Mary Reid

If the rate of exam passes rises there are mutterings of 'dumbing down' the exams. If they drop, then the rhetoric is all about falling standards.

Paradoxically, both have been true simultaneously for GCSEs recently. If you take the percentage of passes in GCSE subjects at A* to C, then these have been steadily rising. But the percentage of pupils who gain five A* to C grades - the league table benchmark - has actually been static or falling for the last couple of years. So which is it to be: dumbing down or falling standards? Either way the accusation is demoralising to students and teachers.

In all this negativity about students' achievements, one thing is often overlooked - the qualitatively different way in which students are challenged these days.

When I took my O and A levels, what I recall is the evening before an exam spent cramming snippets of facts into my short-term memory. Oh - and the boring, boring courses, which seemed to have little relevance to real life. It was only AFTER I had taken my A Level Physics exams that I was shown how to change a plug. We studied Shakespeare as text not as theatre. We could translate from French to English and vice versa, but couldn't hold a conversation for more than a minute or two in the language. We could recite the dates of the battles fought hundreds of years ago but hadn't a clue about the origins of the Second World War. We spent hours and hours learning off by heart the translation of Caesar's Gallic Wars, hoping the right passage would appear on the exam paper. And if we were aiming at University then we were strongly discouraged from studying the creative subjects like Art.

I actually loved school and enjoyed learning, but so much of what was taught could have been expressly designed to kill off any intellectual curiosity or creativity. Since those days GCSE courses have been designed to be interesting - not a word that was used much in my schooldays. They develop the students' intellectual skills of research, analysis, experimentation, creative courage, planning and time management, and they encourage them to be autonomous learners.

So should we be so surprised that modern syllabuses have turned on whole generations of young people to the riches of our culture and the excitement of solving problems? Or that aspirations and expectations have risen? Or indeed that pass rates have risen dramatically over the last 20 years? Of course not - the whole GCSE campaign would have been a complete failure if it hadn't brought life into the classroom and encouraged real learning to take place.

Here are some photos showing the new library and community centre - the Hook Project - as it has been developing.

You can find more information with detailed plans and drawings about the Hook Project on the Council's website.


August 2005 - from Elm Road. You can see the CAB building on the right


July 2005 - from Hook Road


June 2005 - from Elm Road


April 2005 - from Elm Road


March 2005 - from Hook Road


January 2005 - from Hook Road

Here is a short video about blogging for councillors.



Click on the arrow to start it.

This was created for the Local e-Democracy National Project.

Talking of street information points in Kingston - they all now have Wi-Fi. Very useful if you want to use your laptop in the street ..........

How's this for a novel idea?

Go to one of the iPlus street information points scattered around the Borough, use the built-in webcam to make a 30 second video, enter it in the Kingston Webcam Film Festival and maybe win a video camera.

Closing date is Friday 19th August.

More details and locations of information points.

94 years ago today, Westminster voted to reconstitute the House of Lords on 'a popular instead of hereditary basis' in the Parliament Act 1911 - but it still hasn't been enacted.

In fact, the last time the House of Commons voted on this a few years ago, the majority were in favour of a mostly or wholly elected Second Chamber. But in the end differences between them over the exact structure led to a split vote and no progress.

Let's make sure it happens soon.

Check out the Elect the Lords Campaign. You can read more background and if you agree can register your support for the campaign. So far 126 MPs, including our local Edward Davey and Susan Kramer have expressed their support.

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to Dysart School, our school for children with severe learning difficulties. The dozen or so young people in the sixth form unit have developed a Young Enterprise scheme, Dysart Designs, selling cards, bookmarks, mobiles and calendars.


The Mayor and others with the young people at Dysart School

This event was to launch Dysart Designs Online Shop, allowing the young people to sell their products on the Internet.

This is an excellent and imaginative development of the Council's online payment system. Everyone involved - Council ICT staff (especially Robin Noble, who is half-hidden at the back of the photo) the software suppliers, the teachers and the young people - are to be congratulated.

Our garden is being redesigned. By yesterday most of the shrubs and turf had been removed, leaving a patch of bare earth.

Suddenly it became a public open space. Children from both sides wandered in through the gaps to play, and the neighbours came in to attack some rampant ivy from our side.

The English tradition of enclosed domestic gardens in one of the glories of our culture. But it does seem to represent the private nature of the English psyche - we shield our family life, emotions and philosophy from others.

This does present a problem when trying to create public online spaces. They need to be neutral, owned by everyone and not dominated by a few.

The concept of 'civic commons' was first proposed in 2001 when Citizens Online and IPPR published "Realising Democracy Online: A Civic Commons in Cyberspace" (pdf) by Jay Blumler and Stephen Coleman. They argued that these spaces should be a publicly-funded and independently-managed. Amongst other things, this was the inspiration for BBC iCan, recently relaunched as BBC Action Network.

Here's a good idea......... You can check Kingston Council traffic cams in a couple of locations before you set out.

Junction of St Mark's Hill and Ewell Road (for the roadworks) - camera 1

Junction of St Mark's Hill and Ewell Road (for the roadworks) - camera 2

And the one I particularly like - you can check the dump cam for the queue at the tip in Villiers Road!

Dump cam

These are refreshing images but you can get streaming video as well.

One final entry about my trip to Minnesota. On the day after the field trip the stragglers were invited to visit Minneapolis City Hall by Vaman Pai from the Communications Department (left), who took the photos.

The City Hall is a magnificent marble and stained glass redstone civic building.

In the large entrance hall there is a huge statue of Father of Waters, representing the Mississippi with a crocodile and turtle, carved from a single block of Italian marble.


Left picture - City Hall, Minneapolis
Right picture - Me, Kerrie Oates from Queensland Government, Julia Glidden and Susie Ruston from Accenture, Derek Parkinson from Vox Politics.

City Hall is surrounded by skyscrapers, which to my surprise I heard myself describing as beautiful - the surface materials and relationship of the buildings to each other was quite stunning.

We found out why it was so pleasing when we sat in on a Planning Committee where they were discussing the shape of the windows on a warehouse conversion in a conservation area. I had always imagined that planning controls were pretty lax in American cities, judging by some of the buildings and streetscapes. But here the same issues arose as in Kingston - how to preserve their heritage whilst maintaining a strong commercial heart.


Sitting in on the Minneapolis City Council Planning Committee, chaired by Gary Schiff, who formally welcomed us.

The City Council runs two television channels, courtesy of the local cable company, and we looked round the studios. The City Hall also houses some 400 prisoners!