It is a month since the Election, and the new coalition government is beginning to shake itself out. Last summer the Initiative issued a Briefing Paper for Parliamentarians on the Design Faults at the Heart of English Education. Each MP had a copy and so shortly will all recently-elected Members.
The Briefing Paper opened with John Milton’s vision of what he called “a complete and generous education, that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously, all the offices both public and private, of peace and war.” Written in the midst of all the complexities and horrors of the English Civil War there can be no finer aspiration for what a state should provide for its children. Will the new government of 2010, dealing as it is with mind-blowingly complex issues, be able to contribute such a sense of national and personal direction?
The Paper urged Members to consider the ages-old tension between nature (what we are born with) and nurture (being the way our surroundings influence the way we grow up). It asks: Does contemporary educational policy simply react to symptoms, whist failing to address underlying design faults? If the answer is ‘yes,’ how can future policy avoid such faults and build its programmes on firmer foundations. Unravelling the relationship with nature to nurture, and then coming to terms with those misunderstandings from the past that colour contemporary judgements, is not easy. Yet to fail to do this is to undermine new policies, and perpetuate underperformance.
The Paper asked Members a number of apparently simple questions:
- Why is schooling split at the age of eleven, and why is it that primary pupils generally enjoy their education, but secondary pupils don’t?
- Why, if the early years of education are so important, are secondary schools better financed than primary?
- Why, if education is so important, aren’t teachers held in higher regard?
- Why, given the significance in earlier generations of adolescence as a “proving ground” for adulthood, does modern society treat adolescence as a problem, not as an opportunity?
- Why, if one of the most significant indicators of future success is the quality of home life in the earliest years, are schools now expected to take on ever more of what until recently were the responsibilities of parents?
- Why are those aspects of schooling that children enjoy most called extra-curricular, as if they don’t matter so much and are only informally offered?
- Why are Steiner and Montessori Schools so popular with professional parents?
- Why, in a largely secular country, are Faith Schools generally so popular?
Simple as such question may appear, the explanations are far from obvious. They epitomise the deep dissatisfaction with English education that has existed for generations.
It is against this background that our new government needs to be equipped with a strategy that differentiates between short-term panaceas to deal with urgent problems, and the much longer term structural changes needed to build up whole generations of young people who know how to learn, who can communicate, collaborate, think for themselves and make decisions. Only in this way will England so strengthen the younger generation that they will have the energy and the wisdom to revitalise civil society.