to think not having a tracking policy does not mean you can't teach children to read and write?

[OrlandoWoolf]

Listening to Radio 4 this morning. A teacher from the Discovery Free School was blaming the lack of a tracking policy so she was not able to teach the children because she did not know where they were ability wise.

Has she not heard of assessment? It's what teachers do when they have a class of children.

Absolutely. And recording the assessments is tracking. It's not rocket science!

gosh, you find out where they are ability wise by teaching them...this sounds like a very feeble excuse. If you have no tracking policy given to you then you create one.

The Discovery Free school were fantasists. The excuses they are now making are as comedic as their attempt at running a school. The Ofsted reports are a complete car-crash. The closure can't come a moment too soon. Like the Al Madinah disaster in Derby, which is essentially an episode of Citizen Khan, community leader, naive Walter Mitty types were given large amounts of money. They managed to convince easily impressed parents, whose ideological biases predisposed them to accept counter-factual ideas about what constitutes effective education.

Montessori is hardly the most intellectually rigorous and evidence-filled educational theory; like almost anything named after an innovator, it's become as much about faithful following of the long-dead master as about improvement and development, and the interesting and good stuff has been absorbed into mainstream education anyway. Montessori was reacting to education at the time, and it has less to say about education today. But it's not remotely as nutty as some other primary philosophies named after their founders, and it should have been possible to run a workable school based on what are largely pretty sensible ideas. Similarly, the basic concept of running a school which is founded on Muslim principles is no nuttier than your local CofE or Catholic school, which probably has amongst the best results (and the longest waiting list) of any school for miles.

But even the Montessori association (or whatever they're called) are now trying to distance themselves from Discovery, and the Al Madinah governors were in major conflict with their local mosques (not necessarily for educational reasons, admittedly) from the outset. Gove backed the wrong horses. Ofsted and the DfE have at least avoided throwing good time and money after bad, but dealing with mess (and these aren't going to be the only ones: all too many free schools are built on equally dubious foundations) is going to be very difficult.

And it's worth listening to the report Orlando refers to (scroll in 19 minutes). The teacher they interview sound as though she's escaped from a mid-1970s folk album.