Exam Results

[hampden_loon2878]

On 8/10/2020 at 3:09 PM, hampden_loon2878 said:

You judge swinney how you want, i will hold mine. Lets see how this pans out before passing judgement, its unprecedented and difficult,they will get it right  

@phart

[phart]

Tory supporter finds out what Tories are all about.

[Shaundy]

1 hour ago, phart said:

[phart]

https://sceptical.scot/2020/08/two-attainment-gaps-in-scottish-education/

I thought this was a great read

 

[TDYER63]

10 hours ago, phart said:

https://sceptical.scot/2020/08/two-attainment-gaps-in-scottish-education/

I thought this was a great read

 

I found that very balanced and fair. Closing the attainment gap is a huge undertaking and involves buy in from so much more than just politicians, but there needs to people with vision leading it. 

I like John Swinney, he is as honest a politician as you could ever hope to find and I dont necessarily think he is doing a bad job , but I do agree with this paragraph to an extent.

‘At the heart of Scotland’s educational malaise is a serious deficit in the quality of thinking at the top.  Such a climate is a recipe for the apotheosis of mediocrity. Too many of those in senior positions are ineffective time-servers, compliant functionaries or political opportunists.‘ 

I also think there is a responsibility by parents in more comfortable lifestyles to contribute more to help kids less fortunate than their own. 

Within the comments section someone posted this which I agree with. 
 

https://takingparentsseriously.wordpress.com/2014/02/27/sharp-elbowed-parents-should-help-all-kids-not-just-their-own/

I havent read ‘Poverty Safari ‘ which is also mentioned . I will give that a read. 

 

 

 

[ThistleWhistle]

On ‎8‎/‎14‎/‎2020 at 3:01 PM, hampden_loon2878 said:

I disagree and called it from before any “u turn”was on the horizon as i stated on here. If your strategy is easy read it ineffective, even though i don't think this strategy was hard to see, it actually  shows how shit the opposition party's are 

Sorry but it still doesn’t make much sense to me as surely the point of the strategy would be that at the moment it unfolds they’d have been able to go ‘Ta Dah!’ and revel in the genius of their Kansas City Shuffle. 

 

If it was an agreed upon strategy that played out as SG wanted then to me it looks like a mash-up between Red Dwarf and Black Adder where  Rimmer suggests running his waxwork army over the minefields because the enemy will never expect it.  Baldrick then pops up to suggest an even more cunning plan - what about getting half way then we retreat back over the minefield hoping the enemy decide to go ‘fuck it’ and charge over the minefield themselves.  The fact they seem to be attacking in the unusual ‘Square Dancing’ formation over them is a boost nobody could have anticipated.     

 

Black Adder then points out that the cost would be: Education Secretary’s arse out the window reliant on Greens to avoid vote of no confidence and; it reveals abject failure in closing the attainment gap for poor kids allowing Labour to target the votes SNP have spent over a decade to win over so what’s the prize worth this cost?

 

Baldrick then reveals his hand ‘Ah ha we get to show the Tories down south don’t give a shit about poor kids!’

 

Black Adder ‘Wibble!’

 

Even if you think they’ve somehow won this the victory is pyric because their arse is out the window as it has flagged up a massive issue they have that won’t be addressed by next year and given Scottish Labour a free hit.  On the other hand it looks like the tories will have results that stay in kilter with historic norms and crack on like normal sneering at poor people whilst sniping at the SNP for failing them up here.         

[Orraloon]

Who would have thunk it?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-53810655

[ThistleWhistle]

11 minutes ago, Orraloon said:

Who would have thunk it?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-53810655

What an absolute farce after watching our shit-show.  Either have the balls to back the results being bollocks or avoid challenging it like the plague.  Making exactly the same mistake as the SG seems absolutely batshit mental.  

[ThistleWhistle]

On ‎8‎/‎14‎/‎2020 at 4:06 PM, TDYER63 said:

 

= See my youngest daughter. 
She got an F in her Higher English prelim so we got her a tutor. We are not rich but could afford a tutor for 1 hr a week between Jan -May. She got an A in her Higher. Partly she just needed a boot up the arse but it took a tutor to get her an A. This was 7 years ago right enough so its not a new thing. 

Without doubt the kids with more affluent parents have a huge advantage over kids in deprived areas.  However I don't necessarily think  that pupils in more affluent areas always get a better quality of teaching at school. I know a few good teachers who actually prefer working in deprived areas as they feel they are contributing more to the child and gain more satisfaction. 

Tutoring helps the kids grades massively yet the schools in affluent areas get the kudos , the extra ‘one to one’ out of school teaching makes the school look good.  IMO it masks the real quality of the teaching. 
We all want the best for our children. People pay silly money to buy houses in areas where there are ‘desirable ‘ schools . But if the school was that good why the need for tutors ? 
Downgrading kids results in deprived  areas to keep in line with the schools historical results is like rubbing salt onto the wound when you know that kids in schools in affluent areas are getting  a leg up from external tutoring  every year and without that the schools  results would be poorer. 

 

You might not be rich but with your job bet your dog is absolutely wedged with a limited company in the Bahamas and everything

 

You're right there is only so far the playing field can be levelled - folk with a bit more wedge can just move or get tutors whilst the folk at the top can just price the plebs out of the very top schools.  

[TDYER63]

17 minutes ago, ThistleWhistle said:

You might not be rich but with your job bet your dog is absolutely wedged with a limited company in the Bahamas and everything

 

 

You're right there is only so far the playing field can be levelled - folk with a bit more wedge can just move or get tutors whilst the folk at the top can just price the plebs out of the very top schools.  

😂😂 sadly my bank account is more representative of ‘A Rescue Centre’   than ‘ A Spaniel & Co’  , Cayman Islands.

Coincidentally  I have just had a text from an old neighbour asking if my daughter would be interested in tutoring her daughter as she needs to resit higher English 🙄 

[Orraloon]

44 minutes ago, ThistleWhistle said:

What an absolute farce after watching our shit-show.  Either have the balls to back the results being bollocks or avoid challenging it like the plague.  Making exactly the same mistake as the SG seems absolutely batshit mental.  

Unless they made exactly the same politically wise maneuver? 

[ThistleWhistle]

On ‎8‎/‎16‎/‎2020 at 1:06 AM, phart said:

https://sceptical.scot/2020/08/two-attainment-gaps-in-scottish-education/

I thought this was a great read

 

That was a good read cheers and is a fair enough assessment of where we are.  Personally think another gap can be added that seems a bit of an elephant in the room – the gap between schools/teachers rhetoric and what they’re achieving as don’t think you can measure the political gap without considering this too.  It’s like continuingly changing managers at football – at some point have to accept the players are complicit to some degree. 

 

More recently, teachers have been assured that they will be ‘empowered’ to exercise their professional judgement, rather than simply follow official directives. That rings decidedly hollow in the wake of SQA’s treatment of teachers’ assessments.

 

In this fiasco I’d argue that it’s explicitly the trusting of teachers that was the catalyst/ trigger to this chain of events;  potentially they were even overly trusted in that there doesn’t seem mechanisms in place to question/send back the original submissions before deciding to take the chainsaw out.   If the original marks had been sent back with a ‘thanks for your efforts but this’ll never fly’ whilst someone somewhere surreptitiously coughed ‘5%’ then this could have been averted.     

 

Change fatigue is understandable with governments coming and going but here we’ve got the SNP who’ve been in power for yonks and have illustrated various degrees of competence throughout to stay in position.  SNP policies, for better or worse (or to provide vindication for what they want to hear) generally seem to involve academic study in some format so if theory from the top of academia isn’t working at the coal face of learning then we should try to find out why not.  Either the theory is bollocks, or its implementation is flawed, and either way points back to questions to be raised on learning techniques in operation.

 

One of the main things drilled into me throughout the stages of further education is top-down dogma won’t work without bottom-up buy in.  Whether its whatever flavour of the year we’re on around change management; cultural management; including ‘embedding’ within change cycles or;  various tweaks to enterprise risk management simply telling folk what to do won’t work without buy-in bottom up.    

 

Weak leadership is a key failure top down but resistance to change / cultural bottlenecks are regular obstacles the other way.  For me there’s an example of both here with SNP’s u-turn when they should have either had the balls to see it through or foresight to avoid the entire storm in the first place.  On the other side teachers have projected student performance (and by default their own performance) improving by 10-15% across the board during a pandemic without explanation how this was achieved.  The prevailing culture has given the opportunity to take the hump at a perceived lack of trust and generally be backed without much question being asked about their own overestimations.         

 

[TDYER63]

19 minutes ago, ThistleWhistle said:

That was a good read cheers and is a fair enough assessment of where we are.  Personally think another gap can be added that seems a bit of an elephant in the room – the gap between schools/teachers rhetoric and what they’re achieving as don’t think you can measure the political gap without considering this too.  It’s like continuingly changing managers at football – at some point have to accept the players are complicit to some degree. 

 

 

 

More recently, teachers have been assured that they will be ‘empowered’ to exercise their professional judgement, rather than simply follow official directives. That rings decidedly hollow in the wake of SQA’s treatment of teachers’ assessments.

 

 

 

In this fiasco I’d argue that it’s explicitly the trusting of teachers that was the catalyst/ trigger to this chain of events;  potentially they were even overly trusted in that there doesn’t seem mechanisms in place to question/send back the original submissions before deciding to take the chainsaw out.   If the original marks had been sent back with a ‘thanks for your efforts but this’ll never fly’ whilst someone somewhere surreptitiously coughed ‘5%’ then this could have been averted.     

 

 

 

Change fatigue is understandable with governments coming and going but here we’ve got the SNP who’ve been in power for yonks and have illustrated various degrees of competence throughout to stay in position.  SNP policies, for better or worse (or to provide vindication for what they want to hear) generally seem to involve academic study in some format so if theory from the top of academia isn’t working at the coal face of learning then we should try to find out why not.  Either the theory is bollocks, or its implementation is flawed, and either way points back to questions to be raised on learning techniques in operation.

 

 

 

One of the main things drilled into me throughout the stages of further education is top-down dogma won’t work without bottom-up buy in.  Whether its whatever flavour of the year we’re on around change management; cultural management; including ‘embedding’ within change cycles or;  various tweaks to enterprise risk management simply telling folk what to do won’t work without buy-in bottom up.    

 

 

 

Weak leadership is a key failure top down but resistance to change / cultural bottlenecks are regular obstacles the other way.  For me there’s an example of both here with SNP’s u-turn when they should have either had the balls to see it through or foresight to avoid the entire storm in the first place.  On the other side teachers have projected student performance (and by default their own performance) improving by 10-15% across the board during a pandemic without explanation how this was achieved.  The prevailing culture has given the opportunity to take the hump at a perceived lack of trust and generally be backed without much question being asked about their own overestimations.         

 

 

I am not sure if this is representative of all schools but the PT at my daughters school ‘ sense checked‘ the teachers grades before they were submitted. The PT actually changed some of the teachers grades if for example the school was submitting too many ‘B’ s . 

[dandydunn]

Our daughter went back to school for her induction yesterday and was greeted with the news that her B for woodwork had been upgraded to an A. She was over the moon at school for the first time in years 😂