Mick Waters is best known as former Director of the Curriculum at the QCA (Qualifications and Curriculum Authority) where he gained an heroic reputation amongst teachers whilst both consulting, advising and explaining the new curriculum; making it relevant and meaningful for professionals working directly with children and young people. A former Headteacher, Mick is passionate about the role of education in improving life chances for pupils and is still very much involved with teaching and learning. He is the President of the Curriculum Foundation and a charismatic speaker who pushes the boundaries to improve learning and make schools better. One of the UK's leading educational mentors brings you the book you have been waiting for!
Reviewed by Dr Bernard Trafford, Headmaster, Newcastle upon Tyne
Royal Grammar School.
Mick Waters has done it again. Sometimes you read something so
blindingly obvious that you wonder, "Why didn't I think of that?"
But, whereas most of us manage to glimpse parts of the problem and
fragments of possible solutions, he pulls all those elements
together succinctly and coherently. He presents educators and
policy-makers alike with a challenge that is huge and daunting, to
be sure, but which in his masterly analysis is eminently capable of
being addressed, if only we have the will to do so.
That analysis is dispassionate, but there's no mistaking Mick's
passion for education and for its purpose that we owe to our
children but in which we so often fail them. Notwithstanding his
clear love for teaching and for teachers, he doesn't flinch from
criticising the uninspiring and formulaic: nor does his flinch from
laying the blame firmly at the doors of qualification-obsessed
policy-makers and the data-dominated inspection system for creating
and perpetuating the focus on what is narrow, tedious and purely
utilitarian.
Mick is a positive thinker - hence the book's title. So, although
he paints a bleak picture of the current state of affairs, he
offers solutions: they are challenging but realistic, if only
policy-makers would find the courage. If we don't pick up the
gauntlet Mick throws down, we risk (as he writes graphically)
continuing to "beat the drum of progress and march to the drum of
tedious accountability." Reviewed by Andrew Chubb Principal,
Archbishop Sentamu Academy.
In this highly readable book, Mick gives a brilliant review of the
Good, the Bad, and the Plain Old Ugly of the current educational
landscape. He is right to conclude that we need "an Education
Spring - a rising of intolerance about the way schooling is being
manipulated in a piecemeal and uncoordinated way to serve too many
purposes with unclear measures." His call for the es
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