Mount Stewart Conversations are back on shores of Strangford Lough on 14 &15 October

Mount Stewart Conversations are back for a second year on Saturday 14 and Sunday 15 October. As well as talks and debate, the renowned gardens and woodland trails will be alive with performers and international music.

Last year’s inaugural event brought speakers, music and food into the historic National Trust property on the eastern shore of Strangford Lough. You can still watch or listen back to many of the talks by David Aaronovitch, Anne Applebaum, John Bew, Ruth Dudley-Edwards, Rachel Johnson and Jonathan Powell.

So far this year’s programme includes satirist and editor of Private Eye, Ian Hislop in conversation with Craig Brown on Saturday afternoon.

Earlier that day a panel with Rosie Boycott, Mary Kenny and Senia Paseta will launch the National Trust’s UK-wide national programme that will focus on women and suffrage throughout the 2018 centenary year.

Diane Urquhart will join them in another conversation (free thought ticketed) to trace “The Political Women of Ireland” from Maude Gonne, the Countess Markievicz, through to Edith, Lady Londonderry to the present day.



With their private gardens and walks, country houses were used to transact a lot of political business away from big cities and parliaments. Mount Stewart has a history of holding conversations of significance. If you tour the house you can see chairs from the Congress of Vienna after the Napoleonic wars – at which Lord Castlereagh participated – which can be seen as laying down the blueprint of what would eventually become the European Union.

On Sunday morning the National Trust are bringing together Fintan O'Toole, Roy Foster and Ben Lowry to chew over “Brexit, Ireland and the Hard Border” before Ellvena Graham and David Gavaghan discuss the impact of Brexit on the economy on both sides of the border.

At lunchtime on Sunday, Ahmad Sarmast (founder of the Afghanistan Women’s Orchestra) will speak alongside Shalini Wickramasuriya (The Music Project in Sri Lanka) about using music and arts to overcome conflict in a free (though ticketed) session.

Not everything is serious. Attendees are promised a tongue and cheek look at “Boys Jobs, Girls jobs” with Mary and Giles Wood from Gogglebox.

The organisers promise fun and philosophy to expand younger minds with “The Garden of Thought Experiments”, as well as street art, circus skills, and a series of popular lectures on the “Suffragettes of Soccer” and “Use Mind Control like Donald Trump” for the adult-aged children. Add to that a Ukulele workshop and lots more music and creativity from Beyond Skin (the intercultural arts organisation).

Tickets for individual talks organised by the National Trust are now on sale. Except for NT members, normal admission price to the site still applies throughout the weekend. Day passes granting entry to any of the talks on a day (first come first served) are also on sale.

The BBC will shortly be making tickets available for its ‘festival within a festival’ with free talks and conversations exploring the theme of Journeys, Journalism and Books. The line-up is expected to include Jonathan Lynn (who co-wrote Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister), Dan Cruickshank, Natalie Haynes, Edith Hall and Fiona Stafford.

Details about the emerging line-up, tickets and volunteering opportunities can be found on the Mount Stewart website.

TeachMeet, QUB Riddel Hall, Friday 18 October 6pm #TMBelfast

TeachMeet Belfast is back in Belfast on Friday 18 October at 6pm in QUB’s Riddel Hall.

A TeachMeet is an opportunity to share good practice, network, meet like minded teachers who want to see how they can integrated new ideas into their classrooms.

An informal gathering of teachers and educationally interested.

Previous events have been amazingly energetic for a Friday evening at the end of a working week with short, snappy presentations (2 minute and 7 minute) sharing best practice and enthusing colleagues from right across the spectrum of NI schools and organisations. And there’s a raffle, prizes for some of the talks and plenty of refreshments. Cheaper and more fun that most Continuous Professional Development!

The TeachMeet Belfast website has presentations and videos from previous and you can register for a free ticket [two thirds gone already], sign up to do a presentation and maybe even bring along a prize for the raffle ...

Spelling Bees - not the stage version, but the real school competition

Bruiser Theatre Company’s production of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee lives on in our household four weeks after the run in The MAC ended. While she didn’t get to see the show, Littl’un has read and memorised the show’s programme cover to cover, and is slowing reverse engineering the show by asking me more and more detailed questions about the characters and the plot. (Note to self – the show’s page on Wikipedia has quite a lot of the plot details I’ve forgotten!)

Bruiser are raising funds on Indiegogo to support their ten day Summer School that provides 14 year olds and over training in physical theatre. Generous funders get the perk of co-writing a brand new song with Duke Special!

While I’d come across the notion of spelling bees before seeing the play, I’d always written them off as an American invention and had never seen one run in Northern Ireland.

Then about the same time as Bruiser’s Spelling Bee launched onto the Belfast stage, as a school governor I became aware that we had a school child who was through to the County Antrim heat in Ballycastle later this week.

As part of their ongoing literacy initiatives, Easons are running spelling bees in every county of Ireland, with the county heat finalists being brought together for provincial finals and then the all-Ireland final in June. You can follow the full results on Eason’s website. Some of the results from the Ulster provincial heats are already in:

• Armagh – Ryce McClatchey from Millington Primary School
• Derry – Tara O’Boyle from St. Brigid’s Primary School in Mayogall (won after a closely-fought tie-break)
• Donegal – Jamie Griffin from St. Bridget’s N.S. in Convoy
• Cavan – Adam Kelly from Killygarry N.S (Adam has form as a runner up in the 2012 All-Ireland final)
• Tyrone – James Rice from St. Patrick’s Primary School in Dungannon
• Fermanagh – Caitlin Waterson from St. Mary’s Primary School in Teemore
• Monaghan – Monday 27 May
• Antrim – Wednesday 29 May
• Down – Thursday 30 May

The Ulster final takes place on Wednesday June 19 in the Belfast Donegall Place branch of Easons and will be broadcast as part of Ryan Rubridy’s RTE 2fm show.

The All-Ireland final is on Friday June 21.

Best of luck to all the spellers. Rather you than me!

In the meantime, we’ll continue to call out words to each other at the dinner table, enjoying the pronunciation guide in the Easons-branded Collins dictionary, and marvelling at Collins’ preference for –ize endings over the more common Irish/British –ise endings.

Disclosure - this post was triggered by an Easons Spelling Bee dictionary arriving on the doorstep a few weeks ago along with the 2013 Rules for running a bee. The mini-bees that have been conducted around our dinner table threaten to reveal my over-reliance on the spell-checker.

Youth Film School at the Crescent Arts Centre

The Crescent Arts Centre is offering opportunities for folk of various ages to get practical experience and learn about film-making.

Starting on the 10 February and running for three weeks, a Youth Film School course is running between 10am and 4pm for 13-18 year olds.

Want to be the next James Cameron? or perhaps you're walking around with a great idea for a film and have never known how to develop it?

If so, then this is the course for you.

Through practical demonstrations, with broadcast equipment, tuition in story and character, this is a great opportunity to unfurl the magical world of filmmaking.

They're also running a Making the Documentary course for bigger children. It started a couple of weeks ago, but if you're lucky it'll tun again later this year.

This course will teach the fundamentals of documentary and generic filmmaking.

It will guide the student through recognising and developing a story, teach camera skills, sound skills, composition, lighting and editing.

The relaxed, informal atmosphere of this course provides an excellent introduction to those who are curious about the film making process but with more than enough content to fulfill those who would wish to pursue it further.

Good to see such good openings locally. If only I had the time ... or the lack of years!

TeachMeet, Stranmillis College, Friday 19 October 6-9pm #TMBelfast

TeachMeet Belfast is back this Friday from 6-9pm with an informal gathering of teachers and educationally interested in Stranmillis College.

At the first TeachMeet in March, it was impressive to see so many teachers – from right across the spectrum of schools and systems – willing to travel into Belfast on a Friday night to talk about their work and share their experiences and ideas. I can’t think of any other professions that could motivate voluntary continuing professional development on that scale and with that level of passion.

As well as tea/coffee and a light buffet, there are rapid presentations (2 or 7 minutes), raffles and prizes. It’s very informal, and while there was a strong technology theme running through some of the sessions in March, any kind of best practice can be shared – all the way through from early years and foundation to secondary level and beyond.

You can sign up at EventBrite and find out more on the TeachMeet Belfast wiki. And if you can't get to Belfast, there should be a live streaming available from the wiki.

TeachMeet Belfast - 2 March at 6pm in Stranmillis - an unconference for teachers, by teachers

Collaboration, sharing ideas and spreading best practice are common to most jobs, whether organised through formal structures or informal conversations.

The first TeachMeet session in Northern Ireland is being run in Stranmillis University College on Friday evening. TeachMeet is an ‘un-conference’ format that runs in many other locations, with primary and post-primary teachers coming together to share with colleagues and take home other people’s ideas. Attendees can sign up on the night to give a 2 or 7 minute presentation on a topic of their choice: amusing, amazing, questioning or enthusing.

The organisers suggest that “with the ever-shrinking education budget on the horizon … this will be an excellent free Continuing Professional Development (CPD) opportunity for teachers”. They also note that presentations given do not have to be ICT-themed.

Friday 2 March between 6pm and 8.30pm in the Centre of Excellence for Leadership, Innovation and Learning at Stranmillis University College. The event should be streamed online for those unable to make it to Belfast.

More information on the TeachMeet Belfast website, Twitter feed and Facebook page.

Citizen Journalism

Languages, Photography, Film Noir, Inheritance Tax, Philosophy, Jewellery Design, Massage ... and Citizen Journalism. These are all courses offered by Queen's University's Open Learning Programme.

I met some of the students on the ten week Citizen Journalism course on Wednesday evening. They're half way through their programme, and have been looking at the development and value of citizen journalism, old media versus new media, blogging. Having talked to a real live blogger (cough), they'll now go on look at newsworthiness, ethics, legality as well as building their own blog and posting to it on their chosen subjects.

Patrick Toland is the course tutor, and I spoke to him after Wesnesday's session was over. He's pleased with the way the course is going, and hopes it will be run again.

It's a well constructed course and surprisingly thoughtful as well as practical. Perhaps in a year's time some of the students will still be blogging and feeding their passions and interests back into society. I'm looking forward to tracking down what they write about.

You can browse through the current prospectus or keep an eye on the Open Learning website if you fancy signing up for a course or two.

Grammar school intake - hoovering up pupils at the expense of local secondary schools?

Having posted about and charted the recent GCSE results, my thinking turned to that old chestnut of grammar school intake. While some grammar schools manage to fill their First Form Year 8 places with pupils achieving the top grades/marks in transfer tests, others fill up with local students right the way across the academic spectrum.

The Belfast Telegraph normally splash with them in mid-October when they have been collated (ie, FOIed). The 2011 figures aren’t yet available, so the charts below use the Belfast Telegraph-compiled figures for the NI grammar school intake in 2010.

I’m just using a subset of the grammar schools, mostly ones in Bangor, Belfast, Coleraine, Derry and Lisburn. The chart below shows the number of pupils taken into Year 8 in September 2010 as well as the range of marks for those pupils. AQE test schools are at the top, and GL Assessment at the bottom. Note that AQE and GL Assessment results aren’t simple marks out of 100, and aren’t directly comparable across the different systems.

(Click on the charts to expand them to a legible size!)

Some schools like Dalriada in Ballymoney took in pupils within a tight range of high marks. Others like Foyle & Londonderry College and St Mary’s Christian Brothers’ Grammar in Belfast accept students into Year 8 across a very wide range of marks.

The range of intake is even more obvious when you look at the proportion of each grade that the schools accept. The 2010 AQE results published by the Belfast Telegraph were broken down into five quintiles: Q1–Q5. GL Assessment results were graded A, B1, B2, C1, C2 and D – but each grade doesn’t represent a fixed percentage. Note: (1) comparing AQE and GL Assessments results is a bit like comparing apples and oranges; (2) many schools also accepted a number of pupils without test results, or reserved a proportion of their intake for pupils meeting non-transfer based criteria (these are categorised as ‘Other’ in the chart below).

Given that the normal perception is that grammar schools pick up the most academically able children, I’ve over-simplistically used Quintiles 1 and 2 (AQE) along with Grade A results (GL Assessments) as the ‘top grades’ and shown them on the right hand side of the vertical axis in the chart below, and then mapped the remaining quintiles and grades in descending order on the left hand side.

What the chart above shows is that relatively few grammar schools completely filled up with children who achieved the top GL Assessment grade or where in the top two quintiles of the AQE exam. Lumen Christi College and Rathmore Grammar were the two notable exceptions in the areas I sampled, both oversubscribed with pupils achieving the top grade. Schools like Ballymena Academy, Methodist College, Friends School, Sullivan Upper and Wallace High School were close to only accepting in pupils with A grades or in the top two quintiles (ie, the top 40% of AQE entrants).

However, grammar schools like Cambridge House, Campbell College, Coleraine Academical Institute and Hunterhouse College were mostly accepting in students in the bottom three quintiles (ie, lower 60%) of AQE intake.

If the Department of Education’s Every School a Good School policy is truly bedding in and creating educationally rich opportunities right across the range of schools and colleges in Northern Ireland, is it fair that some grammar schools are filling up their classrooms to offer a predominantly academic curriculum to students who could have benefited more from a wider range of academic and vocational learning offered by local secondary schools.

What is it that gives grammar schools their magnetic appeal and kudos? Is their academic promise at least partially illusory? Where's the system's desire to build the self esteem of pupils instead of just crudely applying academic pressure? The grammar school lure helps to empty local secondary schools of pupils who they were set up to serve well and help thrive. And in turn that destabilises secondary school funding and creates a downward spiral of results, reputation, and intake.

Yet while secondary schools are disadvantaged by their not-so-elitist-after-all grammar school neighbours, few grammar schools seem to have any problem filling their places and avoiding the application of any kind of minimum entry criteria.

Cross-posted from Slugger O'Toole.

What’s the real story behind today’s NI GCSE results?

Much of the mainstream media’s reporting around this morning’s GCSE results has focussed on the highest grades.

The clipping to the right (from a BBC News online article) is a typical example.

Not much mention of any grade below C.

The disparity between male and female results is very noticeable in a subject like English.

This year 24.5% of girls opened their envelope to discover they had been awarded an A* or an A, and a total of 75% scored A*-C. In contrast, only 12.7% of boys achieved A* or A (nearly half the percentage of girls), while 62% scored A*-C.

In Maths, male students score marginally higher than females.

But overall, girls outperform boys by a country mile: 31.9% vs 23.3% for A*-A; 78.1% vs 71.3% for A*-C.

Compared to GCSE results across the UK (though note that GCSEs are not taken in Scotland), both male and female students in Northern Ireland have an edge on their English and Welsh counterparts.

You can access the full statistics for the last eleven years of GCSE results for UK, England, Northern Ireland and Wales at the Joint Council for Qualifications website. Unfortunately, the tabular data is released in PDF format rather than spreadsheet, and the 2010 figures aren’t even searchable. Not very data.gov.uk-friendly!

(Note that the figures above all refer to GCSE ‘full course’ and don’t include the double-award subjects or short courses.)

Of course this isn’t the full story.

The data released today simply looks at exam entries rather than the performance of individual pupils. It will be many months before the Department of Education release the figures for Northern Ireland the north of Ireland (as they refer to it on their website) that show the number of pupils who achieved 5 or more A*-C grades including Maths and English – the general measure of success. They have to wait for the School Leavers Survey to be processed, as the statistics are not gathered from the individual school results.

It’s quite difficult to find the figures.

The latest figures are for 2009/10. The School Leavers Survey states that 59% of school leavers (53.4% male, 64.7% female) had achieved at least 5 GCSEs A*-C including English and Maths. (For reference, the figure for England is 53.4% … but I don’t think we’ve got anything to boast about.)

So 41% of Northern Ireland pupils left school in 2009/10 without reaching this standard. Around 1.7% left without any formal qualifications.

Northern Ireland grammar schools could be quick to point out that only 6% of their students (553 in total) left without the five good GCSEs including English and Maths. However, that percentage rises more than ten-fold to 64.7% (or 8800 pupils) for students in non-grammar schools.

GCSEs in Northern Ireland aren’t a particular big success story for two fifths of pupils.

That’s the unspoken story of today’s results too. 9353 unspoken stories of people who are leaving school without the kind of minimum qualifications that many employers require.

(That and the fact that for the last ten years there’s no record of anyone in Northern Ireland sitting a full Welsh GCSE.)

Cross posted from Slugger O'Toole

Educational underachievement and disadvantaged PUL males

Rather than cross-post the whole thing, I refer you to a post I published over on Slugger last night.

It looked at the publication of the report into educational underachievement and disadvantaged protestant males by Dawn Purvis and her independent working group.

Protestant educational underachievement has been a much talked about situation over the years: generational unemployment, last of aspiration, lack of positive role models on top of the Troubles legacy, poverty, deprivation and family breakdown. Statistics bounce around the media about the low number of boys on the Shankill Road passing their 11 plus or gaining university places.

The set of reports and associated consultation reports and research has pulled together the figures along with consultation responses from individuals, education boards, teachers, academics and voluntary organisations. First-hand experiences from a focus group of Protestant teenagers was also considered.

Did you know (according to the initial consultation document) that:

• 24% of children in NI live below the poverty line with 10% living in severe poverty?
  
  
• children in NI are more than twice as likely to be living in persistent poverty as in the rest of the UK?
  
  
• 8% of boys aged <15 have a disability, compared with 4% of girls?
  
  
• 24% of working age adults in NI (in 2006) possessed no qualifications (in England the figure was 14%)?
  
  
• socially disadvantaged Catholics perform better than their Protestant counterparts [in non-grammar schools], whereas grammar schools pupils have more similar educational profiles?
  
  
• at GCSE English and Math, 15% of Controlled schools are under-performing, as against 4% of Catholic Maintained school?

The final report - a "Call to Action" - along with the preceding consultation document and response summary are all well worth reading to get a handle on the state of Ni's education system.

Update - one of the comments penned by "articles" below the main post on Slugger is worth quoting:

There is one group that has delivered for the kids that are destined to underachieve and that is the group that day by day delivers on time, every time. The dinner ladies. Would dinner ladies abandon school meals without preparing a contingency? No. Do dinner ladies treat the FSM kids inequitably? No. Could dinner ladies organise the school holidays better? Yes, you bet they could. Dinner ladies – what would we do without them?

TEDx Belfast - Wed 23 March at 4pm - Creativity and the City

TED talks are coming to Belfast later this month.

The independently organised local events under the banner of TEDx share the same vision as its parent - "ideas worth spreading".

TEDx Belfast will take place at 4pm on Wednesday 23 March in Belfast Harbour Commissioner’s Office. Under the title of Creativity and the City, speakers with a connection to Belfast (and Northern Ireland) will deliver talks to stimulate thought and plant ideas about creativity, design, innovation, technology and entertainment.

Davy Sims and his small team have assembled six great speakers, with the possibility of one more. A number of TED talks will be shown during the event. Tickets (£30) are limited to 100.

• Paul Moore :: Professor at University of Ulster's Head of School of Creative Arts. Member of Content Board Ofcom.
  
  
• Ruth Morrow :: Ruth is Professor of Architecture at Queen’s University Belfast. She has worked as an architect in the UK and Germany and taught at Schools of Architecture across the UK and Ireland. Her work tests the potentials between people, place, creativity and pedagogy and ranges across activist design pedagogies, urban activism and innovative product development. All her work is underpinned by an ethos of inclusivity and design excellence. She is co-founder of Tactility Factory, a spinout company that has developed award winning, innovative surfaces, combining concrete and textile technologies. Together with her co-founder Trish Belford they are known for their ability to make ‘mad ideas sane’.
  
  
• Sinclair Stockman :: Living and working in Belfast and Paris Sinclair is founder of Active Minds, Paris. Currently Sinclair works as an independent executive technology and transformation advisor, working with a number of innovative web service based companies, providing executive advice and also working on a number of innovative projects with global NGOs and in developing countries.
  
  
• Colin Williams :: Colin's TV production company Sixteen South is the creator of Sesame Tree, a co-production with Sesame Workshop in New York - and Big City Park, a co-production with BBC Scotland, which recently won an IFTA (Irish Film and Television) Award. Both series have been commissioned by CBeebies for UK broadcast in 2010.
  
  
• Mark Dowds :: from Northern Ireland now living in California, Mark is founder of BrainPark.com.
  
  
• Maureen Piggot :: Maueen is Director of MENCAP Northern Ireland and is leading the development of a social media space for people with learning disabilities.

It's brilliant to see that Belfast (and NI more widely) taking the opportunity to celebrate itself and exclaim its own vision to the world. And since the talks will be videoed, the content will be available for a much wider audience afterwards.

See the TEDxBelfast page, Facebook and ticket site for further details. Or follow their plans on Twitter.

Sesame Tree goes to school. Beezer!

Not content with sharing their adventures on CBeebies and BBC Two, Hilda, Potto and Archie have left their tree house in the Sesame Tree and are going back to the classroom.

This blog has a continuing fascination with the show and its guest stars.

Funding from International Fund for Ireland is allowing two educational resources based on the second series of the locally made show to be distributed free of charge over the coming months to all pre-school groups, nursery and primary schools across Northern Ireland.

The show deliberately ties in with the Personal, Social and Emotional Development aspects of the Northern Ireland curriculum. The Education & Library Boards have worked with Early Years to produce Let’s Play and Learn Together Again (pre-school) and Out and About with Hilda 2 (foundation stage / children aged 3-6). DVDs feature material from the Sesame Tree show along with themed activity cards and detailed teachers’ guides. There’ll also be information sessions to help teachers and practitioners get the most from the resources.

Sesame Workshop take fun and learning pretty seriously. At this afternoon’s launch event, Shari Rosenfeld (a VP at Sesame Workshop) explained that the resources were:

“... designed to be both educational and entertaining, focusing on promoting social inclusion and allowing this project to have a longer term impact on today’s young children.

Research conducted by the Centre for Effective Education at Queen’s University into the effects of Sesame Tree’s first series on young children’s attitudes and awareness found evidence of an association between the degree to which children watched the show and a small but positive change in their willingness to be inclusive of others in general; their interest in participating in cultural events associated with their own and other communities and increased awareness of the wider environment.

We are confident that providing in-depth resources to enhance that experience in the classroom will only deepen Sesame Tree’s impact.”

Sounds like the next natural step would be for Sesame Tree to go up to Stormont later in the year to launch a revamped strategy for Cohesion, Sharing and Integration. A suggestion that would be likely to be swiftly denied by the programme makers and funders! But one that might be worth considering ...

Education: middle class value or fundamental human need? Mike Wardlow in conversation on Tuesday night

Back in May, the Centre for Contemporary Christianity in Ireland hosted an evening of conversation with Lesley Carroll who was on the team behind the Report of the Consultative Group on the Past .

This Tuesday night, they're following up with another event, this time on the theme of ever-topical theme of education.

In Conversation with Mike Wardlow discussing “Education - a middle class value or a fundamental human need?”

Tuesday 9 June at 7.30pm up on the 3rd Floor, 21 Ormeau Avenue, Belfast, BT2 8HD

Does the Christian church have anything distinctive to bring to current local education debates and institutions? A space to explore biblical values concerning education, and bringing them to bear on current local educational issues.

Mike Wardlow is Chief Executive of the Northern Ireland Council for Integrated Education, has plenty of experience in the world of education and training, and strong views of how faith should inform Christian's engagement with the eduction system.

The event is open, so everyone is welcome to turn up, hear more, and ask questions.

Update - recording of the event and slides below.