I'm starting to think that all the statistical mumbo-jumbo that spews out of press release orifices of government and non-government might actually be of use, if only in that it can give me the hook for an article. Following on from the recent purchasing power revelation (it's down in the Balearics, despite economic recovery), there's another one of a consumer nature. Most of the Barclaycard-IESE (business school) report into consumer spending over the years of crisis was as you would have expected - huge falls in purchases of jewellery, furniture, household goods, for example - but it was the item for the greatest increase in spend which caught the attention. Up by 37% over the period from 2007 to 2014 was what was being forked out for education. It seems an extraordinary rise, especially given that the next highest rise (of 21%) was for utilities, and they were subject to steep increases in certain instances anyway, e.g. electricity, while internet provision would surely have played a part in higher telecommunications spend.
In third place was a 13% increase in health spending. Taken with that on education, a conclusion that might be drawn - and it's probably an accurate one - was that the public was fearful about cuts to public provision of the two sectors that consume far more of regional authorities' budgets than anything else: in the Balearics, health and education account for not far short of 80% of everything the government spends in a year.
But if we take the 13% on health to be a reflection of an increase in private health insurance, then perhaps we could have expected a similar sort of increase in spend on private schooling, but no, the figure was significantly greater.
Not all the 37% would have been on private schooling, as there would have been a fair amount going on training courses and higher education, but a goodly sum would have been going towards schools, and in looking for clues as to why, there are some lurking in the latest survey of opinions regarding education in the Balearics undertaken by the Gadeso research foundation.
Unsurprisingly, the survey reveals that overwhelmingly there are beliefs that education is vital for future job prospects and that education shouldn't be considered an expense but an investment in the future. It depends as ever, however, on who it is doing the investing, and herein, one suspects, lies the rub of that increased educational spending.
There was a perception, a fairly widely held one, that in the Bauzá years of crisis, there was a deliberate but unstated policy to drive parents towards the private sector. Though education spending remained comparatively high, there were cutbacks to education, and on top of these was all the fuss that was to break out over language policy. Allied to this was the far greater and regular attention that media circles were paying to performance of the Balearic public education system. The news was almost invariably less than positive.
The Gadeso survey shows that there is a continuing decline in satisfaction with this system. It also shows that it is believed that the system does not adequately address the needs of the workplace and that there is under-investment.
Put all this lot together, throw in the awareness of the need for a good education, and the greatly increased private spending on education over the years of crisis is understandable.
The survey doesn't particularly lay any blame with problems with the education system on the teachers. There is a concern about teacher motivation, but this can be taken as a consequence of a variety of things: lack of investment, the trilingual teaching (TIL) debacle, cutbacks. In fact, there is support for the teachers and their continuing to put pressure on the government. A majority of those surveyed believe that the decision not to call off the indefinite strike (or the possibility of taking strike action) is right.
But the teachers do need to be taken to task, some of them at any rate, and to be questioned about an ongoing struggle for power between the established unions and the Assemblea de Docents, the teachers' assembly. The unions seem inclined to accept that it is time to call off the strike and to be willing to give the new government a chance: the government is, after all, appointing over 350 additional teachers. The Assemblea isn't willing, and so threatens to kill at birth the government's desire for a grand "pact" to address and seek to solve the problems of the Balearic education system once and for all.
The survey does provide some clues as to why there was that huge increase in private spending on education, but it might also provide clues as to why this spending will continue. Until all parties come together and genuinely do create a pact for improvement, the dissatisfaction and underperformance will continue.
Showing posts with label Performance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Performance. Show all posts
Friday, September 18, 2015
Thursday, May 14, 2015
The Revolving School Gate
Here are some figures for you. In the Balearics for the school year 2012-2013 there were 40,615 children registered with the public education system for infant schooling, 66,123 for primary schools and 40,728 for obligatory secondary schooling. The numbers, by comparison with some other regions of Spain, are not huge. Catalonia, for instance, had over 450,000 primary school children during the same school year, but then Catalonia is a much bigger place and has a much larger total population. The numbers, though, are not really what matters, it is quality of education that does.
The Balearics underperforms in the PISA measures of student assessment - maths, reading comprehension and sciences. PISA, the programme for international student assessment of fifteen-year-olds, consistently ranks the Balearics among the worst-performing regions of Spain along with other regular underachievers at the bottom of the class - Andalusia, Extremadura and Murcia. Not all regions participate in this assessment; the Canaries, for example. But were that region to be included, one wonders if it might not show similar underperformance to that of the Balearics.
A peculiar aspect of this performance is that the Balearics is one of Spain's wealthier regions in terms of contribution to GDP. The implication of comparative affluence should mean, by a typically assigned equation between wealth and education, that performance would be stronger. In poorer regions, such as Andalusia and Extremadura, educational underperformance is perhaps more understandable, but Andalusia (and so the Costa del Sol and other tourism regions) also faces an issue in common with the Balearics - the transitory nature of some of its school student population.
Thus far during the school year 2014-2015, almost 2,400 pupils have been removed from primary schools in the Balearics. It is lower than the figure for the previous school year - 7,000 - but it is still a substantial number. The pupils have abandoned the Balearic public education system because their families have either moved to a different part of Spain or abroad. These include Spanish (Mallorcan) families and those from other countries, who have gone in search of better employment prospects or have simply decided to go back home. At the same time, however, the Balearics is one of only two regions to show a slight increase in total population - workers and their families continue to come to the island for tourism employment or in the hope of a better life.
Before the economic crisis hit, inward population movement was of such a level that the school population rose substantially. This created all manner of difficulties: finding space for the pupils and also being able to deliver an adequate standard of education. Despite the slowdown that crisis brought about, the Balearics still has an inordinately high number of foreign pupils. The national average is 9%. In the Balearics it is 19%. This percentage, though, is regularly shifting in terms of its components. There is, if you like, a constantly revolving school gate of pupils coming in and going out, mostly all of them originally from elsewhere in Spain or from abroad.
The strains and difficulties that this turnover create should not be underestimated. Generally, and although the teaching profession in the Balearics does not seek to use it as an excuse or as meaning that school "failure" is inevitable, researchers at the university in Palma question whether the public education system is capable of compensating for the disadvantages that can be faced by foreign pupils and whether indeed the system is "truly inclusive and promotes educational equality". Though it is not always wise to take anecdotal evidence as proof, I have heard from parents of foreign pupils who imply that their children are not discriminated against by teachers so much as not treated with adequate respect and seriousness and so not granted sufficient attention to their needs. These anecdotes may, though, lend support to what the university researchers are saying. (By way of balance, it should be noted that there are anecdotes which suggest the opposite.)
When one weighs all the factors up, it isn't perhaps surprising that overall educational performance is as low as it is. What isn't revealed by the researchers' studies is the contribution that foreign pupils make to a lowering of general performance (though statistics on repeating might well give a clue), but regardless of this, there are still 81% of pupils who find themselves in a system that underperforms. The shifting school population is surely a factor in this underperformance but only one.
Balearic governments do not help the situation by their movement of linguistic goalposts, but then nor - some of the time - do the teachers. LOMCE, the national law for improving educational qualities, has its many critics, but if its fundamental objective is improvement, why are teachers in the Balearics going on strike on 19 May in opposition to testing that is being introduced for third-grade primary schoolchildren?
The Balearics underperforms in the PISA measures of student assessment - maths, reading comprehension and sciences. PISA, the programme for international student assessment of fifteen-year-olds, consistently ranks the Balearics among the worst-performing regions of Spain along with other regular underachievers at the bottom of the class - Andalusia, Extremadura and Murcia. Not all regions participate in this assessment; the Canaries, for example. But were that region to be included, one wonders if it might not show similar underperformance to that of the Balearics.
A peculiar aspect of this performance is that the Balearics is one of Spain's wealthier regions in terms of contribution to GDP. The implication of comparative affluence should mean, by a typically assigned equation between wealth and education, that performance would be stronger. In poorer regions, such as Andalusia and Extremadura, educational underperformance is perhaps more understandable, but Andalusia (and so the Costa del Sol and other tourism regions) also faces an issue in common with the Balearics - the transitory nature of some of its school student population.
Thus far during the school year 2014-2015, almost 2,400 pupils have been removed from primary schools in the Balearics. It is lower than the figure for the previous school year - 7,000 - but it is still a substantial number. The pupils have abandoned the Balearic public education system because their families have either moved to a different part of Spain or abroad. These include Spanish (Mallorcan) families and those from other countries, who have gone in search of better employment prospects or have simply decided to go back home. At the same time, however, the Balearics is one of only two regions to show a slight increase in total population - workers and their families continue to come to the island for tourism employment or in the hope of a better life.
Before the economic crisis hit, inward population movement was of such a level that the school population rose substantially. This created all manner of difficulties: finding space for the pupils and also being able to deliver an adequate standard of education. Despite the slowdown that crisis brought about, the Balearics still has an inordinately high number of foreign pupils. The national average is 9%. In the Balearics it is 19%. This percentage, though, is regularly shifting in terms of its components. There is, if you like, a constantly revolving school gate of pupils coming in and going out, mostly all of them originally from elsewhere in Spain or from abroad.
The strains and difficulties that this turnover create should not be underestimated. Generally, and although the teaching profession in the Balearics does not seek to use it as an excuse or as meaning that school "failure" is inevitable, researchers at the university in Palma question whether the public education system is capable of compensating for the disadvantages that can be faced by foreign pupils and whether indeed the system is "truly inclusive and promotes educational equality". Though it is not always wise to take anecdotal evidence as proof, I have heard from parents of foreign pupils who imply that their children are not discriminated against by teachers so much as not treated with adequate respect and seriousness and so not granted sufficient attention to their needs. These anecdotes may, though, lend support to what the university researchers are saying. (By way of balance, it should be noted that there are anecdotes which suggest the opposite.)
When one weighs all the factors up, it isn't perhaps surprising that overall educational performance is as low as it is. What isn't revealed by the researchers' studies is the contribution that foreign pupils make to a lowering of general performance (though statistics on repeating might well give a clue), but regardless of this, there are still 81% of pupils who find themselves in a system that underperforms. The shifting school population is surely a factor in this underperformance but only one.
Balearic governments do not help the situation by their movement of linguistic goalposts, but then nor - some of the time - do the teachers. LOMCE, the national law for improving educational qualities, has its many critics, but if its fundamental objective is improvement, why are teachers in the Balearics going on strike on 19 May in opposition to testing that is being introduced for third-grade primary schoolchildren?
Tuesday, March 24, 2015
Lousy Review, Less Pay
Once upon a time, employees would be assessed only by their managers. This was the traditional performance appraisal, an often worthless exercise if, as happened to me on one occasion, it was conducted over a lunch at which the boss, a couple of pre-lunch G&Ts on board followed by a whole bottle of wine to himself, forgot why we were having lunch.
Other systems of appraisal were introduced. There was the upward feedback. Staff could assess the manager, a process which had inherent risks. If Employee A didn't like Manager B, then Manager B could well get a bum assessment. But the purveyors of appraisal systems would insist that these systems would filter out such subjectivity without ever truly convincing everyone that they did, and this was also the case when so-called 360-degree feedback became popular. Anyone could have his or her say. Customers, suppliers, colleagues: they could all have a pop.
These systems weren't of course a free-for-all. Bias was ironed out as much as possible. They wouldn't have been effective or have become as widespread as they did had they just been means of expressing dislike. But they were something of a culture shock for employees or managers who were to discover that there were a number of "stakeholders" whose assessment of performance fell some way short of how the employee or manager would have assessed his or her own performance.
These broader systems of appraisal were all part of a wider culture shock, that of changes to organisations' culture and their ways of doing things. By subjecting personnel to closer scrutiny by these different stakeholders, performance would improve and do so in line with new cultures that were more open to the needs of customers and others.
Into this appraisal mix came technology, and now there is the technology of social media. Customers can have their say like never before, and certain businesses are embracing this customer voice in their assessment of individuals' performance. Comments on Trip Advisor and similar websites are now being used to determine just how much people get paid.
Since the explosion of social media and review and comments' sites in particular, a whole industry of online reputation management has grown up. ReviewPro is one of the leading examples of this monitoring, and its Spanish division works with a whole host of hotel chains. Look at its clients and very familiar names appear: Meliá, Iberostar, Viva and so on.
Meliá is said to be one of the pioneers of using customer comments as part of a quality system through which performance can be measured and remuneration adjusted. Variable pay is partially determined on the basis of these comments; variable pay meaning performance pay, i.e. meeting and exceeding personal and company performance targets. At Meliá, this pay can apparently equate to as much as 20% of overall remuneration, so there is a strong incentive for management to ensure that customer satisfaction is high and also to respond in a thoughtful fashion to any negative comments.
The underlying philosophy is or should be obvious. Customers are at the heart of everything Meliá does, as is the case with any hotel chain. But how well this philosophy is understood by other chains or within Mallorca's tourism industry as a whole is open to some debate. Even among the clients that ReviewPro has, there are individual hotels which are part of certain chains that receive numerous negative comments and little or no response from management.
From surveys that Trip Advisor has done, it has been shown that responding to comments, both negative and positive, is as powerful as the comment itself. Yet, too often there are no responses and when there are they are standard ones issued not by, say, the hotel's director but by someone with a vague public relations job title.
As with any system of appraisal, using online comments is probably not foolproof. There is greater scope through social media for biased or malicious assessments than there ever was with more traditional appraisal methods. There is also the potential, once it becomes widely known that pay is directly being influenced, for online blackmail, something which does already occur. But then this is something for devisers of systems to take account of.
In principle, using customer comments is a very good tool for chains to not just monitor management and hotel performance but also to improve it as part of ongoing quality management systems. It should, therefore, be far more widely adopted by the Mallorcan tourism industry which, despite criticisms of standards, is using other methods to improve quality, the SICTED system of quality being one of them.
But there are limits to how useful such a tool is. Many negative comments stem not from poor management at specific hotels but from a lack of investment by chains which leave hotels open to such negativity.
Other systems of appraisal were introduced. There was the upward feedback. Staff could assess the manager, a process which had inherent risks. If Employee A didn't like Manager B, then Manager B could well get a bum assessment. But the purveyors of appraisal systems would insist that these systems would filter out such subjectivity without ever truly convincing everyone that they did, and this was also the case when so-called 360-degree feedback became popular. Anyone could have his or her say. Customers, suppliers, colleagues: they could all have a pop.
These systems weren't of course a free-for-all. Bias was ironed out as much as possible. They wouldn't have been effective or have become as widespread as they did had they just been means of expressing dislike. But they were something of a culture shock for employees or managers who were to discover that there were a number of "stakeholders" whose assessment of performance fell some way short of how the employee or manager would have assessed his or her own performance.
These broader systems of appraisal were all part of a wider culture shock, that of changes to organisations' culture and their ways of doing things. By subjecting personnel to closer scrutiny by these different stakeholders, performance would improve and do so in line with new cultures that were more open to the needs of customers and others.
Into this appraisal mix came technology, and now there is the technology of social media. Customers can have their say like never before, and certain businesses are embracing this customer voice in their assessment of individuals' performance. Comments on Trip Advisor and similar websites are now being used to determine just how much people get paid.
Since the explosion of social media and review and comments' sites in particular, a whole industry of online reputation management has grown up. ReviewPro is one of the leading examples of this monitoring, and its Spanish division works with a whole host of hotel chains. Look at its clients and very familiar names appear: Meliá, Iberostar, Viva and so on.
Meliá is said to be one of the pioneers of using customer comments as part of a quality system through which performance can be measured and remuneration adjusted. Variable pay is partially determined on the basis of these comments; variable pay meaning performance pay, i.e. meeting and exceeding personal and company performance targets. At Meliá, this pay can apparently equate to as much as 20% of overall remuneration, so there is a strong incentive for management to ensure that customer satisfaction is high and also to respond in a thoughtful fashion to any negative comments.
The underlying philosophy is or should be obvious. Customers are at the heart of everything Meliá does, as is the case with any hotel chain. But how well this philosophy is understood by other chains or within Mallorca's tourism industry as a whole is open to some debate. Even among the clients that ReviewPro has, there are individual hotels which are part of certain chains that receive numerous negative comments and little or no response from management.
From surveys that Trip Advisor has done, it has been shown that responding to comments, both negative and positive, is as powerful as the comment itself. Yet, too often there are no responses and when there are they are standard ones issued not by, say, the hotel's director but by someone with a vague public relations job title.
As with any system of appraisal, using online comments is probably not foolproof. There is greater scope through social media for biased or malicious assessments than there ever was with more traditional appraisal methods. There is also the potential, once it becomes widely known that pay is directly being influenced, for online blackmail, something which does already occur. But then this is something for devisers of systems to take account of.
In principle, using customer comments is a very good tool for chains to not just monitor management and hotel performance but also to improve it as part of ongoing quality management systems. It should, therefore, be far more widely adopted by the Mallorcan tourism industry which, despite criticisms of standards, is using other methods to improve quality, the SICTED system of quality being one of them.
But there are limits to how useful such a tool is. Many negative comments stem not from poor management at specific hotels but from a lack of investment by chains which leave hotels open to such negativity.
Sunday, August 28, 2011
The Mayoral Wonga
How much should a mayor be paid do you suppose? To answer the question you have to know what he or she does exactly, which admittedly isn't easy to get a handle on. A mayor does a lot of signing of things, puts in any number of appearances around and about, shakes a fair number of hands, chairs a few meetings, gets his or her photo taken pretty much every day.
There is a bit more to it than this and the mayor, more or less, is responsible for however many lives there are on his or her manor. It might be said, therefore, that a mayor should command a decent pay packet.
The question as to the mayoral salary has become an issue in Sa Pobla. Here the new mayor, Gabriel Serra, admitted a while back that the town hall was to, all intents and purposes, bust. Against this background and a further admission that the town hall will invest in no building works at all other than to perform urgent maintenance, the opposition's claim in early July that the mayor was going to be trousering nearly 4,400 euros a month did cause a slight rumpus. Assuming this entails 14 monthly payments, as is the wont locally, then Serra was due to be on over 60 grand a year.
Sa Pobla, it might be noted, is a smaller municipality than its neighbour Alcúdia, a tourism town where the town hall and therefore the mayor's remit is somewhat greater than a place that exists for little more than agriculture. The lady mayor of Alcúdia, Coloma Terrasa, will receive a salary the same as her predecessor - 2,100 euros net per month. On the face of it, there is something of a discrepancy with what Serra was said to have been going to be earning.
Said to be, because Serra has published his pay slip. It shows he's getting 2,137 euros net, quite a deal less than the opposition had claimed, and pretty much identical to the salary of Alcúdia's mayor. How the amount has come down by 50%, assuming it was ever intended to be nearly 4,400, one doesn't quite know, but down it has indeed come.
In Pollensa the mayor is getting 2,914 euros a month gross, which puts his take-home at roughly the same as Serra's. So the mayors of the three towns are now all making the same as each other; gross salaries, amended to take account of the two extra months in the year, of something over 40 grand.
Is this a fair amount? Is it too much, or is it too low? Who knows?
A full-time post in public service, and in the cases of Alcúdia, Pollensa and Sa Pobla, this means running towns with 19,000, 17,000 and 13,000 people respectively, should be reasonably well paid, especially if it is the only source of income. But this isn't necessarily the case of course. Many a town hall official, mayor or otherwise, tends to have business interests as well. A prime example was Muro's one-time mayor, Miguel Ramis. His interests? Well, there was the small matter of the Grupotel chain that he founded.
Ultimately, whether a mayor is worth his or her salary cheque depends on how well he or she performs, and performance can mean whatever you want it to, especially when the mayoral office is a political appointment and can count on the support of the relevant party (or parties) to ensure that performance is spun as being effective.
Yet the town halls are in financial crisis, not solely due to current economic hard times. Their tardiness in making payments to suppliers is the stuff of legend, and pre-dates economic crisis. But this should surely be a key measure of how well a town hall is being run or not. Alcúdia and Pollensa, for example, have been shown to typically take up to six months to make payments; you will hear of examples where payment has been much later (if at all).
It is when companies are faced with cash-flow crises of their own, thanks in no small part to being unpaid by municipalities, that one can understand there being some disquiet as to salaries that are paid to mayors, and not just to mayors. Full-time officials other than a mayor can expect to receive 1,800 euros per month net. And then you have the costs of town halls' personnel, which have gone through the roof since the start of the century.
A mayor can in theory be held to account. But widespread concerns exist as to a lack of transparency at town halls. Mayors, and other officials, should be made to show that they earn their money. It's a performance age, but performance as a measure has been slow to catch on in Mallorcan local government. The town halls and the mayors need to publish what they are doing, when and why they are doing whatever it is they are doing, and what they expect the results to be. Then at least we might be able to judge whether they are worth the money. And you never know, maybe this might show that they are worth more.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
There is a bit more to it than this and the mayor, more or less, is responsible for however many lives there are on his or her manor. It might be said, therefore, that a mayor should command a decent pay packet.
The question as to the mayoral salary has become an issue in Sa Pobla. Here the new mayor, Gabriel Serra, admitted a while back that the town hall was to, all intents and purposes, bust. Against this background and a further admission that the town hall will invest in no building works at all other than to perform urgent maintenance, the opposition's claim in early July that the mayor was going to be trousering nearly 4,400 euros a month did cause a slight rumpus. Assuming this entails 14 monthly payments, as is the wont locally, then Serra was due to be on over 60 grand a year.
Sa Pobla, it might be noted, is a smaller municipality than its neighbour Alcúdia, a tourism town where the town hall and therefore the mayor's remit is somewhat greater than a place that exists for little more than agriculture. The lady mayor of Alcúdia, Coloma Terrasa, will receive a salary the same as her predecessor - 2,100 euros net per month. On the face of it, there is something of a discrepancy with what Serra was said to have been going to be earning.
Said to be, because Serra has published his pay slip. It shows he's getting 2,137 euros net, quite a deal less than the opposition had claimed, and pretty much identical to the salary of Alcúdia's mayor. How the amount has come down by 50%, assuming it was ever intended to be nearly 4,400, one doesn't quite know, but down it has indeed come.
In Pollensa the mayor is getting 2,914 euros a month gross, which puts his take-home at roughly the same as Serra's. So the mayors of the three towns are now all making the same as each other; gross salaries, amended to take account of the two extra months in the year, of something over 40 grand.
Is this a fair amount? Is it too much, or is it too low? Who knows?
A full-time post in public service, and in the cases of Alcúdia, Pollensa and Sa Pobla, this means running towns with 19,000, 17,000 and 13,000 people respectively, should be reasonably well paid, especially if it is the only source of income. But this isn't necessarily the case of course. Many a town hall official, mayor or otherwise, tends to have business interests as well. A prime example was Muro's one-time mayor, Miguel Ramis. His interests? Well, there was the small matter of the Grupotel chain that he founded.
Ultimately, whether a mayor is worth his or her salary cheque depends on how well he or she performs, and performance can mean whatever you want it to, especially when the mayoral office is a political appointment and can count on the support of the relevant party (or parties) to ensure that performance is spun as being effective.
Yet the town halls are in financial crisis, not solely due to current economic hard times. Their tardiness in making payments to suppliers is the stuff of legend, and pre-dates economic crisis. But this should surely be a key measure of how well a town hall is being run or not. Alcúdia and Pollensa, for example, have been shown to typically take up to six months to make payments; you will hear of examples where payment has been much later (if at all).
It is when companies are faced with cash-flow crises of their own, thanks in no small part to being unpaid by municipalities, that one can understand there being some disquiet as to salaries that are paid to mayors, and not just to mayors. Full-time officials other than a mayor can expect to receive 1,800 euros per month net. And then you have the costs of town halls' personnel, which have gone through the roof since the start of the century.
A mayor can in theory be held to account. But widespread concerns exist as to a lack of transparency at town halls. Mayors, and other officials, should be made to show that they earn their money. It's a performance age, but performance as a measure has been slow to catch on in Mallorcan local government. The town halls and the mayors need to publish what they are doing, when and why they are doing whatever it is they are doing, and what they expect the results to be. Then at least we might be able to judge whether they are worth the money. And you never know, maybe this might show that they are worth more.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Thursday, December 09, 2010
Comprehension Lessons: Education in Mallorca
Hype, spin, fantasy. Ill-informed, wrong, misleading.
Pick any of the above. Now interpret it. Comprehend it, in other words, by using other words, and also be able to use it in context.
You are probably not a student at a secondary school in the Balearics. Were you to be, you wouldn't be much good at interpreting or comprehending. And this is not an English test. Interpretation of text, any text, is something you're pretty lousy at.
Why choose the above words? It can often be revealing to discover what is trotted out on the internet in the name of Mallorca and the Balearics, and which can be any of the above. "Fantastic." "High standards". Just two examples of what is said about education in Mallorca. You can interpret these examples as being indicative of these words. Or rather, you should interpret them thus, if, that is, you take time to look at the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) report into educational standards which is produced under the auspices of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development).
This report looks not only at national standards. In the case of Spain, it breaks them down by regions. Not all, because not all are covered, but most. In three main categories - mathematics, reading comprehension, science - the Balearics are in the bottom five. In fact, only in maths do the Balearics climb out of the bottom four, and only the Canaries and the "autonomous cities" of Ceuta and Melilla, the Spanish enclaves in Morocco, are worse than the Balearics.
Fantastic? Doesn't sound like it, does it. Of the three measures, the Balearics are below the Spanish average and, by quite some margin, the OECD average.
The findings are significant. They give a wholly different impression of educational standards than the "hype" would have it, and there is an unmistakable pattern to them. The four non-mainland parts of Spain are the worst places for children to be educated. This raises its own question. Are these places somehow disadvantaged when it comes to the provision of education? There is another possibility. Maybe they're just not very good. The teaching unions would suggest that there is a disadvantage and an inequality between regions of Spain.
If one considers economic performance and levels of wealth as indicators of advantage or disadvantage, there is something to be said for this argument. Ceuta and Melilla have the lowest GDPs of all the Spanish regions. The Balearics rank only 12th out of the 17 regions plus the two autonomous cities, but there is a very different picture when you consider GDP per head of population. The Balearics are one of the wealthier regions, up there with the big earners such as Madrid, the Basque Country and Catalonia.
Living and educational standards do not necessarily coincide, but a generally accepted principle is that the higher the standard of living, the better the education. So what's going wrong in the Balearics?
For some, the low standards being achieved will be evidence of the politics of language. Possibly so. The problems with comprehension could indeed be evidence of this, as may also be the level of immigration. But there is arguably a more important issue, and it is one that contradicts the "fantastic" image. It is one of indiscipline and poor motivation and one, moreover, which debunks the notion that higher standards of living automatically mean better education. Or better pupils at any rate.
In state schools, and one probably should distinguish between public and private education, a complaint that is made is that disruptiveness is often the product of children of the better-off. Why should this be? A reason lies with the wealth and with the knowledge that an education doesn't matter if there are over-indulgent parents who will see the kids right when they leave school. A further issue, and particularly so in coastal areas, is the lifestyle. The beach, the summer and all that goes with them are seductive in creating a laidback atmosphere. It might sound great, but not if it inculcates an attitude whereby school is an inconvenience prior to papa setting you up in a bar or the family business or your taking a job as a waiter or on a boat.
It is no coincidence that the best-performing regions are the likes of Castile-Leon and Madrid. It is also no coincidence that two other regions with strong sun-and-beach connections aren't that much better than the Balearics, namely Murcia and Andalusia.
The language of education and the constant fuss that surrounds it will probably be singled out as the reason for poor educational performance, but to do so would be to disguise other factors which may be the real reasons for this performance. Whatever the reason, interpret the words correctly and don't believe the hype.
* The findings of the report relate to 15-year-old pupils. All regions of Spain were included except for Valencia, Extremadura and Castile-La Mancha.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Pick any of the above. Now interpret it. Comprehend it, in other words, by using other words, and also be able to use it in context.
You are probably not a student at a secondary school in the Balearics. Were you to be, you wouldn't be much good at interpreting or comprehending. And this is not an English test. Interpretation of text, any text, is something you're pretty lousy at.
Why choose the above words? It can often be revealing to discover what is trotted out on the internet in the name of Mallorca and the Balearics, and which can be any of the above. "Fantastic." "High standards". Just two examples of what is said about education in Mallorca. You can interpret these examples as being indicative of these words. Or rather, you should interpret them thus, if, that is, you take time to look at the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) report into educational standards which is produced under the auspices of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development).
This report looks not only at national standards. In the case of Spain, it breaks them down by regions. Not all, because not all are covered, but most. In three main categories - mathematics, reading comprehension, science - the Balearics are in the bottom five. In fact, only in maths do the Balearics climb out of the bottom four, and only the Canaries and the "autonomous cities" of Ceuta and Melilla, the Spanish enclaves in Morocco, are worse than the Balearics.
Fantastic? Doesn't sound like it, does it. Of the three measures, the Balearics are below the Spanish average and, by quite some margin, the OECD average.
The findings are significant. They give a wholly different impression of educational standards than the "hype" would have it, and there is an unmistakable pattern to them. The four non-mainland parts of Spain are the worst places for children to be educated. This raises its own question. Are these places somehow disadvantaged when it comes to the provision of education? There is another possibility. Maybe they're just not very good. The teaching unions would suggest that there is a disadvantage and an inequality between regions of Spain.
If one considers economic performance and levels of wealth as indicators of advantage or disadvantage, there is something to be said for this argument. Ceuta and Melilla have the lowest GDPs of all the Spanish regions. The Balearics rank only 12th out of the 17 regions plus the two autonomous cities, but there is a very different picture when you consider GDP per head of population. The Balearics are one of the wealthier regions, up there with the big earners such as Madrid, the Basque Country and Catalonia.
Living and educational standards do not necessarily coincide, but a generally accepted principle is that the higher the standard of living, the better the education. So what's going wrong in the Balearics?
For some, the low standards being achieved will be evidence of the politics of language. Possibly so. The problems with comprehension could indeed be evidence of this, as may also be the level of immigration. But there is arguably a more important issue, and it is one that contradicts the "fantastic" image. It is one of indiscipline and poor motivation and one, moreover, which debunks the notion that higher standards of living automatically mean better education. Or better pupils at any rate.
In state schools, and one probably should distinguish between public and private education, a complaint that is made is that disruptiveness is often the product of children of the better-off. Why should this be? A reason lies with the wealth and with the knowledge that an education doesn't matter if there are over-indulgent parents who will see the kids right when they leave school. A further issue, and particularly so in coastal areas, is the lifestyle. The beach, the summer and all that goes with them are seductive in creating a laidback atmosphere. It might sound great, but not if it inculcates an attitude whereby school is an inconvenience prior to papa setting you up in a bar or the family business or your taking a job as a waiter or on a boat.
It is no coincidence that the best-performing regions are the likes of Castile-Leon and Madrid. It is also no coincidence that two other regions with strong sun-and-beach connections aren't that much better than the Balearics, namely Murcia and Andalusia.
The language of education and the constant fuss that surrounds it will probably be singled out as the reason for poor educational performance, but to do so would be to disguise other factors which may be the real reasons for this performance. Whatever the reason, interpret the words correctly and don't believe the hype.
* The findings of the report relate to 15-year-old pupils. All regions of Spain were included except for Valencia, Extremadura and Castile-La Mancha.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
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