Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

The problem with really high profile cases such as Vanessa George’s seems likely to be is that the very high level of publically expressed opinions can mean that the court case can be thrown out.

To avoid that what usually happens is that a reporting restriction is invoked whereby it’s deemed to be in contempt of court to publish specific information about the case in advance of a verdict being announced. That system worked really well in pre-internet days but is increasingly unworkable in the Internet age as I’ve said before. As it stands right now there don’t appear to be any reporting restrictions in place for this particular case which has had the effect that it’s been talked about on TV, radio, newspapers and, of course, blogs and 99% of what’s been said is very much along the lines of “let’s lynch her now” as you’d probably expect.

However, there’s also the not so small matter that she hasn’t been convicted yet so is rechnically innocent of the charges at the moment. That’s as it should be, of course, since the whole British legal system is built on the premise that people are considered until a case is proven against them. You might think that with all the public outrage that she couldn’t possibly be truly innocent of all those things that she’s been charged with but it does happen. After all, people have been arrested for taking photos of their own children before now and they’re generally laughed at when they reach the courtroom.

The vast majority of people have only heard, at best, second hand reports of the charges. They haven’t even heard second hand accounts of the evidence. Don’t forget that the grandmother I referred to above was charged with producing pornography yet it turned out she was doing nothing of the sort when the evidence was examined.

Are you still prepared to say that Vanessa George is guilty having merely heard an account of the charges against her?

When we got back from France it wasn’t long before James was set to go on a school outing and the school were asking for parents to volunteer to come along to help with looking after the children. So, we volunteered or rather we tried to because we were told that we’d first need to get a CRB check done and found that we couldn’t get one as we didn’t have the necessary documents at the time which seemed a little silly at the time but the school had a policy of requiring a CRB check for parents helping out with school trips.

However, documentation aside, the real problem with the CRB check is that it only looks at previous convictions and, of course, Vanessa George didn’t have any. In fact, she still doesn’t so would pass a CRB check right now which is obviously somewhat ridiculous given what she’s been getting up to.

In some ways the CRB check has made it a lot easier for undesireable people of one sort or another to get into positions that they shouldn’t be in. That’s because in place of what would previously have been effectively an assessment by the principal of whether or not someone was a suitable person to be working with young children, now the school child protection policy says that she must instead rely on a CRB check as indeed do a great many schools and nurseries around the country.

However, clearly there still needs to be an assessment of the type of person that gets each job. Whilst Vanessa presumably won’t be getting any more jobs dealing with children she’s managed to harm quite a lot of children before she was caught and that doesn’t seem right. The other thing that this case highlights is that women are just as likely to interfere with children as men.

Hopefully this case will highlight the need to reduce the complete dependence on the CRB check that has built up since it was introduced.

Although I don’t read the blog stats religiously by any means it’s interesting to keep an eye on them now and again to see what’s popular and what’s not.

For instance, at the moment I’m doing fairly well from people searching for a little assistance with the latest ED209 assignment. Not surprising really as this is one of a mere handful of blogs that have been writing about their experiences with the Child Development course as they’ve been working their way through it this year.

Is it actually useful to try to find some pointers for the assignment this way though? So far, I suspect the answer is “not really”. For instance, Tim has been relatively quiet about it of late and my own contribution certainly doesn’t hand it out on a plate although I do say something about identity and there will be more about the TMA over the coming week. What’s more surprising is that there haven’t been any blogs writing about the course before this year. Tanya has been brave enough to upload all of her assignments for the course but it’s for an earlier year and the assignment questions were quite different so you’ll not get a whole lot of help there.

Of course, there’s also the small matter of just how reliable the information that one would find on a blog about a TMA. After all, even if I were to upload the entire TMA answer this evening you wouldn’t know what mark I was going to get for it. Having said that, I imagine that you could probably have a reasonable guess as to where the mark might fall which in turn would indicate how much work you might need to do to achieve such a mark yourself. Would that really be helpful though? Take, for example, Exploring English (U211) where in the very first assignment you’re required to upload the first half of your TMA, the second half being a critique on someone else’s uploaded TMA. With that you can easily get a feel for the overall quality of work that people are doing in your tutor group. That in itself was quite reassuring for me but then I picked up 90% on that TMA and I can understand that others might find that it was quite intimidating. So, grand if you’re at the top end of the marking range, potentially quite demoralising if you’re sitting in the large middle ground (which is why most OU forums ban discussion about marks).

If anything, the child development course and indeed psychology courses in general with the OU seem much worse than knowing how other people were doing was with the English course. Quite why that is I don’t fully understand but it seems to be related to the fact that a large number of the psychology students are treating the courses as vocational training so it’s more important to them to do well than it might be in another area that’s more of a hobby subject. Thus, whilst I’m more than happy tootling along in the 70s, others in my group are very much aiming to be in the 80s. Having said that, although I’m very content with the marks to date I have already more or less decided to up the pace at which I’m pottering along with the psychology degree thanks to some gentle prodding on the part of fellow students.

So, as always, be careful what you wish for. If you’re a consistent 60% person, would you really be over the moon to see a 90% type assignment? For that matter, there’s the not so insignificant issue that all tutors don’t mark in a 100% identical manner.

This is a somewhat peculiar piece of work that we’ve to do. Since it’s a practical you would obviously assume from that that we have to find a few children and do some practical experiment on them. These days that wouldn’t be quite such a simple thing to organise of course as youve first of all to find some children, then get the parents permission and, of course, there’d be the sex offenders register check that would need done on you as well.

So, what the Open University have done is to conduct a whole series of interviews and record them in advance. Thus we don’t need to find children, get permission and get ourselves checked out thus most of the administration hassles are removed. I suspect that these days the time taken for the pre-experiment administration would mean that some of it would need to be done pretty much as soon as we signed up for the course if it was a real practical exercise that we were going to be doing for the assignment.

What we have to do is to take these interviews and analyse them to see if they conform to Rosenberg’s theory. That’s essentially a theory of identity and basically says that younger children will tend to consider the various aspects of their identity as being defined externally whilst older children will tend to rely on themselves to define their identity. So, for example, a young child will tend to describe themselves in terms of physical characteristics and aspects that can be seen by others, whereas an older child will tend to talk about internal feelings and values.

Next up is writing up the research report which is a full-blown report in terms of format. So there’ll be a title, abstract, introduction, methods section, results, discussion and conclusion along with references and appendices. Sounds easy but I suspect that it’ll be extremely time-consuming so I’m making a proper start on it today with the writing of the methodology section which seems to be by far the easiest bit to do and, according to their suggested plan, should see me with the first 400 words written from the 2000 target.

Since I only started with the Open University so that I would be able to “speak a little more French” I was only ever really pottering along with what was ultimately to become my modern languages degree. That’s not to say that I wasn’t working hard at it but rather that I just wasn’t in a hurry to complete it by a particular date. At the time I started out that seemed to be largely the approach of a lot of people on the courses that I was doing. Certainly nobody seemed to need to pick up a degree at any particular time amongst the tutorial groups that I was in over the years.

However, over that time the mix of people doing the OU courses has changed substantially. In the “good old days” they simply would not accept anyone under 21 and the average age of the students seemed to be somewhere in the 40s albeit with quite a sizeable proportion well over 60. These days, the courses are more likely to have a fair representation of those doing the degree full-time just after their A-levels since it’s a popular choice compared to traditional universities in these days of increasing charges: even full-time the OU wouldn’t cost more than £2000 a year on the most expensive courses and in most cases it would be more like £1200. The older contingent are still there as indeed are the sizeable representation in the 40s or thereabouts but the average age is substantially down.

That shift in demographics seems at least partially to account for the shift in emphasis from merely pottering along to more of a drive to complete the degree as soon as is reasonably possible. For example, throughout the seven years of the modern languages degree I never had anyone mention that they were planning on speeding up the attainment of their degree yet quite regularly I now get people trying to persuade me to do exactly that. I’ve sort-of succumed to this pressure in that I will probably be running with the Human Biology course starting this October rather than waiting ’til the following October to start Exploring Psychology thus, for the first time, I’ll be doing two courses at once albeit only for a month.

In addition to the move towards doing degrees quicker these days I suspect that the lower age range will eventually have an effect on the range of course on offer. I don’t think that widening will be particularly noticeable though as they’ve been widening the range of courses for many years now and the only real gaps seem to be in the area of creative arts and a general medical programme (though they do offer nursing courses).

What may be noticeable sooner is the shortening of time taken to do degrees which presumably will produce something of a bulge in graduations at some point.