Parents alarmed at an urgent meeting between ESAIT, CCEA and the BELB chief executives……
March 24, 2012
Gavin Boyd posing as Chief Executive of ESAIT, CCEA and BELB
The Belfast Telegraph announced Friday March 23rd, 2012 that Gavin Boyd was “good value” for taxpayers’ money.
A meeting of the Chief Executives of ESA, CCEA, the Curriculum and Exams body and the BELB, the Belfast Education & Library Board would effectively mean Gavin Boyd in a mirrored room talking to himself. Instead of outrage at the very idea of such nonsense, the Belfast Telegraph promote such extravagance in a time of austerity as “good value”. Perhaps they may wish to pick up the tab for this inefficiency. No matter how Gavin Boyd slices up the bacon on this porker the most he dedicate to each job is one third of full-time – an indictment which even our political representatives have been forced to address. Will the Belfast Telegraph now apologise to all those politicians they tried holding to account?
If there was ever a need to answer the persistently wrong and ideologically failed attack on academic selection by 11-plus testing carried out by the DENI, an answer to an Assembly Question by a Sinn Fein MLA gives a resounding response.
The Question
| AQW 6202/11-15 | Mr Daithí McKay (SF – North Antrim) |
|
It is little wonder that there were no press releases, planted media articles or angst-filled human interest stories obediently spewed up using words and phrases such as child abuse, stress-laden, difficult, morally wrong, scandalous. The DENI have known since the Household Survey of 2002 that the majority of parents want valid and reliable transfer testing at 11. Their miserable decade long campaign has resulted in failure but the DENI promote failure by denying the taxpayers their right to regulated testing and then object to and hamper those who suceed in doing their work for them. If an example of promoting failure is required then linking the ending of regulated transfer tests to the promotion of the multi-jobbing ESA Chief Execuive may be a good place to start.
Also note that there has been no effort by the unionist parties to highlight the response to AQW 6202/ 11-15. This may be explained by their secret desire to see the issue of transfer testing disappear or perhaps they don’t read answers that don’t refer to themselves.
The Answer
One written complaint was received by the Western Education and Library Board in the last three years in relation to a primary school in that area preparing its pupils for unregulated transfer tests. No written complaints were received by any of the other boards during that period and records are not kept of any verbal complaints.
Gavin Boyd of ESA & CCEA given a 5 year contract
February 16, 2012
Why has a five year contract to lead The Education & Skills Authority (ESA) been awarded to Gavin Boyd, a man shrouded in failed initiatives and questionable spending decisions?
No mention made on the Department of Education website yet published in Irish News.
INews090212 click to view.
How exactly do the DENI press office communicate?
One year on the Irish News catches up on massive ESA costs scandal
November 11, 2010
Last December The Parental Alliance for Choice in Education published an article highlighting the costs of the Education And Skills Authority (ESA). http://paceni.wordpress.com/2009/12/10/esa-the-real-costs/
On Saturday November 6th, 2010 the Irish News ran the front page headline;
£2 million waste of schools money on ESA staff.
Two million pounds is a mere fraction of the waste incurred by this stealthy body. No use by Simon Doyle, the Irish News Education Correspondent of the term “double-jobber” to describe Gavin Boyd the ESAIT chief executive and chief executive of the problem ridden exams board, CCEA.
Frank Bunting northern secretary of the teachers union INTO rushed in to create a heirarchy of losers.
” Yes it’s a waste of money but the bigger waste of money is that ESA has not yet been established…Everyone is a loser.”
Frank Bunting INTO
Perhaps Frank has forgotten his script to the Stormont Education Committee from March 25, 2009 when he said;
“in the interests of efficiency, establishing the ESA is basically a dream come true.”
Frank Bunting may need some remedial numeracy training and careful teaching of accounting principles.
Frank Bunting INTO
Gavin Boyd and CCEA fails Education (NI) Order 1998 on examination standards; again.
August 30, 2010
Once again Northern Ireland’s exam body has failed to deliver on the Education (NI) Order 1998 awarding body standards and will slickly seek to reassure the public by conducting an investigation on itself. CCEA’s remit is to “conduct and moderate examinations and assessments, ensuring that standards are recognised as equivalent to standards of examinations and assessments conducted by other bodies or authorities exercising similar functions in the United Kingdom”.
One again CCEA failed to deliver. CCEA only became aware of the wrong results issue after contact from 2 centres through the Enquiry About Results process. When CCEA staff investigated these enquiries they discovered that incorrect grades were awarded to 151 students. So much for standards.
Parents and pupils may ask themselves how ” a unique educational body” can claim that the qualifications and examinations offered by CCEA, the unnecessary and expensive awarding body in Northern Ireland are of an appropriate quality and standard when on the one hand they fail to spot their own errors and then immediately reassure the same parents and pupils that their revised efforts are perfect. Self assessment means that the assessor is always in control. CCEA is an expensive luxury costing the taxpayer close to £30 million per year.
It will be recalled that CCEA was mired in another recent controversy over the inaccurate results given to schools over their use of the Incas Pupil Profile. Incas was Gavin Boyd’s pet project when he was last chief executive of CCEA before leaving to become ESA chief execuive (designate). The Education Minister also had to issue an apology for that expensive failure of Gavin Boyd’s effort to replace objective measurement of attainment in numeracy and literacy with a “diagnostic” tool.
CCEA’s interim chief executive Gavin Boyd said: “Staff at CCEA are very disappointed by this failure and we apologise unreservedly for any distress this has caused to students, their families and teachers. He neglected to mention that it is teachers who mark the exam papers.
“On this occasion CCEA’s quality assurance procedures did not ensure that the correct grade was issued for the candidates. This is unacceptable and it falls far beneath the standards we set ourselves as an organisation.”
“A formal internal investigation is under way to discover how the incorrect marks were awarded on this occasion.”
As opposed to the informal manner in which 151 pupils were given wrong results.
Mr Boyd is clearly the man to lead the Education and Skills Authority.
Next time check the facts…
October 29, 2009
Next time check your facts
Perhaps the Education Minister for Northern Ireland, Caitriona Ruane will have a meeting with Gavin Boyd of the ESA to discuss the failures of the CEM Incas assessment system that she assured had parents was quality assured. Mr Boyd build his publicly financed business on claims of quality assurance. Those assertions are now in tatters with parental confidence in CCEA-approved assessments destroyed. Mr Boyd would now benefit from a dose of his own advice given when the pseudo-science of the enriched curriculum was criticised… “Next time check the facts”
http://www.rewardinglearning.org.uk/newsroom/press/2006/press_170506.asp
In a poor attempt to convince parents of their effectiveness the DUP have misinterpreted the significance of a statement by Father Ignatius McQuillan recently published in the Irish News http://www.irishnews.com/articles/540/561/2009/7/20/622952_388069193305Exambanw.html
and the BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/8159283.stm.
In a mandatory coalition executive dependent upon mutual cooperation to avoid collapse the DUP must be seen to be outdoing their Sinn Fein partners. As history has revealed the DUP’s effectiveness in tackling anyone with their own developed strategy is virtually non-existent. Sinn Fein’s destruction of grammar schools has been aided and abetted by token opposition and slick slogans.
While the conflicted anti-academic selection position of the Catholic Bishops in Northern Ireland has been sold to the media on social justice and moral grounds that is clearly not the disclosed position for Catholic schools in England where two very high profile campaigns to save Roman Catholic grammar schools have been initiated by headteachers and parents working together.
There is no evidence of ”growing opposition” to non-selective schooling. Such opposition has been constant since the first attempt to remove the 11-plus. If academic selection is to be ended it must be applied to non-Catholic schools at the same time as Catholic schools lest Catholic parents move their children to non-Catholic grammar schools. Unfortunately there won’t be enough room for all the applicants. Social selection will replace academic selection. Perhaps Mr Storey should consult his East Antrim MP friend Sammy Wilson about the parental pressure group STOP. This pressure group petitioned the Catholic bishops to restore the regulated “interim” CCEA test abandoned by Caitriona Ruane in February. The campaign resulted in a complete failure to change the minister’s and the bishops’ position yet not a meaningful cheep from the loud and vociferous MP.
Mr Wilson will know of Mr Storey’s involvement as a member of the Board of Governors at Ballymoney Model Primary School. Despite his senior position in the DUP and access to communication tools Mr Storey was unable to prevent a teacher led plot to convert the school to integrated status.
If Mervyn Storey, Sammy Wilson and the DUP had been fully involved in opposing Sinn Fein’s strategy to remove grammar schools they would have been aware that Ignatius McQuillan, like the late Monsenior Denis Faul, has always opposed the anti-11-plus, anti-grammar position of the hierarchy. Unfortunately the Catholic Church is not a democratic organisation and the power rests with the Irish Catholic bishops. The DUP were made aware of the loss of social mobility when grammar schools were removed in large portions of England but choose to keep silent on the issue. The DUP were made aware of the negative impact of the revised curriculum project inflicted on Shankill Road primary schools but stayed silent. Diane Dodds MEP was the DUP’s representative for the Shankill. The DUP were made aware of the potential disaster that ESA would bring under the former CCEA boss, Gavin Boyd, but predictably did nothing to prevent his rise to power.
Perhaps Mervyn Storey will now disclose the results of his meetings with Cardinal Brady and contrast the Cardinal’s position with that of the stated DUP position on the 11-plus and academic selection to grammar schools. Perhaps they are not too far apart?
Stanley Poots and the ESA
March 6, 2009
While Stanley Poots is fronting yet another campaign against academic selection to post-primary schools he remains quiet over his role with the Education and Skills Authority.
Mr Poots was appointed to Gavin Boyd’s ESA Working Group for Children’s Services.
The Terms of Reference can be found here.
http://www.esani.org.uk/docs/childrens_services_terms_of_reference.pdf
Nowhere does it state that Mr Poots was to evangelise for Gavin Boyd’s anti-selection manifesto.
Mr Poots gave an interview withe local media in which he stated:
“All schools – primary, secondary and grammar – agreed that the 11-plus test was flawed and should be abolished”
Parents can only speculate as to when Mr Poots came by his now publicly expressed views.
So whose frustration are you expressing Stanley? It wouldn’t be Gavin’s would it?
ESA and the Revised Curriculum: what it means to parents and pupils
January 25, 2009
The Minister’s 5th December reply in the Belfast Telegraph to Mr McCartney’s letter shows her lamentable grasp of the issues. In the article she cites no evidence for her “model” of education, but simply offers her opinion. Two of the most highly regarded studies in the history of education research prove that she is wrong. The Revised Curriculum, together will “election” at 14 via a Pupil Profile will damage profoundly the life chances of the poor. The evidence is unequivocal that underachievement will dramatically increase if the Minister’s ideas are implemented.
“Project Follow Through” is arguably the largest and most sophisticated educational project ever undertaken to discover, once and for all, the type of curriculum that maximizes the academic achievement of the poor. To give a sense of the scale of this study, it lasted 20 years, cost a billion dollars to fund, and involved 79,000 children from 180 low-income American communities living in poverty. The conclusion was that the curriculum which helps children out of poverty is a traditional curriculum in which the teacher determines what is to be taught and children work in learning environments which are orderly and highly structured. (The reader can find details of this study by “googling” the words Project Follow Through.) Curricula of the type the Minister is currently demanding that all primary school children follow were shown to be damaging to the development of the numeracy and literacy skills of disadvantaged children. A Minister who expresses concern for children being failed by Northern Ireland’s education system is promoting a curriculum that will increase that underachievement. The evidence that curricula of the Revised Curriculum type push the poor deeper into poverty is overwhelming.
As with all her pronouncements to date, her romantic notions of how one enhances the academic attainment of vulnerable children are entirely at odds with the evidence. The Minister therefore needs a mechanism to impose an incoherent damaging education model on our children. That mechanism is the new Education and Skills Authority (ESA) to be headed by Gavin Boyd, the man whose Council for the Curriculum, Examinations and Assessment (CCEA) developed both the Revised Curriculum and the Pupil Profile. Mr Boyd’s approach to curriculum was tried out on the children of the Greater Shankill. The evaluation report concluded that in academic terms, the rich were getting richer and the poor poorer. Few parents in Northern Ireland are aware that Mr Boyd’s educational ideas have already been tried out and found wanting. Research carried out on behalf of CCEA demonstrated that the model of education he advocates is damaging to the life chances of the poor. The Shankill study replicates high quality international research on the impact of innovative curricula on the poor. The Shankill study (which refutes in every detail the case set out by the Minister in her reply to Mr McCartney) is rarely mentioned by the Minister, Mr Boyd, CCEA, the Department of Education, the Education and Library Boards or the media. The Minister’s support for ESA, with Mr Boyd at its head, will serve to entrench and deepen underachievement and is damaging to already vulnerable children.
The really curious development is that the DUP have joined the Minister in endorsing Gavin Boyd’s ESA. Thanks to the DUP Mr Boyd’s contribution to the current mess we find ourselves in, is to be rewarded by assigning all aspects of our children’s education to his care. Rather than setting up an enquiry in which Mr Boyd might be asked to provide the evidence base for his ideas, Mr Boyd’s capacity to undermine a world-class education system is to be enhanced. The framework for such an enquiry already exists in the ten “features” of good policy-making developed for the Office of First Minister and Deputy First Minister. Mr Boyd should be asked to evaluate his history of education policy-making against each of the ten features.
This sets the context for where we now find ourselves. This document aims to set out what the DUP must now do to protect standards of education in Northern Ireland in general, and lever up the basic skills of underprivileged children in particular. The DUP have highlighted their concerns for primary six children, and the plight of these children will be of particular concern in what follows.
The DUP must insist that schools should be free to ignore the Revised Curriculum because of its pernicious effects on the achievement of poor children. DUP politicians should be aware that there is peer-reviewed evidence that the scientific basis for the Revised Curriculum is non-existent.
Why should schools adopt a curriculum whose scientific basis has been refuted and which is damaging to the education of underprivileged children?
It is a measure of the depth of the chaos into which we’ve descended that the Minister has threatened to use the law against primary schools who privilege traditional teaching and learning over the Revised Curriculum. Indeed, in this brave new world in which Sinn Fein seem ready to use the courts against law-abiding schoolteachers, curriculum documents on the assessment of cross-curricular skills begin not with a rationale for such skills, but with a statement of the legal requirements on the teacher. Under Ms Ruane the law is being invoked to deliver what educationalists call the “Matthew Effect” whereby the rich get ricer and the poor get poorer. This from the avowed champion of the poor and underachieving!
It is important to reflect on the educational model which existed prior to the Revised Curriculum and to which schools could return if the Revised Curriculum were rejected. Mr Boyd’s own CCEA described the model which pre-dated the Revised Curriculum in these terms: “Education in Northern Ireland has an excellent reputation. In fact it’s no exaggeration to say that teachers here are regularly achieving results that are the envy of many other areas of the UK.” Who wouldn’t want to return to an education system described in these glowing terms? In addition, any move away from the Revised Curriculum is likely to free up much-needed finance for use elsewhere in education.
Finally, turning to the DUP’s commitment to the primary six child, it is instructive to examine the particular pressures on the primary six classroom. While the DUP continue to negotiate with Sinn Fein, primary six teachers are dividing their time between:
(i) preparing the children for the Minister’s test (by focusing on the Revised Curriculum);
(ii) preparing children for InCAS assessment (in anticipation of schools possibly incorporating InCAS measures in their admissions criteria); and
(iii) preparing children for unregulated tests (whether the AQE achievement tests or NFER’s “intelligence” tests favoured by at least one Catholic grammar school).
The most effective way in which the DUP can bring the misery of primary six children to an end is to take a clear stand on the Revised Curriculum, Pupil Profile and InCAS, leaving schools free to return to a model of education which focuses on maximising the literacy and numeracy skills of children, poor as well as rich. There can be no doubt that the DUP’s failure to take a firm stand in respect of the Revised Curriculum is contributing to the chaos in primary six classrooms.
If the DUP were to highlight the fundamental shortcomings in the Revised Curriculum (of which InCAS is a part), primary six teachers could engage those who demand that they emphasise cross-curricular skills at the expense of literacy and numeracy, with much greater confidence.
In summary, therefore, the DUP must:
· withdraw from negotiations with Sinn Fein, making clear their support for a return to the education model which pre-dated the Revised Curriculum (which was ordered and structured and in which “teachers here [were] regularly achieving results that [were] the envy of many other areas of the UK”);
· require the designers of InCAS to demonstrate that inferences drawn such tools can inform decision-making in respect of post-primary selection;
· require the designers of the Revised Curriculum to explain why they’ve pressed on with a discredited curriculum framework in the teeth of compelling evidence from the Greater Shankill study and Project Follow Through.
Jim Allister lifts the lid on ESA chief
December 1, 2008
Jim Allister gave a speech in Bangor on Friday evening and spend some time on the new ESA chief executive
http://www.jimallister.org/default.asp?blogID=1290
An extract from the speech included:
Mr Boyd’s time at the helm in CCEA was characterised by radical curriculum reform: he introduced a “progressivist” curriculum which moves us away from the tried and trusted priority of grounding children in the basics of English, mathematics, reading and science and instead emphasises, often in the critical early years through mere play, self-development of “the whole child”, leading inexorably to a woolly, frothy product, incapable of objective testing. Hence the link between this approach to education and outlawing selection. In an address to the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, Mr Boyd’s manager for Curriculum Development, Carmel Gallagher, described the curriculum as a “Trojan Horse that would be the vehicle for effecting significant change.” The chaos which is playing out before our eyes is the result.
Parents can only wonder what will come next from Mr Allister.
