Disseminating and embedding bullshit: a sustainable model moving forward

'How I turned around a failing school.' Interview with outstanding head, Carol Knutsford.

Carol Knutsford became Britain’s most successful head teacher when she took over the failing Cheddar Brook School (now the JD Wetherspoon Academy) last year, taking it to Outstanding in just two terms. She tells us how she did it.

ONSTED: Cheddar Brook was a shithole until you got there. What was the first thing you tackled when you arrived at the school?

Carol: Student behaviour was appalling, so the first thing I did was sack some teachers. For example, the week before I started at the school a 56-year-old female teacher had been the victim of a pistol-whipping by a year 8. Her low expectations and failure to recognise that student’s low boredom threshold meant that she simply had to go.

ONSTED: Was it difficult sacking teachers?

Carol: (laughs) Oh God, no! Fortunately I hate teachers. I really despise them. Teachers come and go. None of them are as important as my bullshit initiatives.

ONSTED: Can you give us an example of one of your most exciting bullshit initiatives?

Carol: Wow. There are so many to choose from. I recently set up an emotional literacy programme for obese girls from conflict zones. That was pretty exciting.

ONSTED: What did it achieve?

Carol: Absolutely nothing. How could it? It doesn’t matter though, because that’s not the point of these initiatives. The point is that they sound brave and innovative and grab attention.  

ONSTED: How did you prepare and motivate staff before the all-important visit from ONSTED?

Carol:  What I like to do is adopt a veneer of supportiveness while making it very clear that I expect no member of staff to eat, sleep or piss from the moment we get the call from ONSTED until the inspection is over and the Outstanding is in the bag. For example, I send all-staff emails saying things like ‘I know some of you are feeling a bit stressed, so we’ll be keeping school open late tonight. Pizza will be served in the library at 3.15am.’ By the time they are observed, teachers will stink and be unable to focus their eyes, but at least they’ll have outstanding lessons ready, chock-a-block with pointless and chaotic activities.

ONSTED: And how about during the inspection itself? What are your tips?

Carol: Weed out some middle class kids and get them to show the inspectors to a 22-year-old teacher’s lesson where students are learning about Shakespeare’s sonnets by playing a game of Twister.

ONSTED: And finally, your proudest moment?

Carol: That would have to be at the end of my first term when a year 7 boy thanked me for getting rid of teachers that had been pissing him off. I looked at him for a long time and then, with tears in my eyes, said 'no, thank you for insisting that we be better. You deserve to never be pissed off.'

Students at the JD Wetherspoon Academy take part in an outstanding lesson about the essential tenets of neoconservatism.

Teachers invited to retrain as troops with Cannon Fodder First scheme

Many ex-teachers find themselves in prison, in mental institutions or on the streets. Finding the readjustment to civilian life difficult, they seek solace in alcohol, drugs and, perhaps most worryingly, supply teaching.

Gary Penchant, a former geography teacher from Ipswich, is one such casualty of this hidden war. Highly decorated with three outstanding observations from ONSTED, Gary had long dreamed of leaving teaching to start his own business, selling dyspraxia-friendly software to cash-strapped local authorities.

The dream however, soon became a nightmare. Gary explained, ‘I was institutionalised. As a teacher I’d lived a regimented life, and I just couldn’t turn that off when I quit. Every day was the same. I would wake up, put on an ASDA easy-iron shirt and a shapeless pair of chinos, get in my filthy Nissan Micra and drive to my old school. I would sit under my old classroom window all day, shouting things about reclaimed land and earthquakes. The funny thing is it was some of the best teaching I have ever done.’

Gary went on (long-windedly), ‘The truth is I have seen things and done things that I am ashamed of. Things that have scarred me. When you have looked into the eyes of an EAL student from Afghanistan, seeing him pity you as you do a fucking rap about the features of an ox-bow lake, you realise you have experienced things that most rational people in society simply cannot relate to.'

Gary is not alone. Thousands of ex-teachers struggle daily to find an outlet for their apathy and sarcasm. This is why the government are launching a new scheme, set to allow teachers become troops. Called Cannon Fodder First, the scheme will mean that teachers with no military training, experience or physical fitness will be (literally) parachuted into war zones to facilitate behaviour for democracy and good outcomes for all.

Charlie Condor, Development Manager at Cannon Fodder First, commented, ‘We do not foresee the need for teachers to receive any specific training before being deployed in the field of combat. Their experience of defusing potentially violent situations with powerful techniques like Restorative Justice should make them an asset to our guys on the ground.’

To qualify, candidates need to have a proven track record of shouting in a chaotic environment and must have seen Saving Private Ryan at least 10 times. History teachers are at an obvious advantage.

Ex-teachers facilitate a restorative conference in Helmand Provence

Warring educational factions agree a truce

A surprise truce has been reached between progressive and traditionalist educators during the 7^th annual Learning and Skills Conference at the University of Carterton.

Delegates thrashed out the agreement in the early hours of Tuesday morning, with debate focussing on the age-old question of which is better, knowledge or skills.

‘For years, we have been labouring under the misapprehension that the two approaches were incompatible,’ said Toby Bunion of the Conservative Learning Forum. ‘But now we’ve reached what seems to be the ideal compromise. We traditionalists will get to tell teachers what they have to teach, and the progressives get to tell them how to teach it.’

Maureen Bismark from the pressure group Progressives for Progress (PfP) explained, ‘We don’t mind kids having their minds filled with reams of archaic knowledge, as long as they learn it through pointless tasks that quickly descend into classroom chaos are a complete pain in the arse for teachers to facilitate. I’m thinking living graphs, hot-seating, carousel activities, that sort of thing.’

With excitement mounting in the education community, there can be little doubt that ‘progressive-traditionalism’, the learning of huge amounts of pointless knowledge through silly convoluted activities, represents the future of British education.

Chris Farmer, Executive Director at Capital Wealth Management Group, sponsor of the country’s largest academy chain, Forward!, commented, ‘It sounds great to me. I mean, I don’t know what a card sort or a hot seat is. My kids go to prep school and for some reason they don’t do those things there. But, yes, we are definitely going to be implementing this.’

As an indication of what an outstanding ‘prog-trad’ lesson might entail, delegates from the two sides came together to rewrite the famous passage from Dickens’s Hard Times in which Headmaster Gradgrind, the original fact-pusher, teaches students to define a horse.

The rewritten Hard Times excerpt in full:

Gradgrind: ‘Girl number twenty. There is a post-it note stuck to your forehead bearing the name of a certain graminivorous quadruped. Can you guess what it is?’

Sissy Jupe minimizes Facebook on her phone and opens Google. ‘How do you spell graminivorous, Sir?’

Gradgrind: ‘It’s in the word search I gave you as a starter.’

Sissy Jupe rifles in vain through the five card-sorts and eighteen worksheets on her desk. 

Gradgrind: ‘Right. We’re going to need some peer-to-peer support here. Bitzer, sit on the hot seat and get into character as the graminivorous quadruped in question.’

Bitzer sits on the hot seat and begins to neigh in a lack-lustre fashion.

Sissy Jupe: ‘Is it a horse?’

Gradgrind: ‘I’m not going to answer that, but can someone else answer Sissy’s question?’

Bitzer: ‘Yes, clearly it’s a fucking horse.’

Gradgrind: ‘Great learning guys. I call that rapid progress.’

'Now get into groups and make a scrappy poster about eighteenth century crop rotation systems. Spend most of the lesson colouring in the title. Then hand it to me and I will lose it before next lesson.'

‘We hate poor people’ admit top universities

Britain’s top universities have called an amnesty on pretending that they want to admit more poor people.

Pryce Fairchild, spokesperson for the body that represents Britain’s top ten higher education institutions said that universities will benefit enormously from a return to the good old days when people got into university because their dads were posh, minted or both. ‘There can be no argument that standards are slipping in Britain’s universities,’ said Fairchild. ‘We have come to the conclusion that this is because we admit too many poor people. Poor people tend to be stupid. If you are poor and stupid instead of rich and stupid it means you cannot attend a good university. Simple as.’

In spite of criticisms that the new admissions policy will set social mobility back by several decades, top educational establishments have been quick to implement the changes.  One college has been harshly condemned for adding the phrase ‘No dogs, no Irish, no women and no media studies’ to its undergraduate prospectus. 

Roger Pike, admissions tutor at a leading Oxbridge college explained. ‘Oxbridge has always been the source of Britain’s best double agents, perverts, sociopaths and, more recently, comedy panel show team captains. People say we should just accept the top 1% of pupils from every school in Britain, irrespective of class or background. But then where would we be? I think it would be unwise to mess with our winning formula. Doing so could destroy the very foundations of our wonderfully fucked-up country.’

Michael Selwyn, head of ONSTED recently detailed his own theory about the root cause of inequality. ‘The reason for the lack of inner-city, working class, disadvantaged kids at Oxbridge is the culture of low expectations and poor teaching in state secondary schools.’ Secondary teaching organisations reacted angrily and rushed to criticise what they see as a culture of low expectations and poor teaching at primary level. Primary teaching unions reacted angrily to this and rushed to criticise what they see as a culture of low expectations and poor teaching at reception level. Reception teachers have blamed parents. Parents told them to shut the fuck up and babysit their kids.

The way it should be

Free school launched for children of Guardian-reading professionals

The Collective Futures Free School in Hackney, which will open its doors in September, is set to enable smug-faced, over-paid Guardian reading professionals to send their children to the kind of schools they themselves went to without having to feel guilty about it.

Wealthy lefties living in inner-city areas have long faced an overwhelming quandary, as Becca Hobbs, freelance travel journalist and mum, explains. ‘People kept asking me, ‘why don’t you just send Otto and Jerry to a private school?’ But I would never do that. It just totally isn't me. I buy my haemorrhoid cream from an organic women’s co-operative in Palestine. I've been to fucking Tibet. I can’t send my kids to private school. The trouble is that the local comp is full of ridiculously poor children. Don’t get me wrong, I like poor people. They’re great. It’s just that the ones round here take it a bit too far. Well, much too far, actually.’

Becca goes on, ‘Basically, we realised that we had a choice: move to Kent, or set up our own school. You don’t get pop-up galleries or Eritrean film festivals in Kent. It was a no-brainer.’

Becca asked around and found a large number of parents in her local community who were facing the same dilemma. After a series of meetings they came together, agreeing to found the Collective Futures Free School.

At present, free schools are forbidden from actively selecting students on the basis of parental income. This would mean that, in theory, poor children would be able to attend the school. However, Becca is confident that Collective Futures has found a fail-safe way round this: the school will be registered as a special school. ‘We realised that, actually, our children all share a specific Special Educational Need.’ explains Becca, ‘That is, they are Gifted and Talented. When he was four, Otto asked me to stop reading him excerpts from Polly Toynbee’s columns because he found the syntax somewhat jarring. You can’t expect kids like him to be educated alongside normal children. It would be absurd.’

The governing body invites applications from anyone who can prove that their child is Gifted and Talented. To be deemed Gifted and Talented, children will need to demonstrate exceptional intelligence, ability or a particularly precocious grasp of how to use systems to accumulate wealth and power. 

More information and application forms are available at the Collective Futures website www.twatsinbrightlycolouredchinos.com

After weeks of debate, parents have finally agreed on the Collective Futures school uniform

Boys with Absent Dads (BAD)

Choice Farm Academy in Tottenham has harnessed the feral energy, anger and deranged sense of entitlement of some of its most challenging male students.

The London riots of 2011 were Tottenham’s darkest hour and, unfortunately, many of Choice Farm Academy’s boys were involved. Headteacher Ken Kennington realised there was a serious issue in need of urgent attention. “Males get angry, it’s what we do, I’m angry right now. The difference between me and these boys is that I have learned to control my anger through a combination of bikram yoga and Jesus. They on the other hand might require sedatives or a good chat.”

Upon their return to school from police custody the boys worked intensively with an art therapist, Jean Fletcher, to get to the root cause of why they were such obnoxious dicks. Many of them produced art work which revealed the lack of a consistent male presence in their lives and a crisis in young masculinity which schools need to tackle.

On this advice Choice Farm Academy has set up BAD (Boys with Absent Dads) a support group for horrible boys who are encouraged to get in touch with their sense of isolation and rejection by covering public buildings with their “anger-graffiti”.

One of the BAD boys Declan Bennet-Frazier described how the programme had helped him. “During the riots yeah, I had a fuckin wicked time yeah. I got an X-box, a foot spa and a fuckin toaster blood. I now know that was disrespectful to Currys and that I only done it cos I aint got a dad”.

To celebrate a successful year of therapy the BAD boys have been asked to design a letterhead for Choice Farm Academy. Photographs of the winning design will appear in the Tottenham News Shopper in July.

A touching example of the BAD boys' work

Socrates was ‘inadequate’, research reveals.

Educationalists at the University of Carterton’s Centre for Learning claim to have found shocking new evidence regarding the well-known classical sage, Socrates.

‘We have been studying the Socratic Dialogues for months now,’ said Jenny Marwick, Professor of Progress Studies. ‘We expected to find regular, in-built progress checks. But they were just not there. No traffic lights, no thumbs-up or thumbs-down, nothing. Put simply, Socrates did not check progress.”

As educational archaeologists at dig-sites in Athens search frantically for fragments of card sorts, lollypop sticks or other evidence that Socrates did in fact promote rapid progress through active and independent learning, hope is fading fast. ‘The new ONSTED observation schedule is categorical on the importance of progress checks,’ says Jenny Marwick.  ‘We may therefore have to accept the simple fact that Socrates was inadequate.’

The implications of the findings are potentially huge. The fear is that Plato, who was famously line-managed by Socrates and who recorded the dialogues, may have been influenced by his mentor’s disregard for progress. ‘If this is the case,’ says Marwick, ‘then Plato was probably inadequate too. Given that Plato is usually regarded as the father of Western philosophy, this would throw into doubt everything we think we know about life and the universe.’

Marwick’s team recommend the immediate removal from schools of all works associated with Socrates and Plato. ‘In fact, it’s probably safest to remove any material that predates the publication of the new ONSTED schedule.’

Some academics, however, have come to Socrates’s defence. ‘His targeted questioning is really very good,’ said Andrew Cummings, Professor of Learning Sciences at the University of Bridlington’s Department of Innovation and Skills.

Hemlock was too good for him

Chief Inspector releases inspection guidelines

On arrival an inspector expects the following

1.    The teacher will greet the inspector with awkward non-sequiturs, thinly disguised defensiveness and a shrill speaking voice. Teachers will adopt a mid-Atlantic accent and say things like “okey dokey” and "fantabulous" to confused students. 

2.    A lesson plan. This should be no less than 4 A4 pages in length and should be arranged in a complicated counter-intuitive grid. Tasks are expected to be idiotic and pointless and pedagogy lazily presented as some kind of super power or pseudo-science. EAL and SEN students will be ignored.

3.    A seating plan. (On a printed off power point slide if possible).This should be out of date and include the names of students who were permanently excluded months ago. There should be at least one student named twice and at least two omissions leading to confusion on their entering the class. Levels will be hastily hand written under students names and must not correspond to levels recorded in teacher's mark book or the school tracker.

4.    Data sheet. This will contain no less than 25 columns of trivia including date of birth, gender, star sign and blood type. It will be colour coded so that teacher ineffectiveness can be tracked and measured.

5.   Teachers should be very nervous with a stale meat casserole smell coming from their armpits, breath and anus. It is a basic expectation that teachers' stomachs will be grotesquely distended with trapped wind.

I'm sweating like a bitch and I've just farted

Learning menus: a breakthrough in student choice

‘Learning menus’, a tool developed at the Forward! Academy in Luton, offer a quick and easy way to replicate consumer choice in the classroom.

Learning menus developer, Jerry Layton, explains, ‘It began when I gave the students a choice of starter activity. Then I thought, why not give them a choice of main course and pudding, too? Now I simply put menus on the desks and circulate taking orders.’

‘We are experimenting with the idea that children would have credits to spend on different items from the menu, with credits being earned for achievement and good behaviour. The cheaper items on the menu would obviously be the timewasting activities devoid of educational value, like word searches and gap fills. We expect that our lower ability students, who at present have relatively few credits, will purchase these items. The highest ability students, by contrast, can opt for the exquisite seven course tasting menu. We call this process ‘differentiation’.’

Sir Ian Munroe, CEO of the Capital Wealth Management Group, sponsor of the Forward! Academy, praised the introduction of learning menus. ‘What’s great is that this system replicates so accurately the conditions of consumer capitalism,’ says Sir Ian, ‘complete with a version of the poverty trap, an integral feature our exciting modern economy.’

Staff at the Forward! Academy have embraced the system. There is fierce competition among teachers for Michelin stars to display on their classroom doors, and the academy’s examinations officer has arranged for exams to be held as buffets in the gym.

Differentiated homework

Homework will be differentiated, too. The cheaper options can be collected from any branch of Maxim Chicken, whilst a choice of organic homework boxes will be delivered to higher-achieving pupils in vans driven by white people with dreadlocks.

Quantitative grading to raise standards for all

An academy chain is to use a controversial and novel technique known as ‘quantitative grading’ to boost results at its schools. The chain of Progression Improvement and Skills Schools (PISS) will inject thousands of A*s, As and level 6s into its data trackers in an effort to raise standards.

The initiative was put forward by the academy chain’s corporate sponsor, a multinational banking group. ‘We simply need more high grades in circulation,’ said Sarah Forbes, Private Banking Consultant at Shitti Group. When challenged on the question of whether quantitative grading would lead to grade inflation, Forbes was adamant. ‘No. It’s not like ‘printing grades’. It’s completely different. This isn’t Zimbabwe.’

‘It does sound dodgy,’ said  Barry Newton, Assistant Head at PISS. ‘But you can trust the banks. I mean, they know what they’re doing, right?’

Quantitative grading will help ensure progress for all

Books criticised for “teaching from the front”

Leading educationalists have called for the removal of books from Britain’s schools on the grounds that their use has “potentially catastrophic implications for the progress of young learners”. The comment, from Maureen Bismark, lecturer in Child Acquiescence at the University of Carterton, comes in the wake of a fierce parliamentary debate in which Culture Secretary Jed Lennox accused the Prime Minster of being “soft as shite on books”. There was laughter from the back benches when the PM admitted “I like Ian McEwan”.

The current campaign against books is based on the fears of growing number of parents who are concerned that their children are passively absorbing facts and knowledge from books while the books in question sit limply on laps or tables. When pressed on the issue Bismark explained that “books, at best, are nothing more than a convenient method of transferring complex ideas and a huge body of knowledge and learning built up over centuries to potentially any human being on the planet”. She added that “Books do not have any place in 21^st century learning and are useless to our children who are now participants in an exciting global economy”. 

Campaigners from the parents’ pressure group BOOKSFUCKKIDS have also criticised the publishing industry for “profiting from the naivety of our most vulnerable citizens while operating in a system with zero checks or balances”.

BOOKSFUCKKIDS will be co-ordinating a number of demonstrations outside Hodder, Pearson and Heinemann publishers this Saturday at 8.00 am. 

An academy in Stevenage disposes of its books. Its corporate sponsor is to supply all students with tablet devices.

Education academics release simple guide to KS3 Levels

Academics at the University of Carterton’s Centre for Learning have released a quick and easy guide to levelling KS3 students.

The guide comes in the wake of complaints by young teachers that allotting levels is an onerous task and part of the unnecessary paperwork that makes teaching these days such a pain in the arse.

The guide has been welcomed by teaching unions. ‘This is exactly the sort of thing teachers require,’ said Tom Rifkin, union rep at the Forward! Academy. ‘It will enable them to level students quickly and, more importantly, very accurately.’

The guide in full:

Level 3
Overweight working-class child

Level 4
Especially pleasant overweight working-class child
Child whose handwriting you can’t be bothered to decipher
Child with a specific learning difficulty you don’t understand

Level 5
Quiet, Muslim girl wearing hijab
Rude, badly behaved child by whom you are slightly intimidated but who seems to like you
Child whose name or face you don’t recognise
Girl with nice handwriting

Level 6
Boy with long, indie-style hair
Quiet, well-behaved Chinese child
Child whose parents gave you a hard time at last parents’ evening

Level 7
Middle-class child

Level 5

ONSTED: Alternative Education News onstednews.blogspot.com via @onstednews

— ONSTED News (@ONSTEDNews) May 22, 2013

School offers intensive course in being more middleclass

A school in Hackney has become the first in the country to offer a course in middleclassness.  The Progression Improvement and Skills School (PISS) has introduced the course following the failure of some academically able students to get into top universities.

Units cover a broad range of topics, from ‘Why old houses are better than new ones’ to ‘What kind of pubs are OK to go into’ and ‘People and things to sneer at’.

‘It was confusing to begin with,’ said Katie Adams, a student at PISS. ‘Like, why are pubs better if the chairs don’t match? And why is it bad to have labels on the outside of your clothes and shoes, unless they say Converse or Camper? There were a lot of things I didn’t get.’

Michael Wiggins, Principal at PISS, admits that the course is challenging. ‘The unit on why old houses are better than new ones is especially tough. Students struggle with the idea that this rule doesn't apply in London, where house prices mean that any dwelling down to a disused public convenience or old shipping container may now be considered an acceptable option for a middleclass family, but only if a wood-burning stove is installed and handmade bunting hung.’

There are practical elements to the course, too. Students regularly visit Waitrose, where they are required to show that they can tell the difference between salsify and samphire and that they can be sufficiently patronising to checkout staff, saying ‘I don’t need a bag’ as loudly as possible, while cramming their over-packaged, airfreighted avocados into a wicker basket.

‘We have had some real breakthroughs,’ says Wiggins. ‘Just last week a parent rang me to say that his daughter had persuaded him to get sash windows fitted in their house. He’s taken on an extra night shift to pay for it. Just fantastic.’

It hasn’t all been plain sailing, though. Josie Morris, 15, dropped out of the course after struggling with much of the content. ‘I don’t care what anyone says. Shopping at fifteen different independent shops instead of going to Asda is a massive pain in the arse,’ she complained. ‘Nowhere sells pollock. And goats’ milk tastes like knob cheese.’  For students like Josie, who cannot handle the course, it is back to the mainstream classroom where they can spend the next two years playing on their phones with post-it notes bearing the words ‘Triple Entente’ stuck to their foreheads.

As part of the course students must learn to enjoy glamping in yurts in Wales

Milgram-style shocks to be administered to teachers found telling children stuff

Teachers persistently found telling students about stuff are to face small electric shocks in an attempt to encourage them to desist.

Inspired by the famous Milgram experiment of the 1960s, the Teacher Electric Shocks (TES) differ from those administered during the well-known study in that the shocks are real.

With the ideal teacher to pupil talk ratio now standing at 1:9, some teachers struggle with the idea that they just have to shut up. Mohammed Ahmed from Leeds was one such teacher. He explains, ‘Having a PhD in Nuclear Engineering, I had become arrogant, believing that I had the right to tell students stuff about physics. Since receiving my shocks I know better. The nerve damage to my face makes it difficult for me to talk now, anyway.’

‘What’s great about this technique is that it’s so pupil-centric and democratic’ said Chris Topper, lecturer in Citizenship Education at the University of Carterton’s Centre for Learning. ‘Students have ‘shock pods’ on their desks. As soon a teacher starts talking, students can simply press a button and administer a shock. Of course, the power is completely in pupils’ hands: if a teacher is talking about something that interests the pupils, like Apple products for example, they may choose to let him or her continue.’

Ben Nicholls, a geography teacher at the Student Choice Academy (SCA) in Redditch says that the system has been instrumental in helping him develop into an outstanding teacher.‘To begin with, when I was trying to teach about something like desertification, I would tell the students all about it. Now I don’t say a word. I just put the title on the board and sit there until the kids find out about it for themselves. This can take a while, but eventually someone always looks it up on their phone and then everyone else copies it down.  It’s wonderful to watch.’

The technique is not without its dangers. Last week a history teacher at the Progress for All Free School (PAFS) received a fatal electric shock while trying to explain the Tiananmen Square Massacre to a group of youngsters. She had been speaking for a total of 34 seconds. The coroner reached a verdict of accidental death. ‘It’s sad for her family’, said Paul Rambert, Principal at PAFS. ‘But, ultimately, she and those like her represent a threat to children’s education. It’s better that this threat is eliminated, at whatever cost.’

Scientists say they have split the sub-level

Scientists at Carterton University’s Centre for Learning claim to have split the sub-level. 

The breakthrough was made by a team of educational scientists who have been working on the problem since 2005. ‘We knew there had to be a way to do this,’ said scientist Rupert Hardman. ‘Our initial lab tests indicated that the potential to split the sub-level was there. Now, thanks to technological advances we have finally been able do it.’

The sub-sub-level will allow teachers to pinpoint children’s progress much more accurately, and will do a great deal to ensure that the last traces of spontaneity and individuality are banished from the classroom. 

Though small, these traces are still present in most schools and represent a considerable threat to children.

Hardman warns, however, that the sub-level must be split in a controlled environment. ‘Sub-level fission can unleash an enormous amount of very powerful educational bullshit,’ he said.

Powerful sub-sub-levels are released in sub-level fission procedure

Posh people offered fast-track into teaching

The government has announced further plans to enable posh people to enter the teaching profession without undertaking specific training.

Education Minister Douglas Macintyre said that the move follows the success of the Teach First Program. ‘Obviously,’ he says ‘the primary objective of Teach First was to get posh people into inner-city schools so that some of their poshness might rub off on the poor communities. However, asking for a 2:1 or above is an unrealistic entry requirement for many of the poshest people. That’s why we've decided to offer the Poshtrack Program.’

To qualify for Poshtrack, applicants need only demonstrate hearty enthusiasm and good breeding.  Hetty Broadman, who is nine, is Assistant Head at the North Norwood Progress Academy (NNPA), an inner-city 11-18 comprehensive. ‘I’ve slashed the inclusion budget and redirected it for polo lessons,’ Hetty explains. ‘People think a nine-year-old can’t run a large educational establishment, but it’s easy peasy lemon squeezy. If you’re posh enough, you’re old enough.’

Posh people will have the right to fuck up their degrees and still become teachers.

Academy bans moving backwards

An academy in Luton has banned students and staff from moving backwards. The Forward! Academy (FA) says that the move is a logical step in making its motto ‘Progress forward together as individuals’ a reality.

Karl Harris, Principal at the Forward! Academy, explains ‘We do not tolerate our students going backwards in their learning, so why would we tolerate them going backwards in any other way?’

If individuals leave a room and then realise they have forgotten something, the rules forbid them from going ‘back’ for it. Instead, the individual should walk all the way around the school until they approach the room from a different direction, thus preventing any episode of moving backwards.

‘It can be tough,’ says Katy Hoang, 13. ‘The other day someone came towards me really quickly carrying their dinner tray. I had to push myself against the wall to avoid a collision.’

Physical Education at the Forward! Academy has been adapted to accommodate the change. ‘We no longer offer rowing, high jump or any other sport in which the competitor is required to move in a backwards direction,’ says Head of PE Sandy Hargreaves.  ‘To be honest, I think we will probably be left with running.’

The Forward! Academy has a simple philosophy.