tag:theconversation.com,2011:/au/topics/queens-speech-2016-27583/articlesQueen's Speech 2016 – The Conversation2016-05-19T09:46:03Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/596272016-05-19T09:46:03Z2016-05-19T09:46:03ZGovernment is tinkering around the edges with prison reform plan<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/123023/original/image-20160518-5867-o20yr8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">HMP Wandsworth in London.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">PA</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/news/biggest-shake-up-of-prison-system-announced-as-part-of-queens-speech">biggest “overhaul” of prisons</a> since Victorian times is to be undertaken by the British government. This was the headline announcement in the 2016 Queen’s speech to mark the state opening of parliament.</p>
<p>But these proposals fail to address the bigger picture. They won’t resolve overcrowding or other festering problems. There are currently 85,381 men and women in prison in England and Wales. They are being held in a system designed for a maximum of <a href="http://www.howardleague.org/weekly-prison-watch/">77,233</a> prisoners. Institutions are bursting at the seams. </p>
<p>The government’s idea is to hand unprecedented autonomy to governors over the running of prisons. Dilapidated, archaic prisons will be replaced with modern jails and more than 5,000 offenders will be re-housed in six new reform prisons by the end of the year.</p>
<p>As Laura Kuenssberg, the BBC’s political editor, pointed out, over half of prisoners have no qualifications and 50% re-offend within 12 months. Secretary of State for the Environment Liz Truss, also noted:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We don’t have a good enough record in terms of where prisoners leave prison, back in to society, getting them back on track.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>These are valid points but they are unlikely to help while prisoners are cramped into filthy overcrowded conditions. </p>
<h2>What does it all mean?</h2>
<p>Despite the heavy trailing of this part of the Queen’s speech, the government is not offering much detail. What, for example, are reform prisons? And what does it mean to give prisons “legal freedom”?</p>
<p>Prime Minister David Cameron said prisons have been allowed to fester for too long, reinforcing the cycle of crime. His government, he argues, “wants to give everyone the chance to rise up and make the most of themselves”. That means starting a reform so that prisons will no longer be “warehouses for criminals; they will now be places where lives are changed”.</p>
<p>Time will tell though. The last major prison reform happened following the Strangeways riots in the early 1990s. A total of 204 proposals and 12 recommendations were made, which included addressing the problem of overcrowding (when the prison population was just 45,000). </p>
<p>The practice of “slopping out”, where prisoners had to urinate and defecate in plastic pots, was also outlawed in 1996. Yet it was <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11630152">still going on</a> well into the 21st century. If history is anything to go by, then I remain somewhat dubious. </p>
<p>Greater autonomy, it is hoped, will lead to better services, such as in education for prisoners. A <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/unlocking-potential-a-review-of-education-in-prison">government review</a>, released on the same day as the Queen’s speech, includes learning plans for each individual to track their progress. The new freedoms granted to governors could also enable them to introduce more stretching education programmes.</p>
<p>According to <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/prison-reform-prime-ministers-speech">plans</a> unveiled earlier this year, the government also wants to create league tables for prisons, to measure their performance, and make it easier to deport foreign prisoners. This could alleviate the prison population to a point, but it could be seen as the government’s way of diverting from the main issues of overcrowding.</p>
<p>There are many positives about the proposed reforms but without addressing the underlying problems being faced by those who live and work every day in our prisons, the crisis of overcrowding along with all its additional problems will continue to grow.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/59627/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David Honeywell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>It got top billing in the Queen’s speech but is anyone actually any clearer on what the government’s prison reforms are?David Honeywell, PhD candidate, University of YorkLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/595712016-05-18T15:49:21Z2016-05-18T15:49:21Z‘My government might’ – the Queen’s Speech is more of a wish list these days<p>Despite winning a resounding victory in the 2015 general election, and facing an opposition widely thought to be in meltdown, Britain’s Conservative government is hardly having an easy time.</p>
<p>It isn’t necessarily to blame. The dominance of the executive has declined in recent years in the face of devolution, rebellious backbenchers, and an <a href="https://theconversation.com/tax-credits-showdown-for-once-public-opinion-may-be-with-the-house-of-lords-49774">increasingly assertive</a> House of Lords. Many decisions are heavily influenced by Europe and voters are finding new ways to register their discontent when they oppose a government line – be it through online protest or <a href="https://theconversation.com/hard-evidence-this-is-the-age-of-dissent-and-theres-much-more-to-come-52871">public mobilisation</a>.</p>
<p>And yet the government often gives the impression of not recognising these constraints. It has, over the past year in particular, announced various controversial policies that have rapidly unravelled in the face of opposition. </p>
<p>The list of reversals is impressive. Since its surprise victory last May, the government has had to change course on tax credits, child refugees and trade union reforms. George Osborne’s announcement in March’s Budget that all schools would be required to become academies has also already been subject to significant modification.</p>
<p>So there are grounds for believing that some of the announcements made by the Queen in her speech to set the legislative agenda for the forthcoming parliament will undergo significant modification before actually becoming law.</p>
<p>Just days before the Queen opened parliament, the <a href="http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publications/government-under-pressure">Institute for Government</a> urged the government to recognise the constraints of implementing the more radical parts of its agenda and modify its ambitions.</p>
<p>Does this mean that the Queen’s Speech is just another antiquated piece of parliamentary theatre which we can safely ignore? I believe not. The speech is still a shop window for governments to give a signal of their priorities to the general public.</p>
<h2>Coming soon</h2>
<p>In the context of the EU referendum, the plan to consult on drawing up a British bill of rights to replace the Human Rights Act is significant, for example. </p>
<p>During the early years of the coalition government, a group of largely eurosceptic backbench MPs sought to pass a pithy bill to reassert British parliamentary sovereignty over the European courts. This ultimately failed. </p>
<p>The Conservatives have long discussed the possibility of withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) but such a bold step was rejected by Cameron last summer. This was in part, it seems, because of the complexities of the UK’s system of devolution.</p>
<p>The decision to offer up the reform as a consultation suggests that Cameron’s government has, in this area at least, learned that such a bill will be complex to draft and so it needs to develop something that will not be unpicked easily.</p>
<p>The need for such a bill will clearly be defined by the result of the EU referendum on June 23. If Britain votes for Brexit, it would, in the long term, be unnecessary. However, the bill is an important means of binding a divided Tory party together, although for many eurosceptic MPs it is unlikely to be sufficient to satisfy all their concerns. </p>
<p>Elsewhere in the speech, we heard about measures to tackle extremism, which occupied a central place this year, as they often have in recent years. We also heard again about devolving responsibilities to local authorities. There will be higher tuition fees and more opportunities for private universities to enter the market. </p>
<p>In addition to these familiar themes, more socially-focused policies are included, such as a Help to Save scheme, reforms to the prison system, speeding-up adoption and improving social care outcomes. The government clearly wants to signal that it is not just an austerity government and can offer opportunities for social mobility. The measures outlined, however, only nibble at the edges of the broader challenges of poverty and social inequality in Britain. </p>
<p>Overall, the Queen’s Speech offers the usual mix of the old, the (relatively) new, the borrowed and the blue. However, the extent to which these proposals will make it through the parliamentary process in any recognisable form remains an open question.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/59571/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Philip Catney does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The government has had to make many u-turns of late and that’s unlikely to change now.Philip Catney, Senior Lecturer in Politics, Keele UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/592712016-05-18T13:41:12Z2016-05-18T13:41:12ZWhat metrics don’t tell us about the way students learn<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/122869/original/image-20160517-9509-ehug69.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/loughboroughuniversitylibrary/3256108502/sizes/l">Loughborough University/www.flickr.com</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>A big push is under way in higher education to measure how students are learning and how good lecturers are at teaching them. Universities can track how much time a student spent on a learning module or how often they accessed a journal article or online book. <a href="https://theconversation.com/snooping-professor-or-friendly-don-the-ethics-of-university-learning-analytics-23636">Some universities</a> are starting to use these “learning analytics” to study how students are accessing data. But that is currently all they can do – because of the limits of using this kind of “big data” to measure the effectiveness of teaching and learning.</p>
<p>In the UK, the government has <a href="https://theconversation.com/new-competitive-landscape-for-higher-education-confirmed-in-white-paper-59494">confirmed plans</a> to measure teaching excellence at universities in England via a new Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). The Queen’s Speech <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/524040/Queen_s_Speech_2016_background_notes_.pdf">revealed</a> that a new Higher Education and Research Bill will be introduced to take forward regulation around the ideas set out in the <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/523396/bis-16-265-success-as-a-knowledge-economy.pdf">higher education white paper</a>. </p>
<p>Currently, the TEF plans to align teaching excellence to university’s scores on the <a href="http://www.thestudentsurvey.com/">National Student Survey</a>, data on how many students finish their course from the <a href="https://www.hesa.ac.uk/">Higher Education Statistics Agency</a>, and on the proportion of graduates in employment using a survey of students <a href="https://www.hesa.ac.uk/stats-dlhe">conducted six months</a> after they leave university. </p>
<p>Universities will also be able to submit qualitative and quantitative evidence of up to 15 pages to explain and contextualise their metrics. This is where it gets sticky: will the people with the highest quality teaching and learning shine through or will the people with the best stories and prettiest data win in the end? </p>
<p>The fluidity of metrics allows for more wiggle room than the government thinks and that wiggle room will allow for gaming the new system, no matter what the white paper claims. For example, there is the possibility of <a href="https://www.hobsons.com/emea/resources/entry/learning-analytics-more-than-just-weather-forecasting">linking data</a> that measures what has happened with events that may or may not be related – such as tracking a student’s participation in online discussions and their ratings of the way their lecturers use technology.</p>
<h2>What metrics miss out</h2>
<p>Yet teaching and learning are more than just analytics. It is not possible to measure good teaching by simply looking at lecture attendance or examining how many pages a student read on an e-text. </p>
<p>Current practices in <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/05/09/big-data-was-supposed-to-fix-education-it-didnt-its-time-for-small-data/">learning analytics are focused on exploring big data</a>, something that students produce <em>en masse</em>. One example of this is keeping track of attendance at lectures, correlating that with the number of hours spent reading an e-textbook, and using that data to predict success on a specific assessment. This can’t be linked to employability, nor can it be linked to the relative excellence of the instructor. Likewise, teaching intensity cannot be linked to a specific number of hours or type of teaching style. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/123022/original/image-20160518-13487-113lhg4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/123022/original/image-20160518-13487-113lhg4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123022/original/image-20160518-13487-113lhg4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123022/original/image-20160518-13487-113lhg4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123022/original/image-20160518-13487-113lhg4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123022/original/image-20160518-13487-113lhg4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123022/original/image-20160518-13487-113lhg4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">What makes a great teacher?</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Matej Kastelic/www.shutterstock.com</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Research into learning analytics is growing <a href="http://lak16.solaresearch.org">apace</a> but is still nascent – so it is a problem that politicians have decided to use it as a promised messiah to define and measure excellence. </p>
<p>This is not to say that learning analytics are not useful – they are very good at doing specific things that can possibly improve the student experience. For example, metrics can identify students who do not access the class materials or attend the lectures. These students can be taken aside and asked if they need additional support. </p>
<p>But here is the conundrum: there is no empirical data that says that all students who display these behaviours need additional support. Learning analytics are increasingly being seen as a universal panacea <a href="https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/universities-should-set-targets-recruiting-male-students">for anything that may ail education</a>. But this has not proven true in the last ten years: we have terabytes of big data on student learning but very little empirical research on its actual impact. Outputs and outcomes in terms of lectures attended are not measures of impact on the individual lives of university students. </p>
<p>The introduction of learning analytics as a measure of teaching excellence will have one definitive outcome: spurious correlations. Lest we forget, <a href="https://xkcd.com/552/">correlation does not equal causation</a> and the best that learning analytics can currently do is correlate that more years of completed education correlate to a higher graduate earning potential. That is not enough to undermine the years of <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03075079.2011.598505#.VzthNatHOKI">educational research</a> that stresses the importance of relationships and presence of teachers in the classroom. </p>
<h2>Game on</h2>
<p>Suggesting that universities use solely qualitative measures to examine teaching and learning is not practical, but there needs to be a balance between what the statistics may reveal and the actual teaching and learning experience. </p>
<p>The government has charged the Higher Education Funding Council for England – now to be subsumed into <a href="https://theconversation.com/new-competitive-landscape-for-higher-education-confirmed-in-white-paper-59494">a new body </a> called UK Research and Innovation – with the task of developing a system of checks and balances to measure teaching excellence so that universities do not try and game the system. These measures are slated to go live in year three of the TEF roll out. </p>
<p>The next three years are likely to see a rash of university policy and practice that will not encourage collegiality – nor will it help to build bridges between innovative teaching practice and quality learning. Instead it may produce the same <a href="https://theconversation.com/game-playing-of-the-ref-makes-it-an-incomplete-census-35707">wheeling and dealing</a> that the <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/research-excellence-framework">Research Excellence Framework</a> does, except this will be much more frequent. The game has officially changed.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/59271/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dana Ruggiero does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Plans to reward universities for excellent teaching could see a bigger role for metrics that track how students spend their time.Dana Ruggiero, Senior Lecturer in Learning Technology, Bath Spa UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.