Yacapaca

Mike Tomlinson wants to reintroduce apprenticeships, according to an interview in the Telegraph today (registration required). The key quote:

• “At 14, some students will spend up to two days a week in the workplace… Junior apprenticeships could easily happen at 14. A lot of people become disengaged at 14, if not before.”

I think this is the most promising element in his whole report. The nation did itself a grave disservice when it let apprenticeships die in the period 1950-1970, and I’m all in favour of bringing them back.

Every few years somebody tries to reintroduce apprenticeships; the current attempt is called “New Apprenticeships”, but I wonder if you’ve even heard of it. There are two big barriers to reintroduction, and I seriously worry that Mr Tomlinson has the clout to overcome either.

First is the ingrained national belief that vocational education is for the less intelligent (meaning, really, the working class). This is an old one so I’ll spare you the sociology lecture and restrict myself to a short scream of rage.

Second is whether the government is really prepared to finance apprenticeships. They are a lot more expensive than locking the same kids up in a classroom for 30 hrs a week. Anyone over 40 may be a little surprised to hear that; I certainly remember apprentices earning real wages, and being able to flash them around in the pub while I was still on pocketmoney. So what’s changed?

The short answer: mobility of labour. The heyday of industrial apprenticeships was between the wars, at a time when few people would choose to migrate outside the town of their birth. For reasons of both culture and economics, jobs where frequently for life. It made sense for an employer to invest in educating a young person for five years because they expected a 50-year return on the investment.

Most young people now consider it a point of honour to change jobs every 6 months to 2 years. If we want employers to participate in apprenticeships in future, we are going to have to remunerate them adequately for the task. I’d guess that for a full-time post we are looking at a figure of £10,000 per year, on top of anything being paid to the apprentice. Tomlinson’s proposed two days per week would reduce this to £4,000 per year.

It’s worth remembering that the industrial apprenticeship model we remember is an historical anomaly of the industrial era. Throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, upwardly mobile parents expected to pay employers to provide apprenticeships for their sons. The economics were similar to those that pertain today. Skilled people were in short supply. They were generally self-employed and highly mobile. Those who had been taught well, by an acknowledged master, could command high wages.

So will parents stump up the cash now? Seems unlikely given that we are looking at a cost significantly higher than university tuition fees. Will the government? Someone will whisper “election” and they’ll run for cover at the tax implications. Will apprentices themselves accept a level of debt of, say £20,000 at age 19? Logically they should; it’s a much better investment in their future than a mortgage after all. But that’s going to be a very, very tough sell for Mr Tomlinson.

Video files are large and slow to load over the internet; you can get around this by using “streaming” formats. These slice a video up; you can watch the first slice whilst the second is downloading, and so on. Last year, we experimented with incorporating streaming media into Paperless School. The results were disappointing; very few of our test participants actually got to see the video in the end. There were two problems:

• Bandwidth. Streaming a video once over a broadband connection is OK, but the average school connection won’t cope with 30 simultaneous streams. We thought schools’ proxy servers would stop this being a problem, but none of the ones we came across in the test could handle streaming media. It runs contrary to the Paperless School philosophy to ask schools to install special hardware, so putting in dedicated streaming media proxies wasn’t an option.
• Format. There are dozens of competing formats and several popular media players. We tried several alternatives, but in each case fewer than 10% of users could both see and hear the video.

The video-in-schools problem was addressed most elegantly by our friends at Espresso several years ago. They put their own dedicated proxy into the school and supply their own programmes to it via a dedicated satellite connection. Like all first-to-market solutions, Espresso is proprietary. Their box, their format, their (and their licensees’) content. Much as I admire them, that’s been enough to put me off trying to incorporate Espresso services into Paperless School.

Now Mike Ramsay, CEO of TiVo, have announced in an interview that TiVo intends to support video over the internet too. Thus far, Tivo recorders have been linked to an individual television. If they were to extend it to include a streaming web server for a local network, the TiVo package would become a very attractive one for schools. Their solution will be a generic one, but it might well attract people like us to offer dedicated educational video as part of our content mix.

My prediction: this market won’t mature until there’s an accepted open standard for streaming proxies to pre-load content. Once that happens, we’ll all pile in.

So far I’ve only read the BBC’s coverage of the Tomlinson Report. First impression: a missed opportunity to make changes. Consider this quote:

Coursework would be replaced by a personal project perhaps spanning a number of subjects, and demonstrating the ability to research and analyse, perhaps through a visual presentation or designing and constructing something.

Most of the coursework I see is project-based already. This feels more like an exercise in renaming than anything more serious. I do hope I’m mistaken.

David Millband wants to ban home study leave, the practice by which students take time off before exams, because boys generally lack the self-discipline to make good use of it. I heartily concur with the analysis of the problem, but I have doubts about the solution. For one thing, girls do make use of home study leave. Surely there’s room for gender differentiation here?

Let’s look at boys’ problems from a management perspective, as if boys were employees. Suppose we have observed that our employees lack self-discipline and will only work when supervised. A bad manager will impose more supervision; a good one will change the task structure and reward structure to one that works for this particular group. This is such standard practice that you can pick it up from any basic textbook on line-management. I’ve met David Millband and he’s a bright chap. I’m sure he can do better than fall into the micromanagement trap.

The key benefit of study leave is that the student can focus on areas with the greatest potential to improve his or her results – it’s an opportunity for truly individualised learning. This is the aspect we really want to keep.

The current reward system is completely broken. The main reward for study-leave diligence is good exam results. Every student wants these but they are too abstract and too far in the future to really motivate many young people. I would like to see each student teamed up with a mentor whose job is simply to encourage, encourage, encourage. Like a sports coach, the mentor would seek to build each boy’s self-confidence and self-discipline by delivering immediate rewards for every step forward. Mentors would not in any way get involved in the content of what was being learned. Naturally enough I would link mentors and students electronically, purely because doing so would make such a system affordable.

The current task structure is in even worse shape. Since the introduction of the National Curriculum, school learning has been broken into small chunks with defined, measurable outcomes. It has been delivered as short learning tasks, each of which is formally assessed. When study leave comes along, all of that is thrown out of the window. What surprises me is that only 50% of the school population falls over when their crutches are kicked away.

Until the rest of the school system has been brought back into balance, and students given more opportunity to develop self-reliance, we must put back at least one of the crutches during study leave. There are lots of good online revision aids out there now; what’s to stop schools (or the government directly) offering these to students through an MLE. The students can still choose their own study content, but they’ll have enough support to make study leave effective exam preparation – even if they’re boys.