Rethinking Qualifications? It’s About Time

Posted on January 8, 2021 by Athene Donald

For the second year running our school assessment system is up in the air, for totally understandable reasons. A Levels were explicitly cancelled but the Government seemed incapable of giving a clear answer about this month’s BTec’s, the vocational equivalent. Leaving decisions about whether the imminent exams should go ahead to individual schools was a clear failure of leadership, putting both those sitting the exams and the schools in an invidious position. It is, perhaps, only too typical of attitudes towards anything other than the so-called Gold standard of A levels.

If you read David Goodhart’s book Head Hand Heart (about which I may have more to say in a subsequent post), it is obvious he believes we completely undervalue skills other than those of the head, those exemplified by A Levels and degrees. Approaching the issue from a different perspective, not least in political persuasion, in David Sainsbury’s book Windows of Opportunity, there is a similar conviction that, as a country, we let down those students for whom university is not an option, or at least not the right one for them. For both these authors, there is a clear belief that not only individuals are not well served by the current system, neither is civil society nor the economy. In other words, for the nation too getting this right really matters.

Sainsbury, the former Science Minister under Tony Blair, spends some time in his book discussing the lack of coherence in our current educational system across the different potential pathways. He considers this not least in the context of the implications for the technical support, so vital in both industry and university laboratories. With the dire consequences of Brexit for supply chains as well as for the flow of non-UK workers, both (amongst many other detrimental consequences) immensely damaging for industry as the deal has been configured, the need for these home-grown skilled workers at sub-degree level will become ever more acute.

Not that long ago, Charles Clarke – Secretary of State for Education also in Blair’s Government – admitted to me that his greatest regret as Education Secretary was the failure to implement the recommendations of the 2004 Tomlinson Report. This advocated a comprehensive rethink of school qualifications to create a single, unified diploma covering all levels of ability. As he said, when presenting this Report to Parliament, it would take time to put such a scheme in place but thereby

“all existing academic and vocational qualifications would be brought within its [the diploma’s] framework…. It would establish a single coherent, understood qualifications framework for the first time. It would put vocational and academic qualifications on a common footing, again for the first time.”

He endorsed it at the time, but there seems subsequently to have been a collective loss of nerve about introducing something that might destroy the (in)famous A Levels and such a diploma never came into being.

So, a decade and a half later, we still have A Levels along with an ill-assorted collection of other qualifications, including the BTec’s and the still-being-rolled-out T-Levels, not to mention apprenticeships. These diverse qualifications are typically not well understood by either students (and their parents) or employers, leading to confusion and inadequate matching of skills and needs. Typically, they are also under-resourced, a point well made in the Augar Review, now more than 18 months old and still awaiting a formal Government response.

In the parlance, BTec’s and the rest are Levels 4/5 qualifications and, unlike many other countries, notably Germany, we have a lack of workers for whom this is their highest level qualification. We are well-served with graduates, but far too many individuals do not progress beyond Levels 2 and 3(GCSE), hence providing inadequate skilled and semi-skilled workers to fill crucial roles. Sainsbury is so exercised about these issues, the educational research trust he funds – the Gatsby Foundation – has directed significant effort to investigating the problems in what their reports  term ‘The Missing Middle’ (see here and here). His book likewise looks in some detail at the problems our current system provokes. Of the inchoate range of qualifications he says

“If there is a vast range of qualifications, and the acquisition of them is not valued by employees – either because they don’t know what skills the people with these qualifications have, or because they don’t value the ones they do acquire ­– then people won’t be motivated to get the qualifications.’ And he refers to the fact that this multiplicity of qualifications  ‘do not work in the marketplace, and produce variable and usually poor standards of education and training.”

Under-resourcing and complexity together deliver this unsatisfactory state of affairs.

The UK has a long track record of failing to think through technical training adequately. It started with the opening up of elementary education for all children in Victorian times, when those devising curricula seemed unable to consider these issues, seeing children as either going on to become servants and mill-workers, albeit literate ones, or heading for university and requiring a gentleman’s classical education. It continued with the 1944 Butler Act, which advocated three streams of schools – grammar, secondary modern and technical – the third of which essentially never got built. My generation were simply divided into two, very unequal parts, with the vast majority being condemned to (again) under-resourced secondary moderns.

And it persists today: the UK has failed to work out how to deliver appropriate education for those who could make an important contribution to society and productivity (not to mention to their own sense of self-worth) without acquiring a degree. As the Augar Review pointed out

‘‘In England, only 4 per cent of 25 year-olds hold a Level 4 or Level 5 qualification as their highest level, compared to nearly 30 per cent for both Level 3 and Level 6. In contrast, in Germany, Level 4 and 5 makes up 20 per cent of all higher education enrolments.”

Looking at the state of German and UK industry, the success of the Mittelstand companies, it is worth the Government thinking about these figures very hard.

While we continue waiting for any sign of a formal response to the Augar Review, as we see those nominal gold standard qualifications (not to mention all the others) run into pandemic turmoil, as we reap the alleged benefits of a Brexit that was never going to transform our economy in a good direction, wouldn’t it be a good moment to think deeply about what spectrum of qualifications we need to sustain our economy and how they can be delivered, in a way that works for all, student and employer alike? As the public watch the unedifying picture of a bumbling Secretary of State making bad decisions, or U-turns always too late, with schools thrown into unending upheaval and consequent stress, some radical rethinking to create a coherent system with benefits all round seems called for. Maybe there is no way could it be delivered until after a significant period of stability in all our lives, it could nevertheless provide some optimism for the future.

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A Playlist for Troubled Times

Posted on January 2, 2021 by Athene Donald

During the recent weeks and months of staring at a screen, when there is little variety of scenery or (physical) company, I have found music a comforting companion. When I say music, I mean classical music which has been a frequent backdrop to my life of the pandemic. Listening to Joyce DiDonato’s own choice of playlist of ‘New Year cheer’ on BBC Radio3’s Inside Music this weekend, and the importance she attributed to Nature as, if you like, life-affirming during these pandemic days, I thought of the choices I would make myself to lift my spirits, Nature-related or not.

You should realise I’ve had public opportunities to choose playlists before, but with different purposes, not simply to lift my spirits. The first time was the most scary: Desert Island Discs, with its huge audience (and ongoing availability). My choices then were determined by pieces that had impacted on my life, with a personal story attached to each. With the exception of some barbershop music, it was entirely classical which seems to have caused some sniffiness in some quarters (what, no Bob Dylan?). Then, some years later I was asked to do Essential Classics (the podcast of which doesn’t seem still to be on BBC Sounds, but inevitably was also all classical), with the choices dictated by a series of questions they asked. For instance ‘What was the first classical record/CD you bought yourself’, to which the answer was Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater having sung it at school. Finally, and scary in a different way, was Michael Berkeley’s Private Passions, because – although I think of it as the classical equivalent of Desert Island Discs but with less potentially embarrassing probing about one’s personal life – it requires more ability to talk sensibly about the actual music as opposed to what it stands for in one’s life. Choices were therefore going to be dictated by wishing to have a spread of music genres (albeit still classical), but also ones I could defend, as it were.  I think I survived, but I do know of at least one very public figure who will not participate because of their lack of confidence about their musical competence, and I can understand why.

If your taste in music is grunge, garage, punk or heavy metal, this post may not be for you, but what follows is my playlist for troubled times and why I’ve chosen it.

Let’s start with a few pieces around the theme of Nature (as with DiDinato), beginning with a couple involving swans, but not the famous piece by Saint Saens written for double bass.

1 Jean Sibelius 5th Symphony. Sibelius is not to everyone’s taste, but the French horn motif in the final movement is supposed to have been inspired by watching whooper swans in flight. I have always thought of the motif as this beauty of flying swans with outspread oscillating wings, although I have seen it described as meant to mimic the call of the swans (I’ve never heard a whooper call, though I have occasionally seen them wintering in the UK, so I can’t readily comment on any mimicry.). To me, it is an uplifting movement, with a sense of purpose but also continuity and endurance. Definitely all things we need to hold on to right now.

2 Cantus Arcticus, a Concerto for birds and orchestra by another Finnish composer, Einojuhani Rautavaara, again with its final movement (Swans Migrating) also celebrating whooper swans. This is a piece of music that has only recently crossed my path, and what makes it so special is the overlaying of recordings of the cries of birds, including the swans, on top of the orchestral music . It is a magnificent, haunting combination. Stuck as I am in Cambridge (although not close enough to the flooded Ouse Washes to go and look for the whoopers), the implicit wildness appeals and cheers.

3 Ma Vlast, and specifically Vltava, also known by its English name The Moldau, the river that flows through Prague, by Bedřich Smetana. This movement beautifully conveys the fizzing eddies of fast flowing water. I learned years ago, when working in my gap year in the Lake District, how much I found staring at tumbling water soothing. Sadly, the Cam in Cambridge is a staid and boring river, the only turbulence to be found at the locks. I’ve tried watching the churning foam there, but it tends to be full of rubbish including the odd shopping trolley, and it doesn’t have at all the same effect. Staring at my local river does nothing for my soul, so I will have to make do with this musical evocation.

4 Fingal’s Cave, also known as The Hebrides Overture, by Felix Mendelssohn. A river anyhow is but a poor relation of a wild sea. Staring at the waves crashing on a beach or rocky promontory – or washing in and out of a cave – is even more satisfying to me than a tumbling beck or waterfall. Fingal’s Cave represents this par excellence. Sadly, not only is Cambridge located on a very unexciting river, it’s almost as far from any beach as anywhere can be in England. There can be no nipping off for some calming sea-watching in these uncalm days. I last saw the sea almost a year ago, and that is far, far too long. So, in the meantime, some musical images to conjure up the sensations are required. I could have chosen Storm from the Sea Interludes from Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes or Elgar’s Sea Pictures, which is more restful – all have their place in my playlist for watery memories. Indeed, I suspect I could construct an entire playlist based on music associated with water.

5 The Spring Sonata, for violin and piano, by Ludwig van Beethoven. While we wait for both the literal spring and the metaphorical vaccine-induced spring to arrive, this is a piece of music to make one smile and feel full of the energy I’m sure many of us feel we’ve lost, or at least mislaid. A feel-good piece, its name is, however, not due to Beethoven, so perhaps one should treat its place in Nature’s firmament with some circumspection. It therefore serves as an excellent bridge to the less programmatic music on my playlist. I may say DiDonato chose Gustav Mahler’s 3rd symphony to evoke the ideas of birds and mountains. It may shock some of my readers to know, but Mahler and I don’t mix; never would he appear on any playlist of mine.

6 Johann Sebastian Bach’s St Matthew Passion. Given that the whole work runs to just under three hours, if I simply wanted quick refreshment, the last chorus is an obvious choice. Bach, of course, was deeply devout. Based on this alone, it clearly isn’t true that ‘the devil has all the best tunes’, a view that seems to have originated with 18th century Methodists. For Bach, his faith was central to the music he wrote. However, one doesn’t have to be religious to be uplifted by the music and, on this list, I could have happily placed a range of different religious music to give me that boost: Bach’s B Minor Mass, Mozart’s C Minor Mass and his Requiem, or Verdi’s Requiem  or Brahms Deutsches Requiem. The Dies Irae in the Verdi is enough to wake anyone up if they’re feeling down and out. These are all works I have sung and been moved by, all stirring strong memories of better times. (Although, to be honest, the performance of the B Minor was definitely substandard, with a second tier and under-rehearsed grouping, even if the setting was the magnificent Wren church of St James’ Piccadilly.)

7 The Vespers of 1610 by Claudio Monteverdi, always known colloquially in my family as the Montevespers, but more formally known as the Vespro della Beata Vergine. When I was a teenager this relatively early music was suddenly creating waves, and period instruments were beginning to be used. In my first term as an undergraduate, being a female undergraduate at a time when we represented less than 10% of the student population, we were in great demand to sing in the (men’s) college choirs, and therefore had the pick of them. I was delighted to spot early on that Christ’s College were planning on singing these Vespers and immediately signed up. They are totally distinct from the other, later masses and requiems I’ve identified, not least in their startlingly different accompaniment by brass and strings plus organ rather than a full orchestra, and ten soloists. Designed for a church where soloists could be placed away from the main choir to give effects of echo and dialogue, it still strikes me as a work like no other. A brassy boost to stimulate me.

8 Staying with a small group of instruments, next up is Antonin Dvorak’s 2nd Piano Quintet. Although I’d always been familiar with the symphonies (one of my earliest concert memories is of Dvorak’s New World Symphony in London’s Central Hall when I was still at primary school) I came to his delicate smaller scale works much later. I love this quintet which, like Beethoven’s Spring Sonata, feels ebullient and outgoing. Just the thing for a dark winter’s day.

9 Johannes Brahms String Sextet No 1 in B flat major is another chamber work, but more sombre and mellifluous than bouncy. As a former viola player, I respond to the texture of having two violas giving depth in the middle register. I have something of a love-hate relationship with Brahms, possibly the after-effect of attempting to play one of his clarinet sonatas (transcribed for viola) and failing to understand it musically at all, but – as with the Deutsches Requiem and this (and the second sextet too) ­– some of his music strikes me as sublime. Thoughtful, calming and equally a good listen for these short days when sombre and mellifluous can seem a good combination.

10 Symphony No 5 by Ralph Vaughan Williams. I was brought up in a family where Vaughan Williams was regarded with huge admiration, by a mother and grandmother who had sung with him in the the Three Choirs Festival, but for whom wider English music was also part of their bread and butter: Elgar, Butterworth, Parry, Holst and so on. My playlist has to include some of this sort of music. I toyed with including Elgar’s Overture Cockaigne, a perky piece I equate with the street sellers’ scene in Lionel Bart’s Oliver, but in the end went for something allegedly more pastoral. For all the sense of a countryside idyll, this symphony was written in the run up to the Second World War. It was, perhaps, written as a seeking for peace and hope, when times were bad, so it seems an appropriate final choice in this list.

My choice of music is obviously idiosyncratic, based on my musical experiences as well as the rest of my life, but thinking positively about the joy that music can bring, whatever your taste or preferred idiom, seems a constructive thing to do while waiting for vaccine roll out and an ultimate defeat of the scourge of Covid19. May you find peace as 2021 gets under way.

 

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That Was the Year That Was

Posted on December 29, 2020 by Athene Donald

2020 is a year we are all likely to want to forget, and yet it is likely to be unforgettable. Some can make a little joke about that

For others, such as renowned professor of primary health care Trisha Greenhalgh, frequently in our news feeds, there is nothing remotely funny to celebrate. Her tweet was so poignant it stuck in the mind (but I don’t include the full tweet, which included a photograph, as that seemed too intrusive):

Goodbye Mum.
You died of Covid-19, days before you were due to be vaccinated.
You told them to give the ventilator to someone else.
I said a FaceTime farewell from a hospital car park.
You will have a Zoom funeral.
You are 2020.

Thanks to the devoted, exhausted #NHS staff.
— Trisha Greenhalgh

For all of us, life has been totally upended. It takes time and effort to think of anything good that has come out of this pandemic year. Highpoints for me include

  • During the first lockdown, being able to walk down the middle of what is normally an incessantly busy Huntingdon Road. Walking not on the pavement was a good way to keep 2m+ away from any other walkers, although initially (when we were only allowed to exercise once a day) these were almost as thin on the ground as cars. This road – one of the main arterial roads in Cambridge, passing the historic centre of power at Castle Mound and thence north, a road of great importance through the centuries ­– was busy even when I was an undergraduate. Indeed, it was an even more dangerous road to cycle along then than now. In my undergraduate days there were no such things as cycle lanes, and no M11 or A14 acting as a quasi-bypass. Juggernaut lorries hurtled past us Girtonians, pedalling furiously for a 9am lecture (sixdays a week, I should stress,  for Natural Scientists like myself).
  • Seeing both a fox and a muntjac deer strolling around outside my windows in the College grounds when everywhere was so quiet. The muntjac turned up several times within a week, then was never seen again, presumably because traffic (foot or car) built up again to keep it where it normally lives. Foxes abound in the vicinity, they just don’t usually turn up a few feet from the window, or walk along the garden wall in broad daylight, probably hoping to come across some hapless bird’s nest.IMG_2388
  • The return of the majority of the students in October. Whereas a few had stayed throughout the summer, for a variety of reasons, the College felt incredibly quiet – no doubt contributing to the freedom with which the wildlife strolled around. But it was heartening when there was more of a buzz, despite all the necessary constraints. Who knows what will happen next? We await ‘instructions’ from the Government.

That’s not a great deal to celebrate at a personal level for an entire year, but for me – as for almost all the population I’d presume – it has been a bleak and miserable year, even if not (I’m one of the lucky ones) personally actively distressing. The pandemic has wreaked havoc with all our lives, ending some, shattering others; disrupting a generation of school children’s education, destroying businesses and jobs and wellbeing. Family ties are weakened when you cannot meet, friendships are put on ice. Some loved one’s faces will never be seen again.

You could argue it has been a good year for science – except ‘following the science’ is more a slogan than an instruction in some parts of our politicians’ brains. Nevertheless scientists, from epidemiologists to pharmacists, from modellers to public health experts, have been much in demand by the voracious media wanting to understand what is happening and what is likely to happen next. As Jim Al Khalili recently discussed, many scientists have willingly stepped up to the mark to talk about their work and the underlying concepts that are so important if we are to understand this virus and get it under control. But politicians not only literally have the purse strings, they also have control of what policies get implemented for good or ill. One great scientist, even thousands of them, are not going to solve the problem in the absence of leadership of the sort Jacinda Ardern has demonstrated, and 2021 looks set to start off at least as badly as much of 2020 in the UK.

Will the current generation of schoolchildren all grow up with a burning ambition to be scientists? Many arts and humanities scholars would argue that the Government has been pushing them into STEM for years, but it is possible that COVID19 will instil a desire to understand diseases and wider scientific matters even more effectively. Alternatively, will it encourage students to think more about public health, the burdens that cramped housing put upon the disadvantaged reinforcing inequality in our society, or the policies that would be required to make it conceivable for Test and Trace to work and for all contacted to be able to afford to stay in self-isolation as long as they should? These social issues are equally fundamental if a future virus is not to run rampant in the same way, or ever be allowed to get a good grip in our population in the first place.

On the other hand, perhaps these children and young adults will instead want to turn to hedonism (think 1920s society and its ‘decadence’), to spend all the money they’ve been saving over the past year or simply focus on simple things such as caring, family and friends. But there is a long time to go – deep into 2021 I fear – before anything even starts to settle down. The choices the next generation will make will remain obscure for some time to come. The choices the current political leadership are making, on the other hand, are obvious now and will reverberate for years.

 

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Memories of Trains

Posted on December 23, 2020 by Athene Donald

What a rubbish year this has been, on different fronts. We are in a far worse state than could conceivably have been imagined this time last year and, the start of vaccinations apart, there is little light visible to cheer us up over our rather solitary – given last minute Government instruction – Christmases. However, I was set off in an unexpected direction yesterday, by a tweet, which distracted me for a little while from the gloom and doom.

The tweet took me to a brief video montage (which can be found on You-tube) of passengers at London railway stations in the 1950’s and ‘60’s. The London in which I grew up; the stations I occasionally got taken to, in order to meet family or to head off to see them. These sights from the clips seemed very familiar (although I don’t think I ever went to Fenchurch Street). There were some striking observations:

  • The pollution. It is easy to think ‘nostalgia’ when thinking of steam trains, but stations were filthy places. The grime of a Kings Cross or St Pancras has long been swept away by generations of modernisation, but the air must have been foul. But then, these were the days of pea-soupers, so probably it all seemed quite natural. I certainly remember regularly walking to primary school in thick fog, and also returning from one summer holiday to find the coal fires had been replaced with gas, sometime after the 1956 Clean Air Act.
  • The clothes. A woman in a most peculiar hat particularly struck me, probably because I feel I can remember my mother in something very similar. However, most women I spotted with something on their heads in the videos were wearing headscarves, something else my mother certainly wore, as I did too, up till I was in my early teens, I would guess, and discarded them. No woolly ski hats common yet for men or women. I was surprised how few of the men were wearing hats, trilby’s in particular, no doubt because both my father and my grandfather always did, so that it seemed ‘normal’.
  • The (lack of) health and safety. In those days many, possibly most, of the trains had carriages for 8 or perhaps 10 people, with doors that opened straight onto the outside world, although increasingly designs were changing so that they led into a corridor running along the length of a carriage. Doors that could be opened simply with a handle, no waiting for the driver to press a safety switch once the train had come to a complete stop. Consequently, the clips showed many passengers had doors open as they came into a station and people alighting while the train was still moving.
    On London buses, likewise, one could hop on and off when in motion, and passengers did just that frequently. I can remember a school friend turning up at my house bruised and battered having fallen down when they timed that wrong. Even worse, I can remember opening a door of a train (when returning to Cambridge from London, so this would have been in the early ‘70’s) expecting it to be into a corridor, only to find it went straight outside. The train was going at speed. Luckily, I got myself in again safely and managed to pull the door shut, or I would not be writing this blogpost. Another passenger helpfully remarked I needed to be more careful, but otherwise I don’t remember much alarm being expressed by anyone, myself included. Health and safety gone mad is a useful derogatory phrase, but sometimes there is some point to it.

Glenfinnan Viaduct.jpg

CC BY-SA 2.5, Link

But of course, once one starts reminiscing and looking things up on Wikipedia (prompted, in this case, by that video) inevitably memories take one into strange places. Steam trains – Hogwart’s Express – Glenfinnan Viaduct, where the iconic footage was taken for the Harry Potter films, as well as the photograph shown here – and hence to memories of several holidays in Glenfinnan in the early-mid 1960’s. There I can visualise my father and grandfather, of course in their trilby’s providing little protection against the endless rain, my mother and I in headscarves (but not, I think, my sister). No steam trains on the West Highland line by then, it was diesels between Fort William and Mallaig, a trip we would make regularly. The line was single track – just as was the so-called ‘road to the isles’, with infrequent passing places making for hair-raising trips by car – and I was fascinated by the ease with which driver and station manager would exchange tokens between platform and moving train to demonstrate the line ahead was clear and safe to enter.  Was I thinking with my nascent physicist’s mind about relative velocity when watching this transaction? At 10, I rather doubt it.

I have vague memories of a haunting story of a horse and cart falling into a pillar of the Glenfinnan Viaduct during construction. In my childhood memory I associated a man driving that cart as falling in too. A quick Google shows that the story in outline is true, but in fact it did not occur at Glenfinnan (but at the Loch Nan Uamh viaduct nearer Mallaig) and no man seems to have been involved. The wonders of careful scientific experiment in 2001, using radio waves to penetrate several feet of stone, managed to locate the horse’s skeleton and so corroborate the basic story.

Occasionally, returning from a day out in Mallaig, we would indulge – at the exorbitant sum of 2/6d, if I recall correctly – in sitting in the Observation Car, a great treat to give us panoramic views of the hills, perhaps the occasional deer or buzzard (however hard we tried to turn them into golden eagles). Rhododendrons had not yet taken over the hillsides. However, that is inaccurate. We took the train to Mallaig, not to spend the day there walking around smelling the kippers, a key industry at the time (sorry to mention fish at this delicate time in Brexit negotiations), but to catch boats to the Inner Hebrides. As far as I was concerned, the rougher the weather the better in these little vessels, although lashing rain could make it unpleasant and hard to focus on the birdlife we wanted to look at.

Twitter is a wonderful way to waste time, useful though it can also be, not least because of all the rabbit holes down which one can disappear, on this occasion prompted by that cliché Memory Lane. Still, we need good memories to get us through the current darkness and so I shall hold on to them while I wait for life, eventually, to return to something one might imagine one could call normal.

 

 

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Why Unicorns Aren’t the Answer

Posted on December 15, 2020 by Athene Donald

I’ve railed against pinkification, and the ‘gift of pink’ in the past – especially at this time of year when presents, notably toys and clothes, are to the fore for Christmas purchase. I hadn’t realised that books, too, come with gender neatly attached from an early age, not just toys and clothes. Amazon at least wants to direct grandparents like myself to different pages, and different sorts of books, depending on whether your grandchild is born with one X chromosome or two. It’s bad enough that they do it at all, worse when you look at their suggestions. Just as advertisements for toys stress power and battle for boys, magic and love for girls, there is something of a similar divide when it comes to books.  On the front page of suggestions for five year old girls you can find out a surprising amount about unicorns, as well as Fantastically Great Women who Changed the World and also a book about girls who like to fart and short stories to develop ‘girls’ confidence, friendship and happiness’. Quite a lot of the stories on this front page do have female protagonists. The only book I can spot in common in the boys’ and girls’ lists is The Witch’s Cat and The Cooking Catastrophe: A fantastical tale of magic, mischief and mishap! Good that boys are directed towards cooking too, even if only to prove that cooking doesn’t always work out right.
unicorn(I’d like to caption this book cover ‘how not to be a girl’ since cuddling a non-existent animal does not appear to me to provide any useful life-skills. It’s not even a very good rendition of a unicorn, which is what it purports to be on the cover of the book.)

However, boys of this same age, also get offered books relating to poo, a detective dog and several joke books.  But, as a scientist, what I find most disturbing is that the boys – but only them – also get offered some books undoubtedly aimed at a kid who wants to learn more about the world around them, with a book on planets and another on discovery. Why are these not deemed suitable for girls? What is it that prompts Amazon to segregate books in this way?

I’d been mulling this topic for a couple of days, without getting beyond writing a few lines, but today’s release of the Fawcett Society’s Report of the Commission on Gender Stereotypes in Early Childhood, Unlimited Potential, really brings home the dangers implicit in such segregation. Their report highlights that booksellers are not particularly bad in the way they segregate their offers (at least not compared with toyshops and clothing, Amazon apart as they specifically mention), but the actual content of the books is more of an issue. A child is, according to the Report, 1.6 times more likely to read a book with a male lead, and seven times more likely to read about a male villain than a female one. I’m not really in favour of encouraging girls to break the law, but a bit of rule-bending never came amiss during growing up, so girls need to know they can do that just as well as the boy next door. Why do we need to divide a messy world so neatly into this binary distinction?

The report spells out many areas in which this divide impacts on child development and growth. This isn’t simply a case of some snotty female scientist on her usual high horse making a fuss, the fact that boys aren’t encouraged to talk about their feelings or cry when they are hurt – morally or physically – would seem directly to feed into the higher suicide rate amongst young men than women. Girls on the other hand, with their steers towards worrying about their bodies more than their brains are the ones to suffer eating disorders as their body changes shape and they start hitting the mating game. These aren’t healthy directions for boys or girls, men or women. Right now, when conditions around the pandemic mean that well-being is more than ever on our lips and in our minds, we should recognize the problems our society creates for all, with their roots starting in the earliest years.

Booksellers are just a bit-player in this context in our society, representing only a small part of the delivery of messages relating to how our young grow up facing the world. The Fawcett Society make it clear the overall responsibilities are shared amongst many. A particular finger is pointed at the Department for Education (DfE) to do more to support practitioners, through training and CPD, to counter stereotypes in the classroom. Teachers are apparently supportive of this, even of there being regulatory oversight to check it happens. Another recommendation is that those professions associated with early years’ care and teaching should have their status raised through appropriate pay, training and qualifications for their workforce. If girls in nurseries weren’t directed to the dolls and boys to the bricks then who knows what changes would be consequent in later years? Story book publishers and educational resources are encouraged to make sure gender stereotypes are not reinforced, with challenges provided in their pages to prevailing norms.

The DfE is also recommended to pilot interventions to see ‘what works’ in countering stereotypes, so that those that do can be rolled out more widely. It certainly isn’t sufficient to focus attention solely on secondary schools – as, for instance, is often done both in the UK and their equivalent in the USA – for instance to try to get more girls into physics. The evidence is that ideas about what is ‘possible’ for girls and boys set in extremely early, as in the study which showed that by age 6-7 girls believe that it’s boys who are ‘really, really smart’ not girls, and consequently they avoid games that require the smarts. Interventions must start early. At home, in the media, through play and, of course, through every interaction with both their parents and other adults, children learn what their place in the world is, or at least seems to need to be.

If we want all our children to develop their full potential, lead rich lives, and feel able to express their emotions, their creativity and their imagination across the full gamut of human endeavour, we need to stop putting them in gender strait-jackets. Our Christmas gifts should reflect our own diversity and our dreams for them to become exactly the person they were born to be, not the one society imposes on them.

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