Great teacher = great results? Wrong

Jack Marwood in The Guardian

Sir Michael Barber, once a chief education adviser to Tony Blair, introduced one of the enduring modern myths about education when he quoted an unnamed South Korean policymaker in 2007, who said: “The quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers.” This great teacher myth is often presented as a simple equation: great teaching gets great results. It’s a view that is widely held, tremendously appealing and completely wrong.

It sounds plausible. After all, children spend a lot of time at school and, collectively, we spend a great deal of money on education. By the time they are 16, children have been at school for 10,000 hours, the figure often said to be the minimum necessary to master a skill, and we spend around 5% of our GDP on education. Surely teachers must be the biggest factor in ensuring that all this effort is worthwhile?

£15,000 teaching bursaries for maths and physics graduates

 

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David Cameron spoke “as a parent, not just a politician” when he recently introduced yet another plan to “deliver the best teachers” to “make Britain the best place in the world to learn”. “The best teachers” has become a common refrain in the ongoing narrative about schools, and it is very clear that many parents, pundits and politicians assume that the prime driver of attainment in schools is teachers themselves. So embedded is this idea, in fact, that when we hear that teaching is in crisis it is often assumed that this is because we don’t have enough good quality teachers. And often, we hear that by removing the bad teachers from the system, we will see improvements in future.

There is a huge problem with this view. Just how do you know who are bad teachers? For the past 40 years, a movement now known as “school effectiveness research” has promoted the idea that good teachers get good outcomes for children. Those who believe this also believe that, by removing bad teachers from our schools and replacing them with better ones, the crisis will be averted.

The key issue with this line of thinking is that teachers aren’t actually directly responsible for the learning in schools. Because, when it comes down to it, children are the ones who actually have to do the learning. Unfortunately, much to the frustration of every teacher – and parent – in the land, children don’t always do what they are told, or learn what we attempt to teach them. What’s more, children are by definition immature, and they don’t always know what is best for them. To further complicate matters, some children find school and learning easy and some don’t, often for reasons out of their, and our, control.

While teachers have to take responsibility for providing the very best circumstances in which to learn, any parent will know that children have their own ideas regardless of what we have to say about the matter. Children, sadly, are not all passively waiting to be filled up with facts and knowledge like empty vessels. The resistance of some children is legendary. Others overwhelm us with their eagerness to learn. But trying to teach anyone anything is tricky unless they actually want to learn, and are in a position to do so. What’s more, learning is hard work; it requires effort, repetition, practice, mental and physical exertion.

All this adds up to a picture of complexity ill served by the great teacher = great results myth. As is well known in the world of educational research, the variation in outcomes within any school is much, much larger than the variation between schools. In the same school, with the same teachers, some children learn a lot and others not so much, because while teachers teach, children are ultimately responsible for what they learn. There is lots of evidence that the vast majority of any child’s learning is due to their own efforts, not that of the school or of their teachers. In fact, academics such as Dylan Wiliam of the Institute of Education in London suggest that around nine times as much of a child’s measured learning outcomes can be attributed to the child rather than the difference their schooling has made.

Does that mean that teachers don’t matter? Of course it doesn’t. We need teachers who help children to get the most from their time in school. It does, however, mean that the common assumptions about what schools can achieve are based on a fallacy. Because learning is done by the child, and not by the teacher, and no education system can exceed the desire and capabilities of its children. The Korean policymaker was wrong. Schools are a very thin layer of icing on a very, very big cake. As highly skilled, dedicated and inspirational as the icing might be, in the end it is the cake that counts.

She took a year off from her marriage to sleep with strangers. What could go wrong? The Wild Oats Project Review

Carlos Lozada in The Independent

Get ready for “The Wild Oats Project”. And not just the book. Get ready for “The Wild Oats Project” phenomenon — the debates, the think pieces, the imitators and probably the movie. Get ready for orgasmic meditation and the Three Rules. Get ready for “My Clitoris Deals Solely in Truth” T-shirts.

Robin Rinaldi, a magazine journalist living in San Francisco by way of Scranton, Pa., initially wasn’t sure she wanted children, but she knew that Scott, her stoic Midwestern husband, did not. Over time, Rinaldi decided a baby would add purpose to their lives, but Scott wouldn’t change his mind. “I wanted a child, but only with him,” she explains. “He didn’t want a child but wanted to keep me.” When Scott opted for a vasectomy, she demanded an open marriage.

“I refuse to go to my grave with no children and only four lovers,” she declares. “If I can’t have one, I must have the other.”

If you’re wondering why that is the relevant trade-off, stop overthinking this. “The Wild Oats Project” is the year-long tale of how a self-described “good girl” in her early 40s moves out, posts a personal ad “seeking single men age 35-50 to help me explore my sexuality,” sleeps with roughly a dozen friends and strangers, and joins a sex commune, all from Monday to Friday, only to rejoin Scott on weekends so they can, you know, work on their marriage.

The arrangement is unorthodox enough to succeed as a story, and in Rinaldi’s telling it unfolds as a sexual-awakening romp wrapped in a female-empowerment narrative, a sort of Fifty Shades of Eat, Pray, Love. “I wanted to tell him to f— me hard but I couldn’t get the words out of my mouth” is a typical Rinaldi dilemma. At the same time, she constantly searches for “feminine energy” or her “feminine core” or for a “spiritual practice guided by the feminine.

But more than empowering or arousing, this story is depressing. Rinaldi just seems lost. Still sorting through the psychological debris of an abusive childhood, she latches on to whatever guru or beliefs she encounters, and imagines fulfillment with each new guy. She still rushes to Scott whenever things gets scary (a car accident, an angry text message), yet deliberately strains their union beyond recovery. “At any cost” are the operative words of the subtitle.

Robin and Scott agree to three rules — “no serious involvements, no unsafe sex, no sleeping with mutual friends” — that both go on to break. He finds a steady girlfriend, while Robin violates two rules right away. “In truth, I was sick of protecting things,” she writes about going condom-free with a colleague at a conference. “I wanted the joy of being overcome.”

The men and women she hooks up with — some whose names Rinaldi has changed, others too fleeting to merit aliases — all blur into a new-age, Bay Area cliche. Everyone is a healer, or a mystic, or a doctoral student in feminist or Eastern spirituality. They’re all verging on enlightenment, sensing mutual energy, getting copious action to the sounds of tribal drums. The project peaks when she moves into OneTaste, an urban commune where “expert researchers” methodically stroke rows of bare women for 15 minutes at a time in orgasmic meditation sessions (“OM” to those in the know). “Everyone here was passionate,” Rinaldi writes. “Everyone had abandoned convention.”

Rinaldi holds little back, detailing her body’s reactions along the way. At first she is upset that she can’t feel pleasure as quickly as other women, but she finally decides she’s glad that her “surrender didn’t happen easily, that it lay buried and tethered to the realities of each relationship.” Her clitoris, although “moody,” was also “an astute barometer. . . . It dealt solely in truth.”

And truth often comes in tacky dialogue. “Your breasts are amazing,” one of her younger partners tells her. “You should have seen them in my twenties,” Rinaldi boasts. His comeback: “You’re cocky. I dig that.” (Fade to dirty talk.) When they do it again months later, he thanks her in the morning. “Something happens when I’m with you,” he says. “I feel healed.” I’m sure that’s exactly what he feels.

Rinaldi can’t seem to decide why she’s doing all this. The project is her “rebellion.” Or “a search for fresh, viable sperm.” Or a “bargaining chip.” Or “an elaborate attempt to dismantle the chains of love.” Or just a “quasi-adolescent quest for god knows what.”

If exasperation could give you orgasms, this book would leave me a deeply satisfied reader.

One of her oldest friends calls her out. “How is sleeping with a lot of guys going to make you feel better about not having kids?” she asks. Rinaldi’s answer: “Sleeping with a lot of guys is going to make me feel better on my deathbed. I’m going to feel like I lived, like I didn’t spend my life in a box. If I had kids and grandkids around my deathbed, I wouldn’t need that. Kids are proof that you’ve lived.” It’s a bleak and disheartening rationale, as though women’s lives can achieve meaning only through motherhood or sex.

For all her preoccupation with feminine energy, Rinaldi seems conflicted over feminism. “I would die a feminist,” she writes of her collegiate activism, “but I was long overdue for some fun.” Later, she pictures women’s studies scholars judging her submission fantasies, and frets over “those Afghan women hidden under their burqas” who could be “beaten or even killed right now for doing what I was so casually doing.” But when she finds a sexual connection with a woman who backs away because of “emotional issues,” Rinaldi channels her inner alpha male: “I was drawn to her body but shrunk back when she expressed unfettered feeling. . . .  It only took sleeping with one woman to help me understand the behavior of nearly every man I’d ever known.”

When the year runs out, Rinaldi returns to Scott, even though she soon starts an affair with a project flame. She’s no longer so upset about the vasectomy, regarding it as a sign that Scott can stand up for himself (though it may also mean she now cares less about him, period). No shock that post-project, their chemistry is off, and when Rinaldi makes a casual reference to their time apart, Scott finally explodes. “Do you know how many nights I cried myself to sleep when you moved out!?” he asks. “Do you care about anyone’s feelings but your own!?” She was “too stunned to reply.” But the fate of this marriage, revealed in the final pages, is anything but stunning.

“These are the sins against my husband,” Rinaldi recounts. “Abdicating responsibility, failing to empathize with him, cheating and lying.” After blaming him for so long, “in the end, I was the one who needed to ask forgiveness.”

In a rare moment of heartbreaking subtlety, the book’s dedication page simply says “For Ruby,” the name Rinaldi had imagined for a baby girl. Except, “there is no baby,” she writes at the end. “Instead there is the book you hold in your hands.”

And that is a frustrating book, with awkward prose, a perplexing protagonist and too many eye-rolling moments. Yet it is also a book I see launching book-club conversations and plenty of pillow talk — not just about sex and marriage, but about the price and possibility of self-reinvention. You don’t have to write a great work to cause a great stir.

Does Rinaldi reinvent herself? She survives the aftershocks and even seems to discover some happiness, however fragile she knows it to be. So maybe she needed this after all. Or maybe sometimes “empowerment” is just another word for self-absorption.

Child rearing is too important to be left to the market

Zoe Williams in The Guardian

“Early years” is the most freighted term in politics, deployed to convey so much. For me, the phrase conjures an image of toddlers, hefting great boulders of public policy intention – like dutiful dwarves in fairytales. At election time, you see it dredged out to convey the following: first, this party is “family friendly”, which really means “women friendly”. Even though men are, last time I checked, intimately involved in the creation of children, and tend by modern mores to consider themselves responsible for the rest of the child’s life, the provision of care for children is an issue for a lady-voter; something to pique her interest after she’s been turned off by the conversation about defence spending and economic stability.

Also, early years – when attached to the word “intervention” – is a way of talking about deprivation without sounding as though you might do anything to tackle its structural causes, while at the same time avoiding the trap of callousness. You care, of course you care: who would blame a poverty-stricken three-year-old for failing to extend their vocabulary to match that of their peers? But your answer never relates back to the deprivation itself, rather, it suggests ways in which the state can make up the household deficit with thrifty, well-costed interventions. You have thereby established yourself as a caring, practical politician, who can meet a knotty problem head-on. It would be great if these interventions served more than a political purpose and made a difference to the children themselves, but you can’t have it all.

Last week the Nuffield foundation produced a report into the efficacy of early-years childcare and education. It found the demonstrable effects of the policy to be “modest”. Looking particularly at disadvantaged groups, it observed “some evidence that the impact of increased free entitlement on outcomes at age five was larger for children from lower socio-economic backgrounds”, but that this effect faded during primary school. The report highlights, furthermore, the fact that you can’t really reach a blanket conclusion about the influence of early years intervention, since provision varies. I want to say “varies wildly” but, to stick with the report’s sober language, it merely divaricates: state provision – especially attached to primary schools – is better.

The conclusions were that more research is needed before more money is committed; the oft-used phrase is “far from conclusive”, and there’s a reason for that. Early years interventions tinker at the edges of deprivation, while never considering what’s at its core. The seminal study on how disadvantage affects children’s educational attainment – and nobody denies that it does – is the 30 Million Word Gap, a 2003 American study that found high-income families talking more to their babies than poorer ones (a difference, by the age of three, of 30 million words). Policymakers have, on both sides of the Atlantic, fallen in love with this study, as they conceive ways in which that gap could be filled by institutions – mandatory parenting classes, graduate nursery staff, the simulation of conditions outside the home in which highly educated people talk a lot. This is accompanied by a complete myopia (I don’t want to call it deliberate; who knows what politicians do deliberately?) around what deprivation is: hunger, homelessness and poor housing, feelings of inferiority and hopelessness.

It is blindingly obvious to a teacher that a primary school cannot erode or undo the negative effect that being hungry has on a child’s ability to learn. A child with pressing housing concerns or very over-worked parents may find it difficult to concentrate. No wonder the effects of the nought to three years fade; these are real practical hurdles to a fulfilling human life. You do not need a sociologist, or a longitudinal cohort study, to find these correlations, as plain as the nose on your face.

And yet we contrive to have debates, and frame policy, around very complex secondary factors, boldly ignoring the very obvious primary ones. The reason is, I believe, moral: there is a fundamental ethical difference between believing in social mobility – opportunities for anyone, so long as they try hard enough – and believing in social parity – a decent life for people, however much they achieve, given that regardless of what happens somebody will end up at the bottom, and their welfare is as meaningful as anybody’s.

If mobility is the only goal you can accept, then to consider too deeply what being poor really feels like for a three-year-old is risky. You may end up caring about the family; you may actually end up thinking that none of them deserve to be hungry, even the ones who aren’t even children any more, and whose rubbish vocabulary is the root of the problem.

There’s a misconception even more fundamental. The Nuffield’s research is laudable, mainly for puncturing the claims about early years care that allow politicians to ignore more fundamental questions of social justice. But it is constrained by an even more fundamental misconception, which is that public policy could ever be cost-benefit analysed in this way – the infinite variegations of a human life crunched down into inputs and outputs; a toddler’s interaction monetised by the GCSEs achieved down the line. Payment-by-results culture is a necessity of any market or quasi-market system: you can’t quantify value if you’re not prepared to devise a set of measures of efficacy. But if we accept that the public sector does this best, why do we endlessly scratch around for the proofs to satisfy the market? We should work instead to the principles of cooperation: that pre-school children get the greatest benefit from universal provision, and the proof of its excellence is that everyone wants to use it.

Data is not the enemy

Ed Smith in Cricinfo

Taking the stats at your disposal into account does not mean your players cannot play a fearless and instinctive brand of cricket


The information is available to the players. It's their choice whether to use it or not © AFP



Poor Peter Moores couldn't have chosen a sentence more likely to turn him into a human dartboard. He needed to "look at the match data," Moores said after England's disastrous defeat to Bangladesh. To a press corps increasingly convinced that the England team has become formulaic and nerdy, this was the worst answer Moores could have reeled off.

It did, however, open up a whole new range of possibilities for the post-match interview. One wondered how historic sports interviews might have been different in the age of referencing match data.

Interviewer to George Foreman after he lost to Muhammad Ali in 1974: "What did you make of the fight, George?"

Foreman: "Haven't seen the fight data yet."

Interviewer: "Well, two men were standing up at the start of the eighth. Then there was one. You were on the canvas. In an algorithm: 2; 8; 1."

Foreman: "Right, got it."

And how would a data-inspired interview have run after the 1978 Oxford-Cambridge boat race, when Cambridge sank into the Thames, live on television?

Interviewer to Cambridge captain: "Disappointing race out there, I imagine?"

Captain: "Impossible to say before seeing the race data."

Interviewer: "Glug, glug, glug - ring any bells?"

All this mischief, however, does not explain very much why England crashed out of the World Cup. Are we really to believe that the central figure in the catastrophe was Nathan Leamon, the mathematician and former schoolteacher who is now England's stats analyst? That is ridiculous. It is Leamon's job to supply evidence that may help the management to make better decisions. It is the job of the coaching staff to use that information appropriately. So even if you believe, as I do, that England need to play a more fearless, instinctive brand of cricket, it does not follow that having access to potentially useful data prevents you from doing so.

The real problem is not maths, which by definition is flinty, pitiless, robust and unsentimental. No, the problem is management-speak, learned jargon and corporate-style snake oil. The unfortunate thing is that coaches can now use the phrase "match data" as just another thing to say when they are avoiding the subject. It slots into the lexicon of cliché, alongside "taking the positives", "skill sets" and "plan execution".

The irony is that real maths, in fact, is at the opposite end of the spectrum from jargon. Maths is exclusively content; jargon is content-free.

In his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language", George Orwell despaired of political jargon: "As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of words that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house." Sport soon surpassed politics for meaningless waffle. Orwell deserves a new epitaph: "The man who foresaw the evolution of the post-match interview."

The former England captain Mike Atherton made several good points about the rush to blame data for all England's woes. First, analytics now has less influence over the team than it did in the more successful Flower-Strauss era. Secondly, Leamon's work is not pushed down players' throats. Stats for the particular ground, videos of an opposition bowler's range of slower balls, these things are available if players want to see them. If they don't, fine.



Nathan Leamon has a gift for numbers but he doesn't believe they provide all the answers © PA Photos

In 2006, while I was writing my book What Sport Tells Us About Life, I dedicated a whole chapter to the remarkable success of a school rugby team, unbeaten for three seasons, a sequence of 33 games. From the author's perspective, drawing lessons from a school coach was an unusual and risky approach. After all, other subjects of my book included Zinedine Zidane, Billy Beane and Michael Jordan. What was a school coach doing in that company?

The answer is that I thought his methodology was worth bringing to a wider audience. The coach was a plain-speaking, no-nonsense Lancastrian who pared down his comments to players. Rather than talking for talking's sake - as most coaches do - he researched what really happened in the matches and fed back small chunks of highly useful information. The quest was to find insight, concision and meaning; and to avoid noise, chatter and cliché.

Who was this progressive but unheard-of coach? Nathan Leamon. His approach, then and now, is thoughtful, flexible and open. His character is modest without being deferential, self-contained without being standoffish. Now, nine years on, he must find the way he is portrayed in the media as unrecognisable. Far from being a credulous geek, Leamon is an understated sceptic, a sensible and balanced man who happens to have a gift for numbers. Leamon is the last person to argue that data can provide all the answers - he's much too smart.

While England were exiting the World Cup, the retired NBA player Shane Battier was addressing a sold-out audience at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston. If you want to understand how data can help a sportsman perform better, read Michael Lewis on Battier's playing days.

Or this, exploring why it is so hard, with the naked eye, to understand the way that Mesut Özil, the Arsenal footballer, creates space on a football pitch.

Like it or not, as professional sport evolves it will provide greater scope for academic rigour. A lot of clever people like sport and they are constantly developing ideas - some good, others less good - that may eventually become absorbed into the mainstream. Bill James' understanding of data changed baseball forever. Eventually no coach could afford to ignore James' ideas because it would cost them games.

That is why the status of the sports analyst is going up. Nate Silver, who has become the most important analyst of American presidential elections, cut his teeth modelling sports matches. Ideas that originate in sport are finding wider application in the outside world.

And yet I am equally confident that a central task for sports coaches - now more than ever - is to liberate players, to free them from stifling anxiety and fearfulness.

Those two truths exist in parallel, not in conflict. Coaches will inevitably want to use every tool at their disposal, including relevant data. Then they must have the psychological nous, the feel and the common touch, to allow players to express themselves.



In the future of limited-overs cricket, can batsmen build dominant positions early enough to reduce the risk of getting out so much as to take it out of the equation? size: 900 © Getty Images

In the end, the discussion of data in sport tends to reveal more about prejudices than the underlying reality. It's all too easy to blame other people for using either too much or too little evidence en route to their decisions. I am intuitive, you are strangely convinced, he is delusional. Or, if you prefer, I am rational, you are a reductionist, he is a slave to numbers.

There is another story to emerge from this World Cup. The central innovation, which has now transferred from T20 to ODIs, is that talented batsmen are lethal - perhaps unstoppable - when they play without any fear of getting out. In 2003 I played in the first ever T20 league. I wrote at the time that it allowed players to play as they do in the nets, when they are totally uninhibited.

This powerful freedom, however, is partly earned by the match situation, especially in the middle overs. If the batting team is behind in the match, and there are few wickets in hand, it is far harder to bat as though another wicket wouldn't matter. The challenge now, in all white-ball cricket, is to build a position so dominant that there is no risk attached to getting out. If you are batting at 360 for 2 with seven overs left - with, say, Glenn Maxwell padded up and waiting - there is literally no risk in trying to hit a six and getting out. Paradoxically, of course, that makes you more likely to hit the ball for six!

Perhaps someone can show me the data on how quickly this underlying dominance turns into an impregnable lead. If I was coach, I'd certainly want to know.

Britain’s housing crisis is a human disaster. Here are 10 ways to solve it

Rowan Moore in The Guardian

“Every day I cry,” says an activist on a stall in Stratford, east London, that is shared by housing campaign Focus E15 and the Revolutionary Communist party. “How many thousands of people are suffering?”

Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England, has said that problems with housing are the “biggest risk” to the UK economy. The CBI agreed, saying: “A perfect storm is brewing in the housing market. Now is the time for action.”

If there is one thing that revolutionary communists and bankers can agree on, it is that there is a housing crisis in Britain. There are too few homes, usually costing too much, often in the wrong places, and often of poor quality. The crisis damages lives, breaks up families, blights employment prospects, reduces mobility and slows the economy. 

This, you would have thought, would be a gift for any political party. Housing is a matter of vital importance to voters. At a time when all parties struggle to offer alternatives to each other, this would be a opportunity to be distinctive and take the lead. Yet all the main parties’ offerings on the subject are piecemeal, gestural and unambitious.

Back in east London, the young mothers of Focus E15 became celebrities when they occupied vacant council properties on the edge of the Olympic Park in the London borough of Newham. They had been told by the Labour council that they were to be rehoused outside the capital – part of a city-wide tendency to send its homeless people to places as far-flung as Bristol, Hastings and Stoke-on-Trent.

Their protest won them a reprieve, but thousands of others are not so lucky: at the Focus E15 stall you hear of families evicted by council-hired bailiffs who break in at 6am, often acting on tenuous legal authority. You hear of schooling disrupted, jobs lost, support networks broken and relocation putting impossible distances between friends and relatives.

The price of housing is a problem that runs across most social classes. In London, the south-east, much of rural Britain and several of the more desirable cities, you can be young, employed and even well-paid and have little prospect of acquiring a decent home. Britain was once famous as a country of houses with gardens, accessible to manual workers and clerks, but in many areas this is now a distant fantasy to those without property-rich parents to help them.

If the most conspicuous issues are about homes costing too much, there are also places where they cost too little. In Accrington, Lancashire, a two-bedroom house might be worth £40,000, which is less than it would cost to refurbish and repair it. This means that it is not worth the owners – often absentee landlords – investing in their maintenance. Roofs leak, mould grows on walls, condensation forms and heating bills rise in poorly insulated buildings.

According to Daniel Klemm of the north of England housing association Together Housing, which is working with property company Better Places, “a spiral of decline sets in”, where the physical environment deteriorates, which further deters investment. Those who can, leave, and those who stay have few prospects of employment. In a place like this you can have a home but no job; in high-value areas you can have a job, but no home.

FacebookTwitterPinterest Terraced homes in Accrington, Lancashire, before and as it is expected to look after a renovation by PlaceFirst. Photograph: PlaceFirst

The housing crisis is an accelerating human disaster. It is creating exploitative landlords, overcrowding and poor-quality homes. Private renters spend 40% of their income on housing. It is shocking that many people in their 20s now regard it as an accepted fact that they will never have much by way of a home.

It is wrong that having a home in many rural areas, or in London, should be regarded as a luxury. This applies even to traditionally poor London boroughs. “If you can’t afford to live in Newham,” the borough’s mayor told the Focus E15 mothers, “you can’t afford to live in Newham.” But these people hadn’t asked for their neighbourhood to become a high-performing investment asset, and they gain nothing from the change.

High house prices, which owe much to policies promoted by Margaret Thatcher’s government, pervert the promises of Thatcherism. If you work hard and are thrifty, she said, you will be rewarded. Yet people who own property can make more money from sitting on it than by doing a job, while others will never get on the property ladder however hard they strive. If you get on your bike to look for work, as her minister Norman Tebbit urged, you might have to pedal a hundred miles or more back to where you live.

Property values are distorting human values. But if politicians are incapable of making an argument based on ideas of a fair or fulfilling society, there are also economic reasons for addressing the problems of housing. It’s hard to run a business if your employees find it hard to get a home. If people on low and middle incomes are pushed out, big cities will in course lose those who make, maintain and repair things, who care for the ill and old, who clean, who cook and wait in restaurants, and who look after and teach children. The creative and inventive types, currently such a big part of London’s sales pitch to the world, will go too.

The most obvious cause of Britain’s housing is the simple operation of supply and demand. The country’s population is increasing, and we like to live in smaller units than in the past. A figure of about 240,000 is consistently estimated as the amount of new homes Britain needs each year, and with equal consistency it is never achieved. In 2014, fewer than 120,000 were built. The most commonly given reason for this undersupply is that Britain is short of land and that it has a planning system which, for good reasons, wants to protect the beauties of the countryside.

These arguments are only part of the story. Another reason is that inflation in housing – so taboo when it comes to other commodities – has since the 1980s been celebrated by governments and encouraged by policies on taxation and borrowing. Prices are pushed up further by recent initiatives such as the changes to pension pot rules which allow people 55 and over to invest theirs in property. Meanwhile, the Thatcher government stopped local authorities from building more housing. Right To Buy took affordable homes out of the available stock and were not replaced. Some were resold as investments, and rented out for profit. A wasteful loop was created, whereby councils now find themselves paying high rents to private landlords, in order to house their homeless in properties that once belonged to the council.

It is also too simple to say that Britain is short of land. “The notion that there is no land left really is nonsense,” says David Orr, chief executive of the National Housing Federation. “Nine per cent of the country is developed and that includes roads, factories and so on: only 2% is housing.” The challenge is rather to find places that do not affect somebody’s view, somebody’s dog-walking route and somebody’s property prices.

The combined effects of demand, government stimulants and restrictions on supply consistently push house prices above other forms of inflation, making residential property an attractive speculative investment. The investors might be British individuals who take the perfectly rational decision to buy and rent out homes as a way of providing for their old age. They might also be overseas investors who, also rational and encouraged by, among other things, non-dom tax breaks, see British property as a safe bet.

The crisis in house prices is therefore not an act of pure economic fate but constructed and willed by policy over decades. As such, it can also be defused by policy, if not easily or quickly. So far, the main government response has been to try to relax planning rules and to encourage the market with measures such as Help To Buy which, presented as much-needed assistance to first-time buyers, tend to push up prices further.

There is a confusion here between the problems of availability and affordability. If the only way to encourage building in larger numbers is to put up prices, this is no help for the people who cannot afford a home. The underlying belief is that the market will provide, if only it were properly stimulated and enticed, but it is one unsupported by evidence. At no time since the second world war has the private sector built at the rate now required, and usually it has fallen a long way short. The only time when the total housing numbers exceeded those now thought essential was in the 1950s and 1960s, when council housing accounted for half the figure.

By itself, the market does not provide. One reason for this is that never, not even in the wildest libertarian fantasy, will there be no planning. It is something that, despite criticisms, everyone wants: we complain about faceless bureaucrats, but when something we don’t like comes down our street, we want them to defend us. Where there is planning, the market cannot operate as freely as it would in trading, say, ironmongery. The other factor is called absorption: if developers start building in sufficient numbers to make homes cheaper or slower to sell, they stop.

The public sector has to build more itself. It also needs to plan more constructively and actively, creating positive proposals for what new places could be, which also recognise and allay the reasonable fears of existing residents. The idea of greater public involvement will raise spectres of the famous failings of mass public housing in the past, but this is to ignore the successes of postwar public development (in many new towns, for example, and in several now sought-after council estates) and to assume that it is impossible to learn from and improve on mistakes.

FacebookTwitterPinterest Council housing should be built to suit a range of incomes. Photograph: Jess Hurd/reportdigital.co.uk

The Homes for Britain campaign, which brings together housing associations, private house builders, landlords, planners and architects, is holding a rally in Westminster. It aims to solve the housing crisis “in a generation”, which is a realistic time frame, given that it has taken a generation to create the current situation. It would be foolish of anyone to suggest that the solutions are easy and obvious, but a party serious about improving the housing of the country should consider these:

1 Make zero inflation a target

In the same way that targets are set for retail prices, it could be stated that it is desirable to stop house prices rising. In real terms they would slowly fall to affordable levels, and the heat would be taken out of speculation, but no one would be put into negative equity. Inflationary incentives like Help To Buy should be ended, and taxation should be used to deflate property bubbles.

2 End the obsession with owner-occupation

Good though it is for many people, owning your own home is neither desirable nor possible for many. It also encourages an approach to development that relies on continuing increases in value. Other options, such as renting from private or public landlords, should be equally attractive and viable.

3 Use every tool in the box

Politicians of all main parties have declared their wish to create garden cities. This is well and good, but requires a level of will and expertise not so far evident, and only goes so far. The scale of the need also requires every option to be considered. This includes building on ex-industrial land, in many small increments as well as through large plans, and increasing the density of existing cities and suburbs.

4 Build – carefully and well – in green belts

Restricting urban sprawl and protecting natural landscapes, the country’s green belts are one of the triumphs of British planning. But some of their land is of little environmental or economic value. Last year planning consultancy Urbed showed that green belts can be built on responsibly, allowing more people to live close to nature. There is no good reason not to realise some of these ideas.

5 Make neighbourhoods

The University of Cambridge, faced with the impossibility of housing its staff in an expensive city, is working with local authorities to create well-planned, good-quality new neighbourhoods, with high environmental standards and well designed communal spaces. Examples like this, which show that new homes do not have to be a form of pollution, should be followed across the country.

6 End discounts on right to buy

At a time when some people are being ejected from their homes in the name of austerity, it is grotesque that others are being offered lavish discounts to buy their local authority homes – often so that they can resell them for a quick profit.

7 End vindictive benefit cuts

The benefit cap unfairly punishes people living in areas that have become expensive by making it impossible for them to pay their inflated rents. The bedroom tax is mean-spirited and destructive. Both should end.

8 Act regionally

The needs of Lancashire, Cambridge and Newham differ widely. There should be the ability to make different measures in different areas.

9 Put a secretary of state for housing in the cabinet

As the renters’ campaign group Generation Rent has proposed, the issue is big enough to be represented at the highest level of government.

10 Let councils borrow to build

For the first time since the 1980s, councils are now allowed to build housing again. To do this more and better, they should be able to borrow money against their considerable assets, rather than form partnerships with private property companies who take 20% of the proceeds in profit. New council housing should not be a last resort only for those in the most desperate need, but suited to a range of incomes.

FacebookTwitterPinterest Greener pastures … Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

The obvious objection to some of these proposals will be that there is no money. But money is already being wasted – on paying housing benefit to private landlords for example, on right-to-buy discounts, and on the profits developers make on publicly owned land. It is partly a question of spending it better.

There is also what Ebenezer Howard, the inventor of garden cities, called the “unearned increment”, which is the uplift in value when land becomes available for housing. It was the basis on which postwar new towns were built. Currently it is being squandered – when the government, for example, relaxes planning constraints on certain properties, or makes it easier to convert offices or shops into homes they drench the lucky owners of such places in cash, without asking for much in return.

House price inflation is an addiction. It is destructive and divisive. It is a tax by the haves on the have-nots, and by the old on the young.

It makes for more losers than real winners – if you own your home, its rising price is of little use to you unless you want to downsize, in which case you can never return to your previous position on the ladder. The only real beneficiaries are those who own more property than they need for their own living.

Thatcher’s property-owning democracy has run its course. It is time for a new model.

“Spare Afzal Guru and hang Arundhati Roy.” A Tribute to Vinod Mehta from Arundhati Roy

When he published the Radia tapes, Vinod Mehta did what a good editor should. By making public the dirty diaries of the ongoing cluster-f..k between politicians, journalists, journalist/lobbyists and their corporate sponsors, he broke the club rules of the cosy oligarchy that runs our country. Not surprisingly, when the curtain went down on the show, for the people who were exposed in the Radia tapes, it turned out to be nothing more than a slightly embarrassing blip in the upward arc of their ambitions. For Vinod Mehta, however, the consequences were serious. I have no doubt they played a role in hastening his end.

Anyway, he’s gone now, and with him perhaps the era of the intractable, unpredictable, idiosyncratic editor. Not because there aren’t idiosyncratic folks around any more, but because we live in a climate where it’s becoming increasingly difficult for them to function. The outpouring of grief at his passing by all kinds of people, including those who are professionally his polar opposite, seems to be as much for him as for the end of idea of the independent-minded editor. In some ways it must be seen as a credit to Outlook’s proprietors that they made room for a maverick like Vinod Mehta, despite being targeted and having their offices raided several times. As for the rest of us, while we grieve for Vinod, we cannot give up on the possibility that there can be independent editors in future too.

I will miss Vinod very much. He played such an important part in my life as a writer.

It’s not that we agreed about everything, we certainly had our differences—about the Congress party, about Kashmir (of course), about the politics of caste, about his strange, recently rehashed biography of Meena Kumari. But this time around, the disagreement between us is permanent and irreversible. I maintain that he shouldn’t have left. He could have stuck around with us a little longer. But he’s just bloody well gone. It’s ridiculous. I don’t agree.

After The God of Small Things was published in 1997, I was aware that I ran the risk of turning into a sort of Interpreter of the East for the western media. This I did not wish upon myself. Whatever I wrote, whatever arguments I got into, whatever hooliganism I was involved in, I wanted it to be here. Not for reasons of any great nationalism on my part, nor because this is my country, but simply because this is where I live. Vinod Mehta became my partner in this enterprise. Almost everything I have written since 1998 was first published by him in Outlook.

There we were, Advani and I, across Vinod’s body. Perhaps it showed grace on his part, none on mine. Wonder what Vinod would’ve thought.

Very early on in our alliance, regardless of any commentary to the contrary (and of that there was plenty) we both understood that neither was doing the other a favour. That, I believe, is a rare and wonderful thing in any relationship. Over the many years we worked together, we spoke several times on the phone, but we hardly ever met. I’ve never been to his house. He visited me only once, recently, but it was more like an inspection tour than a visit. It was as though he had come just to confirm an idea he had in his head about the way I live. He shuffled in, took a look around and shuffled out. I don’t think either of us knew how to play Guest and Host. At any rate we weren’t very good at it. That’s about it as far as our social life went.


And yet, out of this peculiar, laconic, minimalist relationship came a body of work that amounts to five volumes of collected essays and interviews that have been subsequently republished in several languages in several newspapers and magazines in India as well as the rest of the world. What does all this have to do with Vinod Mehta?  Quite a lot actually. I wrote the essays, yes, but the freedom and the urgency with which I wrote had much to do with knowing that Vinod Mehta would publish them—without force-fitting them into some pre-determined magazine format. This was no joke. Outlook was, and is, a major, commercial, mass-circulation newsmagazine. That is its strength. And yet, Vinod had the self-confidence and the flexibility to publish, from time to time, these long, unorthodox, often unpopular essays that almost always created a storm.

The rules were set early on. When I sent him The End of Imagination, the essay I wrote after the 1998 nuclear tests, he called me and said, “Do you really want to say ‘Who the hell is the Prime Minister to have his finger on the nuclear button?’ Can I change it to ‘Who is the Prime Minister?’” I said I’d rather he didn’t. So ‘who the hell’ stayed. Then came my turn to ask him for something. Acutely aware of the mined terrain I was wading into, I asked him whether he could avoid putting a picture of me on the cover. He said he’d see what he could do. It was his delicate way of telling me to take a hike. The issue came out, with a photograph of me on the cover, and the most controversial sentence in the essay splashed across it: I Secede. All hell broke loose.

These then, were our unspoken Rules of Engagement. Vinod would not make any alteration to my text without my consent. In turn, even if my essay was going to be the cover story, I would stay out of any discussions about the content and design of the cover. This went on for fifteen years.

The three of us—Arnab, I and Vinod—on stage together. Hilarious. I’d have done it for Vinod Mehta, though. Gladly. He shouldn’t have gone.

At one point during his funeral, there was a strange, poignant moment that I don’t really know what to make of. I found myself facing L.K. Advani, separated by the length of Vinod’s flower bedecked body. Advani was laying a wreath at his feet. I was standing around trying to say goodbye (or not) to Vinod in my head. I was reminded of the only time he ever cautioned me. It was 2006. The papers had announced that Afzal Guru, convicted for his role in the December 13, 2001, Parliament attack, was going to be hanged in a few days. I was dismayed because I had followed the case closely for several years and had studied the legal papers. I knew that much of the evidence was either extremely flimsy or fabricated. (There was plenty to suggest that it could even have been a false flag attack.) Hanging Afzal would mean putting an end to the possibility of getting answers to some very disturbing questions. Outrageously, the Supreme Court judgement said that though there was no direct evidence against Afzal, it was sentencing him to death “in order to satisfy the collective conscience of society”. Meanwhile, the BJP, with Advani at the forefront (he was the home minister in 2001 when the attack took place), had begun a noisy campaign: “Desh abhi sharminda hai, Afzal abhi bhi zinda hai  (The country is ashamed, because Afzal is still alive).” I knew I would not be able to live with myself if I said nothing despite knowing what I knew. I called Vinod and said I wanted to write something. For the first (and only) time he said: “Arundhati, don’t. The mood is ugly. They will turn on us. They will harm you.” It didn’t take long to convince him that we could not keep quiet on this one. I wrote a long essay called And his Life Should be made Extinct—the title was a quote from the Supreme Court judgement. 

The Outlook cover said, in bold letters,Don’t Hang Afzal. (Of course, the Congress-led UPA government—and not the BJP—did eventually hang him a few years later, in 2013, in the most cowardly, illegal and shabby way.)


After the issue came out, the floodgates opened and once again Outlook was deluged with insults for weeks. But this was the other part of our Rules of Engagement. Vinod would publish what I wrote, but then would open up the letters pages for abusive responses for weeks at a stretch. (After the 2008 Mumbai attacks, Sashi, Vinod’s secretary of 25 years showed me some angry letters-to-the editor that had begun to arrive even before I had written anything.) No other magazine I know publishes insults to itself, its contributors and its editor so gleefully. Vinod seemed to derive endless amusement from those letters. Occasionally, he would call and chuckle about the ones he particularly liked. His favourite letter after the Afzal Guru issue was one that said, “Spare Afzal Guru and hang Arundhati Roy.” Of course, he published it.

And now, suddenly, here we were, Advani and I, grieving at his funeral. I was unnerved. Perhaps it showed grace on Advani’s part and none on mine. I don’t know. I can’t imagine what Vinod would have thought.

The last essay of mine that Vinod published before he retired as the editor of Outlook was Walking with the Comrades, my account of the weeks I spent inside the forest in Bastar with Maoist guerrillas. B.G. Verghese, who recently passed away too, wrote a response to it. And then extraordinarily, Vinod published a reply to his response by Cherukuri Rajkumar, better known as Comrade Azad, a member of the politburo of the CPI (Maoist). It was a remarkable thing for him to have done. He called me, sounding pleasantly surprised at how calm and reasonable Azad sounded. By the time his reply (A Last Note to a Neo-colonialist) was published, Azad had been kidnapped in Nagpur by plainclothes policemen and summarily executed in the Dandakaranya forest on the Andhra-Chhattisgarh border.

I had a last phone call from Vinod just before he fell ill. He said, “Listen Arundhati, I’ve never asked you for anything, but I’m asking now. Actually I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. You have to launch my new book, Editor Unplugged. I know you don’t do these things, but you just have to.” I laughed and said I would. A few days later he called again, naughtily. “Oh, I didn’t tell you, but the other person on stage with us will be Arnab Goswami.” I don’t think he told Arnab his plans. The crafty old fox was playing us!

The three of us on stage together. Hilarious. I’d have done it for Vinod Mehta, though. Gladly. But now he’s shuffled off somewhere. He shouldn’t have gone. I really need to talk to him.

Fixing our schools: 'it's not the policy, it's the people'

Heath Monk in The Telegraph

There is an election coming and education is bound to be a key issue because there are still too many schools where students aren’t doing well enough. We’ll have to spend the next few months listening to prospective Education Secretaries explain how they will fix this. But the truth is we don’t need more policy: we need a revolution. And it has already started, quietly.

This ‘Quiet Revolution’ is how school improvement really works. It’s not about top-down decisions made in Westminster; it’s about exceptional school leaders and great teachers transforming their schools through hard work and expertise.

Over the past decades successive governments have used policy to reconfigure curricula, tighten accountability and shake up governance. I’ve worked in the Department for Education alongside the people who made some of these changes and, without a doubt, they are genuinely motivated by the desire to make a positive change.

But while policies can set expectations and contexts, they are not magic wands. They frequently fail to translate to the front line and some of them aren’t even good ideas, creating more noise than signal.

No political party is immune to this sort of thinking. Recent examples include Tristram Hunt’s pedagogic oath to ensure teacher’s moral purpose (as if medical doctors never go bad), Cameron’s ‘war on mediocre schools’ (haven't they always been with us?) and the confusion caused by universal free school meals in primary. 

Our political culture now relies on bold promises and vague delivery, and that is not what students from disadvantaged backgrounds need. They are the ones who are most harmed by bad schools and they need a quiet revolution most of all.

The mission of giving these young people a great education will not be achieved just through change at the top. My reading of history is that even loud revolutions leave much unchanged. If the deep structures aren’t modified, you’re just re-arranging the chairs.

It’s school leadership that changes things on the ground. A great headteacher can transform an entire school because they have the skills and vision to understand what their teachers and students need to succeed.

I hope I can take the next Education Secretary around one the schools I’ve visited recently and show them how real school improvement happens. It’s the head who shakes hands with every pupil at the gate; who consistently enforces the rule that every student must be ready to learn by bringing a pencil, pen and ruler to their lessons; or who instils a ‘no hands up’ class room culture so it’s not the same keen students answering questions.

This might sound like window-dressing but there’s lots of data that shows that it is not. These everyday actions lead to shared values, language and culture throughout a school – and that can change students’ lives.

The organisation I work for is part of this Quiet Revolution, though we have borrowed the phrase. We train people who want to become headteachers because they are driven by the moral purpose to give every child the opportunity to succeed.

We’ve devoted part of our website to celebrating and sharing some of the most effective things they’ve seen in schools. This work isn’t revolutionary because of fad or fashion but because they’ve done it really (really) well.

Since Future Leader Jane Keeley became headteacher at Haggerston School in Hackney the school has regained its standing in the community, engaging students and families and improving results. Future Leader Luke Sparkes helped set up Dixons Trinity Academy in one of the most deprived areas of Bradford and has instilled a culture where children love school and are excelling academically.

The work of school improvement isn’t complicated but it is hard. It requires dedication to students and a commitment to continual development. It doesn’t happen systematically just because of edicts from Westminster but because of individuals who know that there isn’t any time to waste.

Every child who leaves school without five good GCSEs including English and maths will face reduced choices and opportunities, damaging lives and communities.

I like the tradition in Ancient Rome, where conquering generals would return in triumph and ride through the city with someone whispering in their ear, ‘Remember: you are mortal.’ Post-election, I’d love to stand behind whoever is at the dispatch box and whisper: ‘It’s not the policy, it’s the people.’

The Quiet Revolution is for school leaders and teachers who believe that every child can achieve, who are always searching for better ways to support their students – and who will not stop, whatever the current system.