The Last Journey of a Genius

Reminds me of a documentary on Richard Feynman where he plays conga (or) djembe drums:-)

There was a time when you could buy the DVDs, for educational purposes, direct from Howard, but I can’t now find the link. I’ll check with his office to see if that is still possible.

I much prefer your idea of localized team-based peer-review. In my experience of that, you do get improved performance management, if it is done well.

You’d also hope that best practice these days could spread wiki-style from such a cellular structure of performance. The combination of mistaken theory, targets and check-box management, as you say, has manifestly failed. Perhaps also it has slowed the spread of discussion of Tommy MacKay’s success in West Dunbartonshire, which takes the whole community approach you’re alluding to.

Tim

… however, the government don’t govern, democracy never gave that sort of absolute mandate; voters are realising centralisation and targets in the Major and Blair years were a big mistake. Despite that, state education remains mostly devolved to local authorities and the DCSF budget is largely consumed by teachers and administrative salaries rather than trendy initiatives.

I hope Sing-up _can_ inspire and motivate many children, however politically it seems to me, like the “dance yourself fit” initiative, based on hope it will appeal to the Strictly/X-Factor gene we seem to have.

If I were appointed as a benign dictator of schools in the way you suggest Goodall should be; for the mid-ranking areas I’d focus on staff/pupil ratios and make staff accountable through team peer review led by the head not by exam results. For communities that seem to struggle, there is usually an underlying social problem that cannot be fixed in the schools alone … maybe here the DCSF makes some sense.