Introducing the Public Sector to Agile…
Attended the Northern Regional Continuous Improvement Exchange Forum meeting today, after being invited by colleagues to talk about the ideas around Agile delivery methodologies.
Attended by South Yorkshire Police, the College of Policing, Humberside Fire and Rescue, the British Library, NHS Blood and Transplants, York University, Leeds Beckett University and a number of other public sector agencies, CIEF is an opportunity for different organisations to swap ideas and identify common approaches to solving problems.
When we arrived, we had a fascinating tour of Humberside Fire and Rescue’s (HFR’s) completely independent commercial arm, HFR Solutions, a Community Interest Company. The CIC provides commercial services to businesses who are in and around the Humberside region, including health and safety training, management consulting around risk management services, and private fire services for business premises, as well as providing community outreach services. Their clients include companies responsible for offshore wind farms, companies who work with cranes, and companies who need a different team building day.
They also have a real interesting Virtual Reality training rig, which allows people to experience scenarios like escaping from a fire in North Sea wind farm without being put at risk. This means they know what to expect before they try it out in the real world. It’s an innovative use of technology, which combined with their brand, allows them to second staff from the Fire Service (who might otherwise be made redundant), and make profit contributions back to HFR, netting £500K in the last couple of years with expectations of £1M next year.
I was invited to talk about Agile, and developed an executive overview of Agile which aimed to demonstrate an operational model which enables both disciplined execution and to promote continuous innovation of given processes. A slide on cake will win over the most sceptical of crowds, and all-in-all, I felt the presentation went well; I got a round of applause!
In addition, I was asked about how project-based financial manage to can work hand in hand with a sustainable delivery model like agile, a topic I think I’ll write about in the future.
I’ve been invited back in June to talk about Innovation Games, and I’ve been asked if I could deliver an in-depth one-day training session in the future.
All in all, a good day’s work!
Fracture Site
I broke my leg; this a placeholder so people can see the photo of the injury site without stumbling across it.
Letter to TES about Accelerated Christian Education
This week, TES published an uncritical puff piece on ACE which complained about being misrepresented, and listed all the great reasons people should use ACE. The comments were disabled.
After introducing a motion at the TUC LGBT Conference this year, which was unanimously passed (you can see my speech at Leaving Fundamentalism), I felt this could not go unchallenged. I have therefore sent a letter to the editor of TES, which I reproduce in full below.
Dear sir/madam
I note with concern your uncritical opinion piece (8 Dec 2014) by Lionel Boulton promoting the “virtues” of Accelerated Christian Education (ACE). In my personal experience as an ACE student, it is a system which damages young people, harming them psychologically and emotionally, unequipping them for social situations and for the world of work, and promoting a form of religious belief that is distasteful at best and actively harmful at worst.
For those unfamiliar with ACE, it is a fundamentalist Christian curriculum, which is predicated on a poor understanding of Skinnerian conditioning, with a focus on building “Christian character”. In the UK it is taught in somewhere between 30 and 60 private schools, normally attached to independent baptist churches, and to an unknown number of homeschooled children.
As Boulton describes, ACE has come under attack for teaching Creationism in its science curriculum. This is largely because Creationism is not science, and UK government policy is that it should not be taught as science. However, almost every other part of Bolton’s letter is either factually inaccurate or a misrepresentation of the experiences of ACE students.
Boulton states that, ‘the system is completely individualised’. This is false. The curriculum is the same for every person passing through it, varying only slightly with new editions of the workbooks (PACEs). Different students of the same age may be studying at different levels in different subjects (depending on their scores in diagnostic tests) but this does not individualise the learning to that individual. Individualisation would mean that the teaching adapts to each student, focussing on their areas of interest, and using their strengths to help build on weaknesses, instead of employing the single, ineffective mode of learning which is ACE’s signature, rote memorisation.
Boulton states ‘…it allows [students] to take responsibility for their work, encourages goal-setting, and allows students to maximise use of their time.’ This is again false: students are expected to work through PACEs in three weeks; this means they must maintain a fixed velocity to get through them. If the student fails to complete their daily “goals” they have to complete unfinished pages at home; an individualised learning system would allow students to spend more time on subjects they find challenging, and would increase teacher time to help the students.
Boulton writes, ‘A family atmosphere is established in the classrooms, called learning centres, where students, of varied ages, work in “offices” to achieve their goals.’ I am not sure what “family atmosphere” Boulton is describing, but I don’t know of any healthy families which operate in complete silence where every infraction of arbitrary rules, including making eye contact with fellow students, is punished.
“Offices” are in fact cubicles of one metre square in which students complete their work, with dividers between them and their fellow students. Students typically work in these intensive study farms for around four hours a day, with short breaks every hour, and subsequently miss out on key opportunities to be socialised. Boulton also fails to mention that the supervisors and monitors are frequently unqualified as teachers, instead having completed a week of training PACEs before being trusted with a room full of students.
Boulton says, ‘Students are tested regularly on their acquisition of knowledge and to ensure they are maintaining a standard of excellence in their output.’ Again, this is misleading. Students undergo testing to ensure they have memorised rote sentences, from the text, and to assess how well they have memorised the scripture verses embedded in the PACE. Touching on their teaching of creationism,it is not unusual to see ‘fill-in-the-blanks’ and multi-choice questions about Genesis interspersed with questions which pass moral judgement on evolutionary scientists.
The ‘various motivational methods’ that are ‘in place to see that progress is maintained and developed’ are principally punishment oriented, with demerits issued for every infraction, and three or more demerits in a day leading to after-school detention.
Boulton says, ‘one of the main advantages of this programme of education is that it trains character, prepares students to manage relationships and how to handle people. Yes, it is based on Christian principles…’ Each PACE has small cartoons built into it which promote key “Christian” characteristics, such as submission. These character traits, and their desirability, have been questioned, with some pointing out that the idea of parental inerrancy promotes a culture in which it is impossible to challenge abuse. After all, if parents are always right and children should always submit to parents, what do they do if they need to report physical, emotional or sexual abuse in the home?
Boulton claims, ‘We embrace all races, religions, majority and minority groups, and show them the love of God and extreme mercy.’ While PACEs feature characters from ethnic minorities, almost exclusively they are segregated and do not mix in the same churches and schools. It is stressed repeatedly and explicitly in the curriculum that only Christianity (and in particular, only their form of protestantism) is true, and that other beliefs are false. The only non-Christian characters in PACEs either die or appear to have antisocial personality disorder, and students are warned to stay separate from unbelievers. Gay men and women are told that their sexuality is sinful and that God ordered them to be stoned to death; the TUC LGBT Conference this year passed a motion condemning ACE’s homophobia. Women are told that they are secondary to their husbands; so bad is the sexism that Norway banned use of the ACE curriculum. In short, what Boulton describes as loving, others have described as seeking to indoctrinate racism, sectarianism, homophobia and misogyny.
In short, ACE presents itself as a progressive, inclusive and individualised education, but is an oppressive, exclusive and inflexible system which fails to deliver effective education, leaving young people unprepared for the modern world. It concerns me that TES would provide a vehicle for the promotion of this curriculum.
Yours faithfully
David Waldock
Former ACE student, Pilgrim Christian School, Dunstable, 1987-1993
15 things not to say to a recovering fundamentalist
I have totally heard pretty much every one of these…
Something must be done
This is actually how the law is made, right?
What Do Creationists Teach? A guest post by Jonny Scaramanga
A summary of Creationism from an educational perpective
Today’s guestpost is by Jonny Scaramanga who blogs at Leaving Fundamentalism. One of Jonny’s areas of expertise is the teaching of creationists and he is perhaps the leading authority on the problems of ACE home school curriculum and learning systems, which teach creationism. On his blog, he also deals with other aspects of Fundamentalist Christianity. Be sure to visit there; it is one of my favorites.
Asking what Creationists teach is a bit like asking what Christians teach. It encompasses a lot of different doctrines. Broadly speaking, a Creationist is anyone who believes that God made the universe, which could include people who accept the theory of evolution, but think God started the process.
In the popular mind, though, “Creationist” almost always means “Christian Young-Earth Creationist“. These people believe that the book of Genesis is literally true. God initially made only two people, Adam and Eve, and everyone…
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The Sorrow of Silence
Iain (M) Banks has died. If you’ve never read Culture (with the M) or his other fiction (without) you’ve missed out on one of Scotland’s finest writers.
Culture is a hybrid, liberal in the far future, in a world where humanity (in the loosest sense of the term) has exceeded it’s biological limitations. As with all scifi, he uses Culture to explore contemporary issues, but also to explore possibilities. He uses – used – a range of forms, and perspectives to explore his speculative realities in ways which surprise, delight and engross you, the reader. He transported me, a scifi veteran, to worlds I hadn’t imagined by ships which have personalities I fear may not be far off mine. When you identify with a ship, you know the author is something special.
If you want to read him, start with Consider Phlebas.
I shall leave by recalling the names of Culture ships; not only because they are in every sense his biggest creations, but because, I suspect, they were the deepest reflections of his character.
- Prosthetic Conscience
- Irregular Apocalypse
- Screw Loose
- Just Read The Instructions
- Cargo Cult
- Kiss My Ass
- Very Little Gravitas
- Size Isn’t Everything
- I Thought He Was With You
- Grey Area (aka Meatfucker)
- Zero Gravitas
- Resistance Is Character-Forming
- We Haven’t Met, But You’re A Great Fan Of Mine
- Pride Comes Before A Fall
- Experiencing A Significant Gravitas Shortfall
- It’s My Party And I’ll Sing If I Want To
- Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
- Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints
- Questionable Ethics
- Refreshingly Unconcerned With the Vulgar Exigencies of Veracity
- Displacement Activity
He named the following ships when another culture criticised the lack of gravitas when ships named themselves:
- Stood Far Back When The Gravitas Was Handed Out
- Gravitas, What Gravitas?
- Gravitas… Gravitas… No, Don’t Help Me, I’ll Get It In A Moment…
- Gravitas Free Zone
- Low Gravitas Warning Signal
- Absolutely No You-Know-What
On tornadoes and atheists
Good answer!
David Waldock's Blog 