Parlez-vous Français?

It would be difficult to make it up (although there are times when I wonder if the Telegraph does). Apparently oral tests are to be axed from foreign language GCSE examinations because they are regarded as being “too stressful” for pupils. In their article, Pupils ‘pass’ language exam without speaking in this morning’s Sunday Telegraph, Melissa Kite and Julie Henry report:

“The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority will announce this week that teenagers will no longer have to demonstrate they can speak a language in the traditional oral exams that currently account for half the marks at GCSE level.

In the long-established oral test, students converse for about 10 minutes with their teacher in their chosen language. The exchange is recorded on tape and sent to examiners. In future, oral skills in lessons will be assessed by teachers who will award marks that will be moderated by examiners. It is not clear whether any oral work in class will be taped or how examiners will judge a teacher’s assessment.”

I liked the comments of the shadow Schools Secretary, Michael Gove (also reported in the same article):

“After being told they could get a pass without writing a word in a foreign language, now pupils are being told they can pass without speaking it. Once again this Government is moving the goalposts on examinations. Instead of proper rigour, we have got a watering down of standards. Language teaching is facing severe problems and our children’s capacity to succeed in an ever more competitive world won’t be helped if qualifications can be awarded without their actually acquiring proper skills.”

If only they knew it, the proper response might be “Sans blague”.

Catching up

One result of an over-busy week is catching up with posts, mine and others. Time runs away with me and it is only on a Sunday morning that I pause long enough to catch my breath. Among a whole raft of interesting press reports, feeds and posts, I really liked John Naughton’s post What – no comments? on 10 February on Memex 1.1. One of the questions my family asks me is why I blog, and whether anyone reads what I post (the answer, courtesy of WordPress’ Dashboard gizmo, is very few). John Naughton’s second reason for not allowing comments on his blog is:

“Secondly, although it’s nice to have readers (and I have no idea how many there are, because I’ve never done any kind of tracking) and I’m glad that people find this stuff worth reading and linking to, fundamentally I keep a blog for myself. I started blogging in 1998, and for the first three years or so, my blog was private. It was a personal notebook in which I kept stuff that I thought was noteworthy or useful. Because it had a search engine, it meant I could always cheat my poor memory by retrieving stuff instantly. (This, incidentally, is what started Tim Berners-Lee on the path that led to the invention of the Web.) I knew that if I had blogged about something I would always be able to find it again. This philosophy survived the switch to public blogging which took place, I think, sometime after 9/11. It’s just now that my personal notebook is publicly available to anyone who wants it.”

I go along with that.

Breathing life into corporate responsibility

For a number of years I pestered my partners to consider corporate social responsibility. I prepared papers and advocated our involvement at board meetings. They were reluctant, and unless able to identify a definite return (profile raising, marketing opportunities etc.), very few initiatives got through. What they considered as simply doing good was left to individual involvement. We had a line in our corporate brochure about it, but this was in truth mere lip-service. Recently two things have occurred. First I too began to question CSR, and whether there are better ways to engage with the communities in which we live and work. When law firms involve themselves, or more usually their junior fee earners, in pro bono work (as for most lawyers in private practice this is what they think about when they do think about CSR), there usually has to be a payback somewhere. And secondly, my partners have warmed to the idea, and a recent Strategy Board minute confirmed that CSR is now on the radar. So it was with interest that I read Michael Skapinker’s column Corporate responsibility is not quite dead in yesterday’s FT.

“Is corporate social responsibility dead? Yes, says Harvard Business Review’s “Conversation Starter” blog. CSR will increasingly be seen as a public relations sham, the bloggers say.

Yes, says my colleague Stefan Stern, who recently predicted on this page that companies would abandon CSR in favour of “sustainability”.

No, says the European Commission, which commends companies that “go beyond minimum legal requirements to address societal needs” and has just spent three years and €1.4m ($2m) producing a 108-page report on CSR.

Many will regard the Commission’s endorsement as a sure sign that CSR’s time has past. Its report, written by academics from Insead and other European business schools, certainly contains a fair amount of nonsense, including the “finding” that managers become more socially responsible if they meditate. Doing yoga, according to the report, seems to produce a broadly similar result.”

Skapinker is upbeat about corporate responsibility (you need to read the whole article) and I am rethinking my position.

Quite enough on Rowan

I had hoped I would resist the temptation, particularly as it is Lent, to post again about this matter. However this morning’s reports of Church of England representatives ‘rallying around Rowan Williams’, and in particular the endorsement of the Bishop of Blackburn, proved irresistible. Nicholas Reade, Bishop of Blackburn said:

“Dr Williams has shown outstanding leadership and signalled that the Church must move on from this controversy”.

I remain to be convinced that the ability to find the paddle when up S*** Creek marks someone out as an outstanding leader; not least because in the real world we apply a slightly more stringent set of criteria. But if the bishops are happy (and clearly they are easily pleased), then so be it. My view is that once again Rowan Williams has demonstrated that he is exactly the opposite.

I fear that Mathew d’Ancona was right in his Coffee House post The Archbishop of Cant , when he wrote:

“It has been said by one or two more astute commentators since the row over sharia began last Thursday that Dr Williams’s whispering diffidence conceals an intellectual arrogance that lies at the heart of the problem. . . This [his explanation] was peevish stuff, dressed up as prayerful thoughtfulness. Dr Williams has a lot more explaining to do.”

I will do my best to make this post my final comment on this subject , as there are so many other more interesting and relevant things to write about. Which doesn’t say much for the Church of England.

Uphill all the way

Very much cheered this evening by reading Lucy Kellaway’s latest FT column, Happiness is finding your inner receptionist. She writes:

“A couple of weeks ago another cheering piece of work was published by scientists at the University of Warwick showing that happiness over a lifetime is U-shaped. It looked at thousands of workers in 80 different countries and found that most people start off happy, and then slide towards misery, reaching a trough at 44. By our early 50s we start to get happy again and by our 60s and 70s happier still.

It isn’t altogether clear why we get cheerier as death draws closer. I suspect it is mainly because the burden of ambition and expectation slips away. We no longer hanker after what we are never going to have. I’m not quite there yet and neither are most of my contemporaries. Ambition still rages, and prospects are intolerably uncertain. But if we hold tight, the upward curve of the U will carry us along soon. We don’t need career coaching. We just need time.”

I read this to my youngest (a confirmed pessimist at 18) and his response was the title to this post. I am next going to email the link to my eldest!