Test your knowledge, identify areas for improvement, train your friends, your family, people you meet on the street, why not buy one for your dog, your cat, your goldfish, perhaps your parents need to boost their knowledge of resistant materials, the perfect gift, the perfect anniversary present, the solution to all your problems, make all your dreams come true.

http://www.educationapps.co.uk/apps/iphone/self-assessment/gcse/dt

That’s not the full story, of course – I’ve been looking forward to taking time away from the chalk face for a while now, and so be careful what you wish for!

What I am doing now is going into a partnership with my wife to develop her artwork, another partnership to create interior products, starting with wallpaper, again with my wife, but also one of her sisters, and also doing a revision guide for the nice people over at Education Apps, for OCR’s Resistant Materials.

More on all of that later. In the mean time, did you catch this article in the Observer? Of course everyone has an opinion about education, but it does seem that it’s just a lot of bluff. Maybe everyone needs to go away and just leave teachers to it? Who knows…

Seems fair enough. They went to a bunch of schools over three years, 89 of them secondary schools, and have presented their findings. This article on the BBC sums it up pretty well, however I have my own views on what they said, here.

NAAIDT has a response up on their website, but his basically just recaps what Ofsted said. They’re going to wait until HMI give a talk at the annual conference in May.

So what do I have to say? I’d still like someone to tell me what smart materials are for.

Apart form that, I do tend to agree with the recommendations, it’s just that saying something, identifying it, is only one half of a soilution.

When Ofsted say that secondary schools should ‘make sure that D&T resources are up to date to reflect 21st-century technology, are used effectively and represent good value for money’, it makes sense – but what D&T teacher is currently sitting there plotting to introduce some more of those early twentieth-century cabinet-making manuals into their lessons?

Teaching design to the standard Ofsted has identified is a massive challenge, especially as ‘Schools generally had not made sufficient use of subject-specific training to enable teachers to continually refresh and develop their practice to teach the technologically challenging and more modern parts of the curriculum and to stay up to date with developments in research and innovation‘.

I love design, I love teaching design, but I have always found it the part of my job that students are least willing to meet me half-way. I’ve scoured the internet and trawled through books, i’ve attended CPD and shared resources, but there is still no straightforward way to engage students in design when, really, they are thinking ‘I just want to make something!’

Ofsted mention encouraging visitors, staff training and more electronics and systems & control. These things will all help, but in a way it’s the same old story – if there was the time and the money for these things, we’d already be doing them.

For instance, a couple of years ago I invited some students from the RCA’s Design Products course to do a bit of tutoring with my A-Level class. Everyone loved it, and all sides got a lot out of, not least me getting my students more motivated and involved.

But how long did it take me?! During that time, was I able to ‘provide a balanced D&T curriculum that is well pitched to build upon the primary curriculum and includes the technologically challenging and more modern parts of the subject so that students can apply their scientific understanding and develop greater technical rigour in designing and making‘ or ‘improve assessment so that learning activities, particularly in Years 7 to 9, are challenging and well matched to the needs of each student‘?

No! I wasn’t able to do that, because there is too much to do! It is very difficult for teachers to find a win-win situation, because focusing on one thing/trend/objective/group generally means missing out on another. Nightmare.

So, Ofsted, thank you for your report, I shall refer to it when I need to cite evidence of D&T teachers needing more budget spent on CPD, and time allocated for curriculum planning or increased capitation in order to buy super-exa-chroma-magna-electro-quark paint, or need to convince the site manager to sort out enough ventilation so that I can have more than one soldering iron going at any one time, but other than that – I already knew all of this!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-12850211

http://community.tes.co.uk/forums/p/479090/6650901.aspx#6650901

Whatever way you choose, it seems that they always go astray and don’t find their way back.

The image below was snapped at a school I visited to do some training. I think it’s an effective solution because it saves spaces, costs little and you can see at a glance if any are missing. Thank goodness Design & Technology classrooms can still ahve good design in them!

Photo taken in 2010 at a school in Milton Keynes

They ask, for each of their so-called ‘soft’ subjects, whether we think it should be included in the NC, whether it should be compulsory and whether they should do a new programme if study for it.

Here are my responses to these questions, which I copy-and-pasted for each subject.

I do not believe that the children of this country are best served by compulsory curricula. I do believe that “…it is not necessary for the Government to specify in a statutory Programme of Study precisely what should be taught in that [sic] subject, and that decisions should instead be made at local level, by individual schools and teachers.” [From the introduction to section E of this Call for Evidence]

This subject is an essential part of a broad-based curriculum. All children should be given the opportunity to experience it in varying depths and in varying contexts. This may mean a blurring of the traditional boundaries between subjects.

I am sure that the existing programme of study is fine.

Couldn’t help dropping in my response to the question “Please use this space for any other comments you would like to make about the National Curriculum”. Its a classic rant, but maybe there is the light of sanity int here somewhere…

The research that I have read does not lend itself to the argument for increased centralisation in school curricula, as embodied by the NC.

For teachers of Foundation, or ‘soft’ subjects, (has anyone told him that this is very insulting moniker for teachers of these subjects?), the NC is not formally tested at the end of KS3 and as such is a nice reference document of things that you can teach to children, and little else.

For teachers of core (‘hard’?) subjects the amount of accountability required at all levels of management leads to ‘teaching to the test’, delivering little value to children.

Should the NC be made non-statutory then maths teachers, for example, would still teach maths things such as fractions, times tables etc., but they would not be burdened by the spectre of testing and so would be able to support more students in developing a deeper, more long-term useful understanding of the subject.

Leave grading and testing of students to teachers and their professional knowledge and understanding of the individual. This would have the added bonus of not having to give millions to whoever is being paid to mess up this years SATS.

For parents who want to know how to decide which school to send their children to, OfSTED provide indicators of how good schools are across a range of metrics – it is impossible to judge a complex entity such as a school on one or two numerical values and parents should be trained out of the mindset that expects that to be the case.