How Ofsted failed my children

(A “Back To School” personal posting, not the usual stuff I write about here, but still important and somehow relevant to tech businesses)

Three of my kids were in a Rudolf Steiner school. Our plan had been to do Steiner education for primary and then mainstream education for secondary. The oldest child has made this transition successfully, but plans for the younger two were recently thrown into disarray.

The school has now closed following about 18 months of pressure from Ofsted and the Department for Education (DfE). As far as I can tell, the closure is as a direct result of this pressure. Ofsted were unhappy with how the school operated. Whatever issues Ofsted might have found, forcing the school into a position where it had to close was absolutely not in the best interests of the children. Ofsted has failed the children who have had their education disrupted so abruptly.

But there’s more than this. Ofsted have failed to recognise all the things that this school system is good at – things that are becoming more and more important in our changing world. Some examples:

• The value of spending lots of time outdoors, and not just walking around tarmac playgrounds
• How to introduce foreign languages at a young age
• How to build a real community of children, teachers and parents
• How to delay the age at which kids start getting online
• The importance of joy in learning
• How too much progress monitoring detracts from delivering real education

The fact of the matter is that the world that our children will inherit is changing. Automation is transforming the nature of the jobs market. The sorts of skills that people will need in the jobs market in 10 or 20 years are going to be very different to when knowing how to file a tax return guaranteed someone a decent wage.

There is no accident that many people who work in the tech industry and can see close-up the changes coming our way choose this kind of education.

Obviously the Steiner system in general, and this school in particular, don’t have all the answers and won’t get everything right. You’d have to be quite an extremist to take that position (I’m sure there are some such extremists around). In my view, the healthy thing to be doing would be to learn what the school does well rather than just trying to shut it down for what you don’t like about it.  Instead the DfE has thrown the baby out with the bathwater.

Disclosure: I was part of the governing team of the school up until the point that Ofsted got involved. I haven’t had any involvement since the school started working through the issues that Ofsted raised and write this just as an ex-parent.

Trying to make some sense of it all

I’m still trying to get to grips with the course of events in the UK recently. Since the Brexit referendum, of course, but increasingly over the past few days. I’m getting a bit tired of the Facebook echo-chamber and so given that I have a blog I figured I’d take a momentary break from talking about tech to think through these issues. But here’s a tweet to give some Tech Business angle to this post.

To Tech Gurus who run arnd advocating Disruption, understand that Brexit is what Disruption looks like to people who undergo it, its no fun.

— Alan Patrick (@freecloud) July 2, 2016

OK with that out of the way let’s get on with things.

The Conservatives apparently want to shame British firms into hiring more British workers by making them publish how many non-British workers they employ. And most Brits apparently support that position.

Similarly, they, apparently all of a sudden, want schools to list how many foreign-born students they each have. And there are also the reports about the Foreign Office not wanting to use foreigners in some advisory work to do with leaving the EU.

Meanwhile, the de facto opposition party (UKIP) has experienced thuggish behaviour and somehow this is considered acceptable by the UK electorate. And in a surprising twist, a UKIP representative has spoken out against these Conservative ideas.

I’m a member of the liberal, cosmopolitan elite. In the referendum I supported Remain. My sympathies were to Leave based on the mess that the EU has made of Greece. But the absence of any realistic vision for how Leave could work meant that, for me, the whole thing was flawed. I suspect that most (all?) other voters also have their own reasons that defy stereotyping. I certainly didn’t enjoy the Remain scare-mongering. For what it’s worth I also have a healthy scepticism of experts – they crop up all over the place and I’m not always convinced of their insight. However I do have to admit that some of the worst scare-mongering (I seem to remember £1 being predicted to fall as far as $1.28) has now come true so I do wonder what else will be coming over the horizon.

Anyway, back to the plot. The public was asked a question and in a close result the public answered it. Brexit was about leaving the EU. I hope that however Brexit gets implemented it is not a simple Tyranny of the 51%. But that’s not what worries me most. What worries me most is that, based on the noises that we are hearing, Brexit is increasingly becoming about xenophobia, not about the EU.

Since the referendum result racist incidents have increased. Over the past week we’ve seen these latest nationality-related proposals. Obviously I’ve never met any of these people and don’t know what their motives are, to what degree they believe what they are reported as saying, to what degree they are grandstanding or just doing their job or whatever. But something is very concerning indeed about the content of this debate.

Let’s come back to the Name And Shame Businesses Who Employ Foreigners idea. The Party may now be back-pedalling on it but remember that, firstly, it was seriously considered, and secondly, the reality is that apparently most UK people support it. I do expect it to come back in another guise sooner or later (consider the example about profiling non-Brits in British schools). So let’s imagine that, in order to try to improve standards of living, British companies are somehow encouraged to hire native Brits rather than foreigners. It’s easy to see where this will end: They will hire based on nationality rather than ability; so they will perform less well; standards of living won’t increase as expected; immigrants will get scapegoated even more; and the cycle will repeat itself.

Whether in our out of the EU, this country depends on immigrants and will always depend on immigrants. Immigrants disproportionately contribute to the UK, despite the views evident in the YouGov poll. How to reconcile these contradictory facts is something I would hope our leadership manages to lead on, rather than just scapegoating immigration as they seem to be doing. I do have a general faith in common sense, decency and democracy so I remain optimistic, but it ain’t easy. Maybe I’ll have to stay up to watch the US Presidential Debate tonight to remind myself that it could always be worse.

Update 31st December 2016:

One thing that has been playing on my mind is the clear strength of feeling on the subject. There was a James O’Brien LBC clip doing the rounds a while back in which a Leave voter was finding it hard to articulate why he wanted to Leave (probably something to do with immigration). Getting out-talked by a talk show host isn’t the interesting thing here. The interesting thing here is that towards the end of the call the caller says he is willing to suffer 5 years of financial/economic hardship in order to get to a better future. That level of self-sacrifice is pretty incredible.

On the importance of climbing trees

Wow. So about a year ago I was going to resurrect this blog. And then work got incredibly busy and my best intentions got swept aside.

So here’s another go. For my first post in a long time I wanted to write something a bit more personal.

I’ve seen a lot of postings/commentary about school age starting. Probably due to the fact that my peers are in that sort of place. And wanted to share a personal view for what it’s worth.

My wife and I thought long and hard about where to send our kids. As any parent would. Luckily we have/had the luxury of a choice.

In the end we went for a system where reading doesn’t start till 6 or 7. 

For me, at least, I was more than happy to delay the start of formal reading in exchange for earlier exposure to foreign languages.

And so far there seem to be no ill-effects. I’m more than happy that they spent their early years climbing trees rather than trying to learn to write. Plenty of time to put away childish things later on. Mens sana in corpore sano. 

Re-introductions

Cough cough

It’s getting a bit dusty in here. Time to sweep the old cobwebs away.

I can’t believe it’s near on 4 years since I last posted here. Looking back at my posts and even some of the recent comments it feels great to see that some of what I had to say then is still of relevance and use. And it’s inspired me to try to start again.

Also, to be honest, I’ve noticed a large increase in spam comments getting through recently which prompted me to log into WordPress to clear them out.

Back in the day I had 2 blogs: Alan Buxton’s eSourcing Place, where I blogged about eSourcing from the point of view of being the guy who headed up the product at TradingPartners; and Golden Pebbles where I would get more technical. I imagined the audience would be pretty different for both. And at one point they even had their own domain names.

I’ve now combined the two into one and look forward to blogging here a bit more regularly than once in 4 years. See you around.

All the best

Alan

My New Gig

I’ve recently started at Rated People as their Technology Director.

I find the company fascinating for a bunch of reasons:

1. They are a marketplace that allows people to find tradesmen very easily. It’s shocking how easy for the user it is, in fact – and I speak as someone who has used the service as a user. The model is pretty similar to MFG.com – regular readers will know I’m a fan.
2. But even better than the traditional online marketplace idea, Rated People is more like a dating agency. I don’t go on the site and choose from hundreds of plumbers. The system chooses the best plumbers for me based on my location, budget etc.
3. The upshot of all of this is that the ratings system on Rated People is the best I’ve come across. It is the hardest to fake. Amazon’s ratings are useless – as a manufacturer I could easily hire plenty of people to post positive reviews of my goods. Even on MFG.com I could register myself as a supplier, create a number of fake buyer accounts, award myself some contracts and give myself a great rating. On Rated People you can’t just do this.
4. It’s still sourcing!

On a “small world” note, I was out with one of the guys last night and found out that he once used to be a buyer at Brakes where he used to run their reverse auctions and was involved in the early incarnations of Trade Interchange.

Farewell-ish

Those of you who follow the TradingPartners Senior Management Team pages will have noticed that I’m no longer there. Yes, it’s right, I have departed TradingPartners.

Over the past half decade with TradingPartners and the decade before with SAP and Ariba I’ve had the good fortune of being involved in a number of great projects and learning a lot about what makes a good piece of business software (hint: it’s not just what they teach you in project management school).

I’m looking forward to putting these ideas into practice in the next piece of business software I build. I expect to be posting less and less here, at least for a while – but at least you’ll know that what I do post will become more and more impartial 🙂 In the meantime I expect to post more regularly over at my other blog – it would be great to see some of you over there.

All the best

Alan

Service interruption

Just dropping a quick post to let you know that I am now a proud father second time round – hence the absence of postings over the past couple of weeks… Normal service should resume from next week.

All the best.

Alien Abductions – the most compelling/entertaining theory I've heard

… as told to me by a fellow member of my ante-natal group a few years ago.

Alien abductions are misty recollections of having your nappy (diaper) changed as an infant.

Think about it. What do so many alien abduction stories have in common?

• Sudden transportation away from what you were doing – a transportation you are helpless to resist
• Bright lights shining in your face
• Out of focus humanoid people whose faces are a bit similar to your own, only narrower
• Being made to lie down on your back while your abductors carry out bizarre medical activities – ofteninvolving the nether regions
• Being dumped unceremoniously back into the normal world as suddenly as you were taken away.

Hmmm …..

Fame already! w00t

Golden Pebbles has only been going for a week or two and already it’s in the top spot at Google!

No joke. Look here.

Number 1. Numero Uno. The big kahuna.

Ok, admittedly it might have something to do with the fact that I’ve spelt “scaleability” with an “e” and most seem to spell it without the “e”. But heck. It was fun to see some traffic coming through from that search.

Roger. Out.

Greener sourcing – a personal tale

Last year I moved out of London and bought an electric scooter from these guys for driving the 3.5 miles between my new house and the train station.

The story so far:
1. When it first arrived it didn’t work: the batteries weren’t functional. It took a good two weeks to get it workable.
2. Finding an insurer was a mission. There’s apparently only one in the UK. They aren’t cheap.
3. Stuff just fell off the scooter. Nothing major (yet). But still I haven’t got working replacements.
4. One of the options I bought they never even delivered. Kept fobbing me off for best part of 9 months (and I didn’t have time to chase every day).
5. It was vandalised once (someone yanked an important cable out) – and the supplier  expected me to be able to fix it. Heck, I don’t even own a soldering iron, let alone feel confident digging around in the bowels of the scooter.
6. Kids have sniggered at the man on the scooter … Until they realise it’s electric whereupon their sniggers are replaced by wows.
7. Fellow commuters are impressed by the electric scooter. Then they overtake me on the way home.
8. It is fun to drive a nearly silent machine. But it would be nice if it would go faster.
9. It’s nice not to need to stop and fill up with petrol (though I have no idea whether the electricity I use to charge it is cleaner, greener and/or cheaper than petrol would be).

It’s clear that this bike is still bleeding edge. It’s still the domain of enthusiast hackers. Definitely not ready for consumer prime time.

Parallels for professional buyers:

Beware of getting too far ahead of yourselves on green initiatives. Unless you have the time, inclination and executive support get too far ahead of the pack and you could struggle (1,2,3,4,5).

There is a good marketing angle (6,7).

And, heck, it might even make you feel better (8,9).

To be honest: When I look at my buying decisions at work I haven’t gone out of my way to buy greener at work. The only thing I can recall doing recently is ticking the box marked “plant a tree for every server” on a hosting deal.