infeasable ongoing improvements in the education system.

Of course, the improvements have always been illusory, as is clear when you compare the local results to the international standardised assessments such as TIMMS and PISA. These projects show English educational performances to be generally static over the years of supposed massive improvements. Indeed if the international assessments matched the improvements in GCSE grades over the last two decades then England would have an education system so advanced that the other nations wouldn't have a hope of catching up.

So now each government congratulates itself each year when the exam results creep a little higher. The schools inspector Ofsted, nudged by ministers, makes grade increases a key part of the regulation system and schools whose 'grade outputs' are steady year on year are punished for 'coasting'. With this unwavering political pressure head teachers make grades the key success measure for departments and individual teachers. It takes a confident teacher secure in their skills to resist the temptation to reach for the short-term quick fix of driving their pupils to adopt an exam performance focus for their studies instead of concentrating on the long term goal of developing usable knowledge and skills. And when this exam grades obsession takes over an entire education system, the collateral damage to the actual education becomes significant.

Manipulating the Metric

It is a truism in statistics that when the statistical measure becomes the aim it stops being a good measure. When GCSEs stopped being solely a measure of how well a pupil has learned a subject and became the political target, the focus naturally moves from improving the quality of education to doing anything to push the numbers up.

Now of course there are plenty if positive interventions that will improve both education and the headline grade averages, but these are difficult and relatively expensive, so a head teacher under pressure to rescue flagging results will often resort to manipulating the metric instead of the more difficult to manage educational culture and skills of their teachers and students.

One popular way was the 'dash for BTECs'. BTEC is a vocational alternative to GCSE courses and some of these qualifications are high quality and useful for developing technical skills, but not all were like this. One in particular, an IT skills course, could be taught in a single term and when competed was treated by government as equivalent to four GCSEs passed at the A* to C grade level. The effect was to massively increase the school's average GCSE 'grade C and above' figure, which could push that school to the top of the local rankings. Parents looking for a school for their child will naturally favour the 'best' school, so those near the top of the table will become over subscribed, while others will suffer from shrinking rolls, poor Ofsted assessments and high staff turnover.

The students suffer too, as focussing on grades forces students to abandon deep learning for whatever they see that the teachers have identified as being more important, which emphasises shallow over deep learning.

At a management level, good is defined as that which improves grades, so the grades are the only metric for success, for teachers and students alike. Teachers who develop strong pedagogical understanding and are able to foster deep learning in their charges will not be supported as much as those who can drive short term behaviours in pupils to nudge up their grade profile, even it it undermines the pupils as they move on to more advanced courses.

Time to Change

GCSEs were a good idea once, and they initially worked well to offer academic instruction to children from a wider range of backgrounds than the older O Levels managed. But the move away from norm-referenced grading produced grade inflation, while political pressures forced schools and teachers to adopt short term strategies. Focusing on the grades significantly weakened their corration with educational quality, to the extent that the grade expectations dominates most discussion in schools to the exclusion of ideas that could radically improve the quality of secondary school leavers.

The exam regulator debacle last spring, when summer exams were summarily cancelled across England and Wales, was an avoidable mess.

From the beginning it was clear that was quite possible to run essential exams even with coronavirus in the ascendancy. A Levels could have been saved by scrapping all GCSE exams, except perhaps English and Maths. GCSES used to be a school leaver qualification, but now that every student has to attend some form of education or training until they are 18 their usefulness has declined until they are mostly just a distraction. Exam boards would have held two sittings for each A Level, making use of the alternate papers they hold onto in case the primary papers are compromised, which would have allow socially distanced exams to take place. Students in exam halls are already spread out for obvious reasons, so only a little extra space would have been needed to keep the whole process covid-safe. But then the government panicked, although it is hard to criticise them given the uniqueness of the situation.

The result of the rushed arrangement was that the national averages were very little different last year, while a very large number of students were awarded grades far from those that their teachers had expected. After a national outcry raw teacher predictions were used unmoderated, leaving final grades inconsistent from school to school.

Was it possible to make a better fist of awarding estimated grades? It was always going to be difficult to award grades that were trusted as much as normal without the evidence of actual exam results, but the government made a big mistake. The nominally independent Ofqual quango which regulates qualifications explained the risks of each option, recommended that exams were scrapped and replaced with a certification of performance, to avoid damaging comparisons with genuine A Levels. This would have allowed students to progress to university on the basis of offers, and it would have allowed for the necessary grade inflation as exam boards sought individual fairness.

But Ofqual came under pressure to issue actual A Level grades from the government which was also keen to avoid politically damaging grade inflation. This was a fine aspiration, but the complexities of the statistical model which was needed to assign grades placed that desire in opposition to the reliability of individual awards. Forcing the grades to fit the same distribution as previous years meant the model risked introducing inconsistencies at the individual level. The government ignored the warnings and went for issuing moderated simulated exam grades, with the instruction to focus on the average results at the expense of individual variations. Students missed their university offers by the thousand. Students who had never received anything other that top grades were awarded several grades lower, and others failed their courses, much to the surprise of teachers who had firmly predicted good passes. Small independent schools had class sizes too small to moderate, so their high predictions went through without reductions, a likelihood also predicted by Ofqual and ignored by a blinkered Education Secretary.

And the rest is history. The government of Scotland cracked and switched to the unreliable, unmoderated Centre Assessed Grades from the teachers, followed inevitably by England two weeks later, introducing an whole new set of irregularities, now brushed under the carpet. One can only hope that if exams are cancelled in 2021 there will be a more informed plan in place.