Everyone's an expert now

 This post isn't about politics. It's about economics. It has links to politics in the same way that education has links to politics and to Politics. But it's about economics, and ideas not personalities, let's be clear.

It turns out I have quite a lot to say about economics, so let's get my main point clear in case it gets lost in what follows:

Liz Truss spooked the markets because she showed a basic lack of economic understanding. She wanted to use tax cuts to create growth. Without realising that her measures would create inflation. Which would oblige the Bank of England to increase interest rates. Which would choke off any growth.

It wasn't the effect of her policies that caused alarm. It was her obvious lack of understanding of the basics of economics. She had no credibility and the market reacted, losing all confidence in government bonds.

To take a step back, economics is a lot like teaching. In that everyone thinks they know about schools because they went to one. And everyone thinks they know about economics, because they pay taxes. Ironically this argument would bar some of the current bigwigs, as they are the ones who seem not to pay taxes! Also, the fact that we hear politicians and journalists getting the wrong end of sticks about education, makes us think that maybe they aren't totally reliable when it comes to the economy or the racing tips. Economics also like teaching in that it is a bit of a mysterious art. We are always on the look out for a clear method, but when we are presented with one, it always turns out to be political rather than educational/economic. There are orthodoxies and heresies. And the power of belief. If an approach makes sense to a teacher, it may well work in their classroom. If the markets think a policy is necessary, then it may work.

The mother of a good friend of mine went to university to study economics. The first lecture was on the debate around controlling the money supply and whether it affected the economy. She thought, "If they don't even know that, what's the point of studying this?" She switched to Social Work and went on to have a long and distinguished career in doing good and affecting public policy.

So, as with statistics, we shouldn't feel intimidated and think that we have no right to comment on the economy. Our attitude to things that make no sense is often to think, "Someone cleverer than me understands it." For example throughout my life the attitude to public utilities has been to privatise them. The claim is that this brings investment. Does anyone understand how an approach which is about taking money out as profit or dividends is a model for putting money in to public services? It makes no sense but we have been cowed into thinking we aren't qualified to comment.

So back to Liz Truss. She is in the papers saying her tax cutting agenda wasn't given time. Let's look at it. She wanted to cut taxes to generate growth. She wasn't clear if this was simply because flooding people's pockets with cash would give a boost to the economy and through the discredited trickle down effect, lead to sustained increased economic activity. Or whether this was a long term structural change to encourage investment (= taking money in or taking money out?) in the UK. There's an easy answer to that question of whether it was meant to be an instant boost or a long term incentive. It was neither. It was simply following through on an empty mantra: We want tax cuts. It is the mantra of the tiny number of Tory party members. They justify it by saying, "It will create growth" but that's a slogan, not an economic argument. Liz Truss was elected by the Tory members after a campaign in which she pooh poohed the idea that tax cuts would cause inflation when it was put to her by her rival. She did not engage at all with economic debate. It was a simple gift in return for being elected. Even if I am wrong and there is more to her argument, you can see that this is how it appeared, and when it comes to the markets, appearance and belief is powerful.

Why would tax give aways cause inflation? Inflation is a result of free market bidding for resources. When things are in short supply, those with more money can pay more and get their hands on the goods. Because they are paying more, the prices go up. In happy times, the supply of goods and the amount of money to buy them are in balance, the economy is stable, and inflation is low. Liz Truss became PM at exactly a time where energy was in short supply. Paying more for it might mean you got your hands on more of it, out bidding those who are poorer. But it doesn't actually mean there is any more energy available. So putting more money in to the economy through tax cuts wouldn't make any more energy become available. Or solve the supply issues of an economy coming out of Covid or facing obstacles to trade after leaving a trading bloc. It would just mean more money to bid for the scarce resources, pushing up the prices.

This argument IS used by Liz Truss when it comes to putting money into public sector pay. At the moment, the things we want to buy are in short supply, so giving more money to teachers and nurses wouldn't actually solve that. It would just mean we had more money to bid for goods, pushing up prices. As the government can't solve the supply issues, they present it as a problem of too much money sloshing around, and restrict pay.

This blindness to the effect of putting money into the economy in different ways is also there in their growth policies. So the Truss economic mantra says that putting money into the economy through tax cuts causes growth. And forgets that it will cause inflation. Yet it also says that putting money into the economy through pay will cause inflation. And ignores the fact that it could also create growth. The argument is political, not economic. Just like education policies are political, not educational.

These economic arguments are not complicated. Their fallacious and facile nature is there for all to see. But for too long we have assumed that when something makes no sense, it must be because we don't understand it. Messing about with financial levers of tax and spending and easing generates flows of cash that some can feed off, but in macro economic terms, tend to cancel out. Creating growth without inflation is very hard, otherwise all governments of every stripe would do it.

If you were serious about creating growth, it wouldn't be through these economic levers at all. It would be through real world policies that remove obstacles to economic activity. Government spending on infrastructure that doesn't affect the mythical balance sheet, because you are getting an asset in return, not just giving the money away and hoping for the best. Restoring the free flow of trade would have a huge effect. Childcare, transport, flexible and inclusive working, infrastructure, training, local initiatives... all these would have a positive effect on economic activity, with a multiplier effect of the money generated being spent or reinvested back into the real economy.

AQA GCSE Reading Exam Success

Sometimes I can be a bit slow. Eating out in restaurants in Spain with teachers from our exchange school, I often would think, "Gosh, the starter is quite big." Or "Thank goodness the main is quite small." It wasn't until we went over as a family to stay, that my wife said, "Spanish starters are bigger than the mains." And then it all made sense. The same thing happened with the AQA GCSE Reading Exam.

In the 90s and 00s, the Listening and Reading exams didn't need a lot of focus. You worked through the topics and you concentrated on building pupils' repertoire so they could speak and write. The Listening and Reading exams, while containing tricky distractors, were based around testing the language that pupils were learning. So different foods, or numbers, or places in town, or illnesses. At some point this changed. And I missed it.

It might have been around the time we moved from Coursework to Controlled Assessment. When the GCSE that destroyed language learning came in, we were preoccupied with how to preserve teaching pupils how to speak and write spontaneously, when the exam rewarded pre-learned fancy monologues. But while we were grappling with that, there was a change in the Listening and Reading exam that suddenly meant pupils were doing much worse.

I started to notice some things, but it wasn't until the current GCSE came in that I was able to clearly identify them and take them into account in how to prepare for the Listening and Reading exams.

Here are the two main points:

1. The current GCSE has a huge topic vocabulary list in the specification, reflected in the published coursebooks. But the exam boards have wisely ignored most of this vocabulary. Instead, the texts are largely built out of the non topic vocabulary. If this is a new idea to you, click on the link to this previous post to see examples.

2. The Questions in the Listening and Reading exams are not comprehension questions. This previous post gives an explanation, but the most egregious example is the question that asked, "What impressed her about one of the schools?" The honest answer to the question was, "They grew fruit and veg on the school field." But AQA only accepted "They grew fruit and veg on PART OF the school field." Now clearly, the fact that it was part of the field was not the thing that impressed her. But for AQA that was required for the mark. Because AQA questions aren't comprehension questions. They are show you know what all the words mean questions.

And you've probably spotted it. But like with the Spanish starter dishes, it took me a while: The two points above are one and the same. Not only are AQA texts largely based around the non topic words, but these words are also the key to the accepted answer.

So this is what we've been doing with Y11 this week.

Perhaps the usual exam technique would be: Read the questions, locate the answer, answer the question. Instead, we concentrated on identifying Topic and Non Topic vocabulary. This is the version on the projector as we fed back as a whole class. But in the lesson, the pupils had their own printed version. For the first paragraph, I gave them a list of non topic words to find and highlight in yellow: more, then, if, often... In the second paragraph, they are going to be hunting for them for themselves. And they are looking for topic words to highlight in pink.

This led to useful discussion about the importance and difficulty of the pink words and the yellow words. The topic words are often basic words that they know, or are cognates. And where they are unknown, their meaning is often easily deduced from the context. Because they are words strong on "meaning". In a tricky text, the topic words were surprisingly accessible. 

The yellow words. For a start there are lots of them. Many of them should be known. But do they get relegated and ignored compared to the topic words? They are often harder to deduce. Because they are more about nuance or the relationships between words in a sentence, rather than referring to concrete meaning. And some of them can have more than one meaning depending on context.

For a comprehension question, the pink words might have been enough. For an AQA answer, you are going to need the yellow words.

Next lesson:

The same text. With questions on the board. And answers on the board too. But while the answers are not wrong, they would not get the mark chez AQA. So for example, "Why are young people healthier?" has the answer, "They are active." Which is correct, but would not be acceptable to AQA. Pupils have to read the text carefully and give the answer, "They are generally more active than older people."

Then you can see the questions for a subsequent paragraph. Here I haven't provided the inAQAdequate answers. It's up to the pupils to make sure their answers reflect what they understand about what AQA require.

I strongly suspect that this will continue with the new GCSE. It's definitely in line with the intentions of the reforms. And the exam boards, if their specifications are accepted, have done a good job of minimising the changes. But once you realise what is going on, it has the potential to change something frustratingly stupid, into an understanding that can help your pupils get more marks!

Year 9 Spanish beginners - writing on the tables, telling their own stories

 You may have been following my Y9 after school beginners Spanish lessons, as we work on narrating amusing stories about aquariums, theme parks and sea gulls. Last week's lesson went really well, with the pupils confidently rebuilding the aquarium story from their knowledge of key structures and verb endings. After a lesson the previous week where I worried I had got the pace and challenge all wrong. So this week I wanted a lesson that was going to stretch and support and move them on to the next level.

So I used Writing on the Tables to enable them to create their own stories.

First we recapped the aquarium story quickly, going round the class. Then we transformed it into the theme park story, keeping the key structures but with new infinitives. This is where we were up to at the end of the last lesson. The template is flexible, but roughly like this:

I like to go to a theme park because I can go on the rides, especially if it is sunny, because if it rains I prefer to go to the aquarium. My brother doesn't like to go on the rides. He prefers to buy loads of sweets and fizzy pop. Last year, we went to Chessington. I said, "I want to go on the rides." My brother said, "I want to buy lots of sweets and fizzy pop." We decided to buy sweets. Later we were riding on a roller coaster and my brother vomited. I cried.

You can see it contains the verbs go, buy, ride, and vomit. We throw in cry for free because it is the ending of all the stories!

Then I gave each pair of pupils a felt tip and a dictionary. They each chose a place - stately home garden, cinema, beach, park... And they chose 4 infinitives to look up in the dictionary - words for something they like doing, something their nemesis likes doing, and something that went wrong. I don't know what the fourth infinitive was for. Probably cry.

They wrote the infinitives on the desk with their felt tip. In the first half of the story, the verbs stay in the infinitive. But in the second half, they need endings. So they wrote their infinitives again, this time ready to be changed. They had to decide which of their verbs was going to be what was happening. And which were the things that happened. Then they rubbed out the ar/er/ir endings - remember these are written on the desk in felt tip. And added the endings. For first person endings, they can do this from memory. For 3rd person endings, they used their verb tables.

Then they were ready to write their stories:

So, I like to go to the waterfalls because I can take photos of nature when it is sunny. But if it is raining, I prefer to go to the cinema. My friends like to have a picnic. We went to Crystal Falls. I said, "I want to take photos." They said, "I want to have a picnic, pretty please." We were taking photos of the waterfall when I fell. I cried.

What is the point of doing it on the tables? Firstly it's fun. Which I know is a dirty word, but you can see it comes out in the gleeful excitement of the stories. Pupils are excited about writing. Excited by all the words in the dictionary. Excited by the felt tips and the spray to clean the tables. Excited by the possibilities of saying things they wanted to say, excited by the progress they are making, excited by their Spanish lesson. It doesn't take a lot! And secondly it's memorable. I know. I know that there are those who will say, "They will remember writing on the tables and getting to wipe it off with spray and a paper towel, but they won't remember the learning." Except they will. They will remember the very physical process of writing the infinitives. Changing the endings. Inserting them into the story. It highlights the process of writing.

Here's a post on more ways to use different approaches to writing. And another one on making constructing sentences physical, to break it down step by step for pupils who don't think writing French is something they can do.

And what is the point of the stories? Firstly they meet the GCSE criteria of opinions, reasons, tenses, narration, developed answers, spontaneity. Secondly they meet the national curriculum criteria of developing what pupils can do with their language, not just what they know. Thirdly, the core of language the stories contain, allows more and more language to stick and transfer across topics.