Tuesday, 24th August. 6.30- 8.30pm. Borough Bar, London Bridge.

There will be free drinks, kindly sponsored by Protocol, and talks from a couple of experienced supply teachers about how they found work and impressed the schools.

If you’d like to come, RSVP to our Facebook Group

Giving children the tools to find knowledge for themselves has some sound pedagogy; the days of rote learning (and corporal punishment for that matter) are well behind us. But the extreme opposite essentially holds that we don’t need to know facts at all in an age when limitless information is only a click away on Google. The Battle of Bannockburn and the phyla of Nematodes are equally irrelevant to a modern student with Wikipedia to hand, so goes the theory.

It is in this climate that the new Scottish Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) was developed since 2002. Consultation and committees have produced something that replaces a specific and important historical battle with

I can discuss the motives of those involved in a significant turning point in the past and assess the consequences it had then and since

and learning about worms with

I can report and comment on current scientific news items to develop my knowledge and understanding of topical science.

The real issue for teachers is that assessing whether students have achieved the required levels of the new curriculum is much harder than some factual test. Does the ability to ‘comment on current scientific news items’ require the incoherence of your average YouTube comment, or the erudition of Stephen Pinker?

And ironically all that delay involved in consulting the community has meant the Secondary school CfE launch comes at a time when the tide is turning back towards learning facts. The Core Knowledge curriculum, adopted by many US states, now looks to be the favoured route for Primary curriculum change in England. Core Knowledge’s popularity stems from its clarity, not modernity – it was devised in the early 1970s, at the height of the relativist revolt against facts. It really does get specific: for year 8, students must know that ‘At room temperature, sound travels through air at about 340 meters per second’ and that the Latin for year is ‘annus’.

Teachers know what they have to teach, and precisely what should be imparted when. While the prescribed books for English may not prove to everyone’s taste, the maths and science content is uncontroversially what students need to know. Far from stifling creativity, the focus of innovation (as with Teachable’s content) is then on the how to teach and engage.

Parents can also follow their child’s progress more easily when topics are prescribed. Plus for a teaching resource library, such as Teachable, it is SO much easier for people to find materials linked to commonly known topics and events than abstract concepts.

Curriculum for Excellence might be the very latest, but in the broad sweep of educational history I suspect it will be seen as the last hurrah for ‘develop curiosity and understanding’ versus teaching identifiable facts.

Still, the naive assumption of 99% of the posts that widespread, high-quality news will still be available if no-one pays is astounding.

Not a single comment here has pointed out that this is not about greed on behalf of News Corp; it’s about survival.

Every mainstream newspaper in the UK is loosing money at an increasing rate. At current projections the Independent, Evening Standard and most local newspapers will be close down by the end of 2010 (even with the cash injected by Lebedev). The Guardian, Times and Telegraph may not last 3 years without a new income stream. That’s because few people click on the online adverts, and all that writing, photographing, editing and web development still costs money.

So if the posts here are to be believed, and users baulk at paying for the online edition the options for getting British news in 5 years time there will be a stark choice:
(a) source news from a haphazard stream of opinionated bloggers
(b) rely on a monopoly output from the BBC (which will likely decrease due to cuts)

There won’t be a newspaper to buy at your local store.

And I feel strongly because the same argument applies to educational content in the longer term. Yes, a group of enthusiastic amateurs have always and will always publish their educational ideas for free, but if teachers want a reliable, high-quality range of resources they have to pay for it online.

From jungle noises to mechanical clicks, there are thousands of studio quality sounds to choose from. As with Teachable, the clips are available to download from around £1 per file.

Please use the discount code ‘teachable’ when you get to the checkout page to claim a special 10% discount.

We are pleased to announce that the prize winner is Laura Breton, a primary teacher from Leeds, UK. Well done Laura, and the iPod Touch is on it’s way to you!

But the growth in users has slowed (unless Facebook actually starts giving free smartphones away in India and China), and like any maturing business it needs to be valued on what cash it is actually generating for shareholders.

So firstly, the top line. Facebook gets around 260 bn page views per day.

By a few simple experiments with their advertising platform I reckon the average click through rate for their adverts is just below 0.01%. They serve 3 ads on each page, so that means 1 in around 3,500 pages could be revenue generating for them. But that assumes they have enough advert inventory to keep showing new ads to their users (who get bored easily); perhaps safer to assume only 1 in 5,000 pages generates click-through revenue (or the equivalent).

We’ll assume the average click-through advertising rate is 30 cents.

$0.30 x 5m clicks = $1.5m per day = $550m per year.

The costs are not insubstantial either though: 40,000 servers – which probably cost the best part of $200m to buy and set up – and storing maybe 100 petabytes of images, video and log data (80bn images alone).

There are also 250 engineers and support staff, which is about $60m of annual cost.

So we could be assume that their total operating expenses are around $200m a year. That still leaves a healthy profit of $250m.

That doesn’t account for any revenue from some of their more sophisticated cross-sell and data-mining ideas – which have caused such user outrage. Assuming they can find a non-contentious way to double the profits over a few years, and maintain their pageviews (if not their share of global traffic), the business could easily be valued at 20x EBITDA, which gets you to … $5bn.

So it looks like Facebook needs to go some way to prove it’s worth, mainly because not enough people click on ads. That’s why we haven’t served ads at Teachable so far: only one is a few thousand users actually find them useful.

The TDA, National College of School Leadership and Children’s Workforce Development Council will all receive a 10% cut to their budgets this year (saving £60m in total). Could these be wound down further next year? The 10% in-year cut is in line with my previous prediction, but to realise the 40% of savings next year, one or two more £150m/year quangos may have to go.

Elsewhere in the letter, there are indications that some of the pet schemes of the Labour executive will be wound down:

• £21m saved from stopping Diploma development, support and communication
• £7m saved from unallocated budget for Enterprise education
• £15m from cutting grants for Specialist Schools changing designation or for High Performance specialist schools
• £7m for not proceeding with Rose review and less on PHSE and Citizenship
• £1m less from Gifted and Talented

At Teachable, we feel the combined effect of all of these may leave the education sector reeling for a while, but in time the restructuring will probably lead to more schools seeking advice and support from non-governmental organisations. There is no reason why curriculum development, support and workforce training needs to be funded and delivered centrally.

And beyond that the education department’s budget will be cut by another £590m. The Chancellor has said that schools’ funding, the Sure Start programme and spending on education for 16-19-year-olds will be protected. But that leaves a lot of the Education budget protected:

1. Sure Start: £1.8bn
2. General Schools Spending: £31.7bn
3. Teachers’ pension scheme: £10.7bn
4. Young People’s Learning Agency (the 16-19 part of Learning and Skills Council): £6.5bn
5. Academies and Specialist Schools: £1.1bn

That means only £9bn out of a total £61bn Education budget that can be cut. So that £590m will be a 7% cut of everything else.

If you assume that the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme will continue in some form (or at least that many contracts have already been signed and won’t be reneged on), then there is only £5bn left unprotected – and 13% of that will be cut.

If you work in a quango or agency (or a supplier company) that gets publicly funded outside of these protected areas, I would be pretty worried right now!

The unknown part is how much of what these quangos do is seen as really essential, and will just be reabsorbed in a re-organised Department of Education (i.e. Becta employees become DfE employees) and how much will just be cut loose.

And let’s be honest; the government will need to reduce spending again by double the amount next year, so by the end of 2011 over 40% of those ‘non-core’ activities of the Education department could have ended.

So far the website is looking very clean, and it may sign the way to a slimming down of the plethora of websites and portals that the DCSF ran.

In an e-mail to civil servants today Michael Gove said: “In the weeks ahead, I want us to offer all schools the chance to enjoy academy-style freedoms so that heads and teachers across the country can be liberated. This will be the focus of the legislation we hope to bring forward later this month.”

So it seems we were right that Gove’s liberalism hasn’t been watered down in the new coalition education policy.

Schools
We will fund a significant premium for disadvantaged pupils from outside the schools budget by reductions in spending elsewhere.

We agree to promote the reform of schools in order to ensure:

• that new providers can enter the state school system in response to parental demand;
• that all schools have greater freedom over curriculum;
• and, that all schools are held properly accountable.

With a Tory education secretary in Michael Gove, his pet policy of independently run state schools is likely to go ahead, but there is no detail on what terms these would be run. The move to more school budgetary and curriculum independence is likely to increase, but without major overhauls.

Although money ‘from outside the schools budget’ is promised, this doesn’t necessarily mean there won’t be cuts within it. There is certainly no commitment to spending increases.

Ben Barton, who advised the Tory party on aspects of their schools policy, has found in the finer analysis that there are many areas for broad agreement. The clearest of these are to promote Separate Sciences and MFL at GCSE, expand Teach First and give Head Teachers more control over pay.