Slide 1. It is a pleasure to be invited to share with you my fear that the English (and by this I largely mean the Anglo-American) model of education, by not challenging historic assumptions, and by failing to keep up with the latest research on how humans learn, is becoming progressively upside down and inside out.

‘Upside down’ because it overemphasises the importance of secondary; ‘inside out’ because it overplays the role of the school and minimises the importance of home and community.

I will rest my case on the need for a better appreciation of the relationship between the pre-pubescent brain and that of the adolescent. My book “Overschooled But Undereducated” elaborates on this.

2. “Knowing what we now know,” I will argue, “we no longer have the moral authority to carry on doing what we have always done.” As people with responsibility for today’s adolescents we each need to pause once in a while and consider how we got into this privileged position.

3. It may be hard to recognise your speaker in this photo of me climbing up the beach on VE Day 1945, but that is where my story starts! Events conspired to give me an almost idyllic childhood.

4. You may not think so in this view from my bedroom in the vicarage to which my family moved early in 1946. Portsmouth was then recovering from the Blitz, it was exhausted by the war, and inundated by Displaced Persons. Adaptability and finding novel solutions were our survival skills. An older generation determined to escape from the horrors of war, were generous in their treatment of youngsters such as myself.

4a.There was the retired Hydrographer Royal who taught me about making maps in the China Seas, and whose geometric instruments his widow later gave me.

4b. And Mrs. Purse (excuse the Miss Marple stand-in!), the widow of a former missionary in China who taught me to paint, and thrilled me with stories of sailing in junks on the Yangtze.

4c. And old McFadgen, a former stoker in the Navy who taught me to woodcarve, and whose chisels are still one of my most precious possessions.

5. A quality education, I very early intuited, was like a three-legged stool, which balances the emotions, intellectual rigour, and social relationships – the home, school, and community.

6. In January 1953, ration book in hand, I joined the 350 other boys – mostly boarders – at St John’s Leatherhead. Amongst the staff, I encountered a mixture of the war-weary and the idealistic. One of the former was so awful that I only succeeded in passing O Level Latin by boycotting his lessons, and teaching myself. But in the man who taught us both A Level History and English I encountered someone who started me thinking in a joined-up way.

7. Never quite sure if the lesson would be about English, History, Medieval Art or Music, he challenged us to think about the context of every idea. Studying the English Civil War he took us inside the minds of the protagonists by studying the poetry of John Donne and the letters of John Milton.

8. The middle ‘50s were an exciting time to be a teenager. Coming up to 16, two of us hitch-hiked to Scotland and I was enchanted by my first sight of the Hebrides. The whole trip cost less than £4, and I prided myself on getting from Edinburgh, around the North Circular and down to Portsmouth in 14 lifts and 15 hours.

9. Those peaceful, purposeful times were nearly shattered by the Suez crisis of 1957 and the possibility that we would be conscripted into the army. (Note the jingoistic headlines of those newspapers….England still thought it was the policeman of the world). Wanting to ensure that we knew what we might be fighting for, that same History/English teacher set us a mock scholarship question: “The roots of civilisation are twelve inches deep. Discuss.” I’m still struggling to find an adequate answer!

10. I got to university and fed on all the experiences it had to offer.

11 In a T.C.D certificate of education great play was placed on ‘educating human personality’ and stressed that a quality education was more than just subjects.

12. In my second year I organised an expedition of fourteen year olds to the tiny island of Ulva. I was intrigued with the beauty of the island and the excited inquisitiveness of the youngsters. I later discovered that, 250 years before, another 14 year old, Lachlan MacQuarie, son of the clan chief, had climbed those same hills

13. (add portrait of MacQuarie). Turned off their land in the 1770s by sheep farmers, the young Lachlan joined the army, served in the American War of Independence, and was eventually posted to the colony of New South Wales as its governor. He had to sort out the chaos that had prevailed for the previous thirty years. He was eminently successful.

14. When asked years later how he did it, he reflected back to his childhood on Ulva, and wrote, “If you’re born on a mere speck of land…..you become a citizen of the world.”

15. In 1965 I went to teach at MGS where Peter Mason had set out what he saw was the challenge to the successful grammar school, by warning against the arrogance of the meritocrat.

16. Promoted quickly, I was appointed Headmaster of the 16^th century Alleyne’s grammar school in Stevenage, the very term it started to become a comprehensive school. As the youngest secondary head in the country at the time I threw myself into the task convinced that my enthusiasm would make up for the limitations of my experience.

It didn’t.

17. “You have more pilot projects in this school than there aircraft in the RAF, and they are all looping separate loops – where do you think you’re going?” asked my Chair of Governors. A local primary head was brutally frank. “The trouble with secondary schools is that they only understand teaching, and don’t understand enough about how children learn. Not until you get this right nothing much will happen, so give up a week of your time and come and sit on the floor of my reception class, just listen, follow what’s going on and don’t talk too much!”

18. I accepted the challenge and, as a secondary teacher with precious little experience of primary education, and not yet having children of my own, I found it an intriguing and salutary experience. Nothing much will happen, Lady Plowden had written ten years earlier, “until [education] is in harmony with the nature of the child nothing much will happen.  That head teacher was right…..I might have known a fair amount about teaching, but didn’t know much about what children did with the ideas that teachers put out.

19-20. Jim Callaghan, the Prime Minister, was equally confused about education in 1976 and in his Ruskin College speech invited the general public to explore what he called “the Secret Garden of the Curriculum.” Many heads took offence at what they saw as political meddling and refused to be involved in what Callaghan had intended to be the “Great Debate”. Taking such a stand-offish position provided just the opportunity for Kenneth Baker nine years later to override professional judgement and impose a National Curriculum. Why such confusion?

21. I have now to take you away from the provincial concerns of England. Working totally separately from any Ministry of Education, or university department of education, a number of neural biologists and cognitive scientists around the world, in their search to understand Artificial Intelligence, went back to Darwin’s assertion in 1859 that the very structures of the brain were as much a product of evolution as any other part of the body. As such, they argued, the brain must have preferred ways of working. A key figure was Sir John Eccles, an Australian.

22. In the late 1980s (just as Baker was setting out the national Curriculum – which is ironic) – this thinking came to be called Neural Darwinism. The clue to successful human learning, they postulated, lay in fully understanding “the grain of the brain.”

23. This work was based on creating a synthesis across many fields of study. We in the West love the easily achieved certainties that we can find in Reductionism. Synthesis is far more speculative and difficult. But as Schrödinger noted in 1944, without such a synthesis “we will be lost forever.”

24. With every year that passes creating such a Synthesis becomes more difficult as academic disciplines subdivide into more and more specialised subcomponents. In the past fifteen years the Initiative has collected several thousand books and research studies, most of which contribute to this.

25. Two of these have the capacity to create a whole New Paradigm for Learning. Fritjof Capra (2002), by adopting  a statement made by the philosopher and politician Vaclav Havel that “Education is the ability to perceive the hidden connections between phenomena”, showed that the brain is predicated as much on its ability to draw things together as it is on reductionism. Matthew Ridley (2003), by a brilliant reversal of the phrase that had dominated university departments of education in the 60s and 70s of “natureversus nurture.” He showed that nature is only revealed vianurture. This was the great breakthrough. Inherited predispositions count. for little if not have released by appropriate nurture.

26. Because our brains prefer pictures and joined-up stories to abstract theory, I will change pace and take you into the emerging world of seriously intentioned animated graphics which are social networks’ equivalent of parables – simple stories with profound meanings

27. What a reversal! Adolescence is not an Aberration – something that should not happen, an unpleasant period of awkwardness from which children should be protected. Rather it is through being “crazy by design” adolescence is actually a critical evolutionary adaptation that is essential to our species’ survival Take a look at a second animation.

28. No child is a blank slate when it first comes into school, for his or her mind has already been powerfully shaped by the dominant assumptions of the society into which it is born. Take a look at this third animation.

29. We live within a culture where our everyday activity is shaped by producing more than we need. And on a day to day level life for many is becoming ever more boring…a word frequently used by children. Boredom is a wearying state created by dull, repetitious or tedious studies. The first recorded use was by Charles Dickens in Bleak House was only in 1852, the high point of the Industrial Revolution. Evolutionary psychology notes that an unengaged adult human is unique amongst the animal species in having no reason for being.

30. Ecologically we live within a ‘closed system’ of a depth of some twenty miles from the top of the stratosphere to the depth of the deepest mines, stretched around a globe with a 35,000 mile circumference at the equator. It really is true that “no man is an island entire unto itself”. If one part is too greedy the rest suffers; if the perceived gap between the rich and the poor gets too great most of us start to feel miserable; if one of either the Old or the New economies so upsets the climate we will all freeze, or all burn up. With two and a half times as many people on the earth’s surface today as the day I was born in 1939 we have ever less living space.

31. Only a fifty/fifty chance of survival? If this is simply because we are becoming too clever for our own good what would you say to the students in your school next week? Let me make it more personal……. this may just last out our time but what of your children or grandchildren?

Facing reality is hard, ignoring it is immoral.

32. We have manufactured a world almost unfit to live in. What is education doing to reverse the process?

33. More than a dozen years ago I was summoned to explain my argument at the Policy Unit in Downing Street.

That is something really quite awful.

34-35. But as someone whose career and personal sympathies span both the maintained and independent sector, and who has had the opportunity of studying the history of the period very carefully, I have to say that the responsibility for this dreadful state of affairs rests squarely on some of your most revered predecessors.

It goes back to 1869 when W E Forster, setting out late in the day to create a national system of schooling proposed using the endowments of some 3,000 old schools to form a nationwide scheme for teacher education. A handful of your predecessors having already used their endowments to create the new boarding schools were infuriated. They effectively hijacked the control of their local endowment funds, challenged government to prevent them, and at the same time founded HMC in 1870.

You were born in a spirit of conflict with a struggling national system of education.

Their refusal to support teacher education seriously impacts to on English schools to this day, perhaps best illustrated by the experience of today’s Finland where only the highest qualified can become teachers, and whose pupils constantly stand at the top of the OECD tables (see this month’s Smithsonian Institution magazine).

Unable to fund a national scheme for teacher education, Forster went ahead and established a national network of School Boards. Within thirty years the School Boards were educating more than half the country’s children, often taking them through to 16 and 17. The rapid popularity and achievements of these Schools outraged your predecessors who saw in the widespread education of those above the age of 14 something that trespassed upon their own privileged preserve.

So, in 1902, after a most heated and virulent debate (in which your predecessors lobbied most strongly against the School Boards), Parliament eventually prohibited the raising of taxes to fund any public education above the age of 14. Secondary education became the virtual preserve of the public schools and the few remaining grammar schools. In 1939 only 18% of fourteen year olds were in school – the second lowest proportion of any country in Europe.

36. There are other shadows still stalking in the wings. In 1944 the former Headmaster of Harrow, Cyril Norwood, together with the classically trained civil servants in the Ministry advised Butler that the only way to administer a national system of education was to divide it, as had Plato, into three tiers – for those with gold, or silver, or iron in their blood. Realising that national finances could only provide for one additional year of schooling, these classicists argued, was to take three years off the elementary school and so create a four-year secondary system. Norwood expected this would make 11 the age of transfer in the state sector so keeping it structurally separate from the Common Entrance at 13 ½.

A whole lecture would be needed to explain how this left state primary schools for the past 70 years struggling to fit an appropriate primary education into 6 years rather than the previous 9, and how – perversely – this has led to far too many secondary schools simply becoming too large for anyone’s good.

37-38. We must question another aspect of Arnold’s innovation. It was part of his genius that he offered his educational philosophy within boarding schools that very specifically offered parents the opportunity of being rid of their troublesome adolescents. In the socially-mobile latter part of the 19^th century this became a winning combination.

It was sort of still working when I went away to school in the early 50s. As I said earlier I greatly enjoyed and benefitted from my experience at St John’s. But in later years I began to realise that as much as I loved St John’s… of Leatherhead, its people, and the county of Surrey beyond I knew virtually nothing. Worse still, I started to lose contact with my own brother and sister. It was, I think, the same for my friends from Epsom, Hurstpierpoint and Harrow. We had all grown up in delightful bubbles cocooned from the world around us.

But even that is not my prime point. So well marketed has the boarding school become that it has entered into the English psyche as being the perfect model of education.  Parents replaced by surrogate parents, tutors often overtly preoccupied with producing perfect pupils, rather than developing thoughtful and confident future adults… all within the warm embrace of the House as surrogate for community.

Maintained secondary schools seeking to attract more pupils to otherwise empty desks now try to present themselves as being able to do everything… which of course pleases hard-pressed parents too busy to create a stimulating home background, (and too nervous to risk anything as dangerous as letting their children hitch-hike to Scotland) and according to the latest calculations now fill their homes with £7.3 billion of toys and ingenious games of ‘painting-by-numbers’ which provide almost instants satisfaction but don’t stretch creativity sufficiently.   Schools have become very very busy places. Too busy to leave enough time for anyone, teacher or pupil, to really think for themselves. How Socrates would despair.

Remember St Augustine? “I learned most not from those who taught me, but from those who talked with me.”

And those of you whose once predominantly boarding schools find yourselves recruiting more day pupils, are you not now trying to squeeze that ‘broadly based’ curriculum you once covered in 7 days of 24 hours, into 5 days on only 8.30 to 5.30? No wonder your pupils look so hammered.

39. These questions demand urgent thought. We need to be much clearer about our vision.

For far too many years there has been talk of a crisis in education. The Statute Book is littered with regulations for ever more innovations which, because they were originally designed to deliver short-term benefits, have already disappeared into a murky past.

40. A highly energetic Secretary of State seeks extensive collaboration with your schools, on the basis, it seems, that there can be a one-way exchange of ideas. You with your specific backgrounds can, apparently, take on the running of new academies, a new interpretation of schools whose one clear distinction is that they will be free from the control of locally elected education officials. What, however, is not clear is how HM Treasury (through the office of the Secretary of Education) will monitor and hold someone accountable for the billions of pounds of public money that all this will involve. Many details remain to be worked out. Michael Gove is quite properly inviting your support, and it is only right that you should earn your charitable status by demonstrating the public good.

41. It is not the DNA that is at fault but the lack of the appropriate nurture to draw it out. Putting to one side for a moment how offensive this was to the large numbers of hardworking staff in maintained schools, working under conditions that I suspect some of you cannot really contemplate – means that there is a fundamental fault in his analogy , and I submit in current political expectations.

42. Let me give you an analogy. Both horses and donkeys can graze together in the same fields (I leave you to decide which species of equus you are!).

Should a racehorse on a fine spring morning take a fancy to impregnating a donkey there will be born neither a horse nor a donkey, but a mule. A mule, however, is a sterile creature that cannot reproduce. It is an evolutionary dead end. The Bible calls them asses.

43. A national education system, divided amongst itself, can never flourish.

44. It all comes back to the need for a national vision, something which unites all schools, and behind which most people could rally.

Related posts:

1. 13th Annual CiCe Network Conference, Dublin
2. Vancouver Pupil Conference
3. Richmond School District Conference

Related posts:

1. Battery Hens, or Free Range Chickens: What Kind of Education for What Kind of World (Full Speech)
2. Dr Jonathan Long, Principal, United World College of India
3. Ruining the Future Our Problem-plagued World as a Reflection of how Schooling Limits Reality-Based Learning

Related posts:

1. Sooke District (School District 62) British Columbia
2. School District No. 64, Salt Spring Island
3. Comox (School District 71) British Columbia, Canada

Vancouver Pupil Conference, 20th October, 2010, Vancouver, Canada.

Related posts:

1. Richmond School District Conference
2. HMC Conference, St Andrews
3. Reading Head Teacher’s Conference

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1. Paul Fisher, Teacher
2. Gloucester Association of Primary Heads’ Annual Conference
3. Ben England, Head of Music

John Abbott will be returning to Atlantic College sometime in early November to discuss with those students that took copies of the book Overschooled but Undereducated what they think they could do to further the implementation of these ideas.

Related posts:

1. Neil Richards, Principal of Atlantic College
2. Dr. Eric Anderson, Provost of Eton College
3. Dr Jonathan Long, Principal, United World College of India

Between 40 and 50 people attended this meeting which was a result of the leaflet drop of that name made throughout Larkhall and the adjoining areas.

Twelve questions were asked during the course of a lively one and a half hour discussion.  These were, in the order asked, as follows:

1. What kind of time scale are we looking at?
2. Why do you say that St Mark’s is vulnerable?
3. How do you implement your philosophy?
4. How do we make BANES ‘do it’?
5. Who are the key players?
6. What understanding is there amongst us of the staff of the three schools sharing our ideas?
7. How do we address the question of human resources, i.e. how can you ensure quality of staff?
8. If none of the three schools was involved, how would that place your philosophy?  Would we need to opt out altogether if the staff of the three schools didn’t follow our idealism?
9. What about introducing a play ethos for the under 7s?
10. What is the opinion of the church?
11. Doesn’t your vision exclude the Valley Schools?
12. How do we get the Heads involved?

Although an electronic recording of the discussion was made, it seems better to reorder the questions slightly so as to ease the task of the readers of this record.  This enables my answers to have a sense of continuity and fit into a single piece.  There is one long answer, and eleven significantly shorter ones.

2.   Is St Mark’s vulnerable? At a time when BANES is looking to achieve “best return on its money” (and is under considerable pressure from London to do so) and so is planning to close one secondary school, the fact that St Mark’s is the smallest of the BANES secondary schools with only 280 pupils on its role in a facility built for 540 makes it economically vulnerable.  It is also vulnerable in terms of the numbers of staff needed to provide a balanced curriculum and makes it a very uneconomic school for the Authority to maintain.  The fact that it currently does not have a Sixth Form on site, when most Bath secondary schools do, makes it, in the eyes of some parents, a less attractive school to which to send their children at the age of eleven.  It is known that this is one of the reasons (and certainly not the only one) why significant numbers of parents of 11-year-olds opt to send their children either to one of the other state secondary schools, or into independent education.

That the future of St. Mark’s has appeared uncertain for several years (here the blame must largely lie with the desultory way in which the Authority has approached the rationalisation of secondary education) has understandably contributed towards this, but it is not the only reason, nor can it be largely blamed on its historic legacy of years before.  Fighting in a tough corner, and receiving more than its fair share of difficult pupils from other parts of Bath, St Mark’s has developed an ethos that works well for many of its own pupils (which has to be the school’s natural and reasonable response) but in doing so it seems to many potential parents to be the kind of school that does very well for special needs children but is not the place that they want for their own child.  In this the school’s very present success seems to work against its public perception.

This may well be a total misconception and it is to address this issue that when I spoke to the staff, some governors and some parents, at St Mark’s for a whole day in February 2007 I urged the school to make a “leap of faith in the community” (see attachment).   This meant, as the staff record of the day noted and which is appended to this document, (i) getting involved in Larkhall community projects, (ii) getting into the local primary and infant schools so that coming up to St Mark’s is a natural and wanted progression and (iii) as the staff representative reported to the common room “get John to talk to the community; find out what they want from St Mark’s, and what they are going to give St Mark’s.”

My offer to address such community meetings was reiterated later that year, and again several times in 2008.  But no such meetings have ever been held and, I would suggest, the broad base of friends that St Mark’s most desperately needs has never materialised – until perhaps the meeting of May 22^nd, and this one on July 9^th.  The public meeting held at the invitation of BANES on May 12^th was well attended by the current parents of St Mark’s who quite naturally expressed pleasure at what the school currently provides, but it was not well attended (presumably because they didn’t think anybody would take any notice of them) by those people within the community who have not considered sending their children to St Mark’s.

That the governors of St Mark’s have entered into discussion with the governors of St Gregory’s for pupils from St Mark’s to have an automatic right of transfer at the age of 16 to St Gregory’s addresses one major part of the St Mark’s dilemma.  It should reassure potential parents about what could happen five years on from transfer from primary school. To a concerned parent of an 11-year-old that is fine in the long run but what is going to make St Mark’s an attractive proposition for the next five years?  Can one of England’s smallest urban 11-16 comprehensive schools grow and evolve quickly enough to attract  twice as many 11-year-old as currently wish to go to St Mark’s?  That has to be the essential transformation.

To create a new sense of enthusiasm the governors of St Mark’s have to go far further than resting their case on the link with St Gregory’s and urgently work on the issue of enthusiastic transfer from the infant and junior schools to St Mark’s.  To do this they have to talk with, listen to, and work with members of the entire community.  That community is broader, as was said in the first leaflet, than just Larkhall and involves all the schools of the Valley.

Which is why, at the first public meeting, the case was made to give urgent consideration to creating an all-through Larkhall 5-16 school.  The case was made on how this would benefit all children; how it would attract very good staff; and how it would also enable the three separate schools to develop as a single unit on a single site, so bringing with it enormous economies of scale.  With such economies of scale a reallocation of funds could be made to ensure that progressively all the youngest children are helped to so master the basic skills that the curriculum of secondary education could be transformed.

5. Who are the key players? Of course these are the Heads and the governing bodies, supported by their staff.  But, and here is the problem which this project has to overcome, all of us have to think in terms of what is actually best for all children, not just now but in five or ten years time.  We have to think about all the children of Larkhall and neighbourhood, not just the children attending our particular school.

It is a natural ‘newspaper headlines’ kind of reaction that in times of stress and tension the easiest thing is to “Save Our School.”  It is here that a wise community must become so critical as to enable the argument to be carefully worked through.  Speaking as a former Head myself I know how easy it is (because we seem to carry so many responsibilities and pour so much of ourselves into our jobs) to become more committed to the well-being of an existing institution, than it is to rethink what is best for the children… and the next generation of children.

In the 1950s when the planners built St Mark’s and redeveloped St Saviour’s infant and junior schools, educational thinking and the research which underpinned this, saw a logic in splitting the education of the 5-16 year olds into three phases.  For much of that time we have actually known that one, not to mention two, periods of transfer cause considerable disruption to many children’s academic learning.  We have known this, but we have done little about it.  In the past 10-15 years biomedical and cognitive research has shown overwhelmingly the importance of shifting resources towards the youngest children, and then capitalising on the metacognitive abilities associated with adolescence to move away from a teacher-dominated curriculum towards more independent study.  Just because central government seems incapable of grasping the vexed question of transfer of funding from secondary to primary education, does not mean to say that a community as tightly-knit as Larkhall could not take up this challenge.  Think national, act local is a good maxim.

Some people have suggested that to introduce the concept of the all-through school at this stage when the schools of Bath are fighting for their survival is a dangerous distraction.  We would argue that it is just at this moment when people are seriously considering future alternatives that these are the issues that should be right at the very front of people’s thinking.

4.   How do we make BANES ‘do it?’ Conventionally no one person, no single school, nor any collection of schools has rarely ever been able to make a very major shift in the policy of local authority, be it BANES, or a large county council.  Again my own personal experience in Hertfordshire exemplifies this point.  Local Authorities become very proud of what they have achieved, and then struggle to perpetuate that model, long after its usefulness has ceased.

For better or worse we appear in mid 2010 to be moving into a political situation where, at least on paper, Authorities are being required to be more responsive to the needs of the local community.  They only become responsive to well thought-through ideas, and to the very obvious commitment of people to run with this.  This change of mood is reflected in the BANES document of earlier this year – The Review of Secondary Schools.  That Review actually invited separate proposals to be considered by BANES.  It was in the light of that invitation that we first submitted the proposal at the end of May and it was clear from talks held subsequently that the key officers and elected members were aware of this, and noted what its value could be.  Since then however, political changes at Westminster have led to any assumption that an alternative view of education provision can be met simply by withdrawing the school or schools from Local Authority ownership.  This is where Larkhall fits uncomfortably because, although wanting to do something very different, they do not want to break out of the local structure – they want to be innovative, but within the concept of the Local Authority.  This should matter a lot to BANES.

5 and 10.     Who are the other key players? What Larkhall might attempt to do would be sufficiently novel in England, at a time when many others are thinking of innovation, to attract considerable outside enthusiasm.  There should be several universities interested in studying this, and looking at the implications it has for teacher education.

Not least amongst these groups should be the Anglican Church (question 10) to whom the three schools immediately concerned are all related.  St Mark’s, being a voluntary-aided school, means that the Church largely owns the land and is responsible for significant amounts of capital expenditure.  St Saviour’s Infant and Junior Schools are related to the Church (and were originally set up by the Church) but now the Church has no financial involvement in their day-to-day activity.

Across the community as a whole there are large numbers of people with skills which should be made available to young people – men and women who were once artists, entrepreneurs, engineers, writers, translators, etc., all of whom could provide an invaluable additional resource to young people.  A wise governing body will want to listen very carefully to all of these groups – not only its present parents, but people who might be considering becoming parents.  Which is why, in the constitution of governing bodies, places are given not only to parents, but also to representatives of the community.

6.   What understanding is there amongst the staff of the three schools who would need to share these ideas? The simple answer is that no one of us knows that. For so many years the wealth of the new understanding about human learning, which was beginning to flourish around the year 2000, has been swamped by all the administrative minutiae which recently governments have imposed upon schools.  To a considerable extent this has prevented the teachers thinking further about the application of these ideas.  That in its own right is a total tragedy.

Suddenly government appears to be offering the opportunity for anybody with a new idea about organising education to have the funds to start a school of their own.     Unless there are sufficient people who really understand that learning is more than just teaching, and that education is more than just going to school, we will have a proliferation of schools which simply mirror the present.  They need to work with the staff, not only of the three schools in Larkhall, but on a much broader basis to ensure that they are in a position to capitalise on this new freedom now becomes a paramount issue.

Which leads to the next two questions.

3.   How do you implement your philosophy? This requires a lot of slog.  Slog in terms of governors understanding what this would involve; the community seizing the opportunity to speak in meaningful language to the governors and to the school, and to the teachers in renewing their enthusiasm that the role of a teacher is not simply the transference of today’s knowledge, but the wisdom to help children develop knowledge in the future which goes far beyond anything that can actually ‘taught’ in school.

Which naturally leads on to the next question.

1.    What kind of time scale are we looking at? While these matters are undoubtedly urgent, the truth is that to change perception takes a long time.  That does not mean to say that we dillydally on the way, but it does mean that we cannot rush forward without making sure that the philosophy is genuinely understood by everybody, and that the sense of urgency is maintained as people work through the detail.

It was suggested that a first step should be to ask the three schools to collaborate as fully as possible as they each begin to adjust to these issues.  That is a fine first step, but it is only a first step.

The more individual schools do this the more obvious it will become to governors and staff that it is the present splitting into three segments that makes it impossible to implement across the entire age range the excellent policy already started by St Mark’s of “Stage not Age.”  What is needed is for flexibility between all stages… which currently cannot happen with fixed boundaries of transfer at the ages of seven and eleven. Moreover, and this is as critical, neither can there be any serious reallocation of funds if funding is simply looked at from the perspective of the best interest of the individual school.  With such a narrow way of looking at this there will be no strong urgency to reverse the current funding based on greater generosity to secondary education.

So, what about the time scale?  Starting now, working at all these issues most seriously, it will take up to the order of ten years to bring all this about… almost the entire school career of a five-year-old just starting.  Rather than being put at a disadvantage in any form of ‘guinea pig’ sort of situation, these will be the most fortunate of all children because they will have the enormous enthusiasm of some of the keenest teachers in the country to really make this the new model for English education.

9.  Play Ethos for the Under-Seven. Yes, play indeed is not only desirable, but essential.  All human learning starts with a sense of inquisitiveness and play is, actually, about experimenting in a safe environment.  Play in an educational environment has the additional advantage that adults can begin systematically to support such play with inquisitive questions of their own to the pupils which helps them, in turn, to be still more inquisitive.  The more young children learn to experiment at this level the better prepared they are later to ask good questions.  It is the personal involvement of the child in their own learning that people like me see as the critical issue.  But this is a point of great contention.  Let me illustrate this:

In a most influential book published in the year 2000, “Becoming Adult: How teenagers prepare for the world of work,” which reported on an eight-year study into the skilled development of older children, two key findings emerged:

… students who get the most out of school – and have the highest future expectations – are those who find school more playlike than worklike.

… clear vocational goals and good work experience do not guarantee a smooth transition to adult work.  Engaging activities – with intense involvement regardless of contact – are essential for building the optimism and resilience crucial to satisfying their work lives.

At the time that book was published an interesting letter was published in The Independent by a university admissions tutor.  It went as follows:

“The question Ministers should address is: ‘Why do students from state schools do much worse than those from private schools at A Level and in interviews?  I believe there are two answers: the national curriculum and Chris Woodhead.  The straight-jacket which has been imposed on state schools prevents them from truly educating their pupils.  They are required instead to provide training, but not permitted to provide education.  Pupils from schools not under this duress will inevitably do better.’”

NB.  At this time I was much involved both in public and in private with arguments with Chris Woodhead, then the Chief Inspector of Ofsted.  I will shortly publish some of this correspondence as it is most enlightening.

8.  If none of the schools wants to do this, what would this do for your philosophy? I am not personally involved with any of the Larkhall schools but I have an extremely wide experience of different kinds of schooling both in Britain (the Scots, the Irish and increasingly the Welsh are doing things differently to the English), Europe and essentially across the English-speaking world.

This enables me to observe that what people here are proposing for Larkhall will, inevitably, have to be adopted across the whole country as more and more people accept the need for radical transformation based on an ever better appreciation of what I call “the grain of the brain.”  Humans are enormously empowered by the structure of the human brain, but they are constrained by it as well. Driven to go against its natural inclinations, the brain (and you can see this in so many of today’s teenagers) simply rebels, digs its heels in, and refuses to become involved.

School leaders will have to learn to recognise what every woodcarver has known for centuries: that to produce a brilliant sculpture you have to work with the natural grain – be it of wood, or the complexity of the human brain.  Several countries are already moving in this direction of which the Scandinavian countries are pre-eminent… soon parts of Britain will be doing this as well.  Could Larkhall be one of these?

7.  The quality of human resources. Whatever the structure of the school, whatever the state of the classrooms, or the nature of its examination systems, nothing matters as much as the quality of the teachers, and their individual relationships with pupils.  For twenty or more years most teachers have been taught to deliver the national curriculum in a tightly defined way – which has driven some of them to leave the profession very shortly, and too many of them to lose their zest for a broadly-based education.

Yet there will always be a supply of enthusiastic potential teachers.  Government has recognised this when it urges attention to be given to a programme called “Teach First”, a scheme whereby graduates with good degrees can go into teaching for two or three years before going on to another career.  What bureaucrats have noticed about this is that such sharp young minds are more willing to break away from the conventional model of teaching.  That is a good first step.  Further steps are needed… such as the situation in Finland which has the world’s highest standards for literacy and numeracy where they insist that every teacher has both a three-year good Honours Degree, and a three-year Pedagogic Degree in the understanding of learning and human development.  To pioneer such teachers is what Larkhall could do.

11.  Doesn’t your vision exclude the Valley Schools? Most certainly not.  Everything that has been said about this refers to Larkhall and the greater Lambridge Valley.  There could, and should, be movement in and out between the different schools both to suit the needs of the child and the parent, and of a continuously moving population.

10.  What is the opinion of the Church? Having been invited by the Bishop to address the entire clergy of the Bath and Wells Diocese at their Annual Conference two years ago, the clergy of the neighbourhood are well aware of the issues at stake.  Just how they will organise themselves around this, as the future of one of the few Anglican secondary schools begins to be seriously discussed, should well reflect this.

12.  How do we get the Heads involved? The question is really the wrong way around.  There is nothing that ‘we’ can do without the individual Heads having internalised such thinking, made it their own, and use their present leadership roles and responsibility to look beyond the immediate foothills (which so often preoccupy all of us) and dare to see the Big Picture, the true mountains that need to be climbed.  Immediately we can encourage them to do this but, given the present structure of English education, they really have to be in the lead.  Without their leadership we will be stuck in the disconcerting foothills while bolder spirits scale the heights.

NB.  Over the summer holidays, in discussion with the others who are involved, I would be happy to try and answer on this website other questions that people might wish to ask.

John Abbott

27^th July 2010

INSET Priorities from Staff

We radically change the curriculum.

Music in the background when working in class.

Pupils help other pupils in class with work (to discover for themselves – not teacher telling them the whole time)

Have study group lessons/sessions

Create working parties where staff focus in Insets and Monday meetings as well in their own time on key issues about the school;

• Essential) Cross-Curriculum links made to prevent repetition in other subjects, save time and create a sense of purpose!
• ‘Out side the box@ team – make links with community for potential projects, start up portfolio’s for each student to add to etc…
• Reports, word-limit within Union expectation

Get involved in Larkhall community projects – set up community groups to manage this – eg Larkhall Environmental Group (LEG) to a) clear the brook opposite Otago Terrace, to do litter pick in the park etc.

Get into the local Primary and Infant schools more regularly so that coming up to St Mark’s is a natural and wanted progression.

Get John to talk to ‘The Community’: what do they want from St Mark’s?  What can they give to St Mark’s?

Get the pupils who attended to lead feedback (with staff) to the rest of the school?

Major rethink of the structure of our curriculum.  MUST have more opportunities for cross-curricular work, extended projects, out of school learning, private study/independent learning, team teaching, peer teaching, more links with community, linking subjects to the world of work and the world around them, more funding for exciting learning opportunities (overseas trips!!)… I could go on forever!!!

Dare to be different – accepting this as part of our school ethos.  Students AND Staff are frustrated and confused by rigid frameworks, bureaucracy in order to ‘tick a box,’ endless changes etc.  Let’s be brave and be innovative, rather than constantly towing the line.

Set aside a sufficient amount of time to draw up a list of things we can do as a whole school, as subject leaders and as teachers

Draw up a plan and a timeline for implementation having worked out what we are going to do.

Dedicate an inset day for staff to work on cross curricular links as there are hundreds of them but we can’t do anything about it because there is never enough time.

Devise an action plan which has at its core a child centred approach.

To enlist the help of Human Scale Education in implementing and advising on the plan.

Related posts:

1. A paper prepared by Tim Baddeley of Monkton Combe School following a day-long public meeting in Bath early in January.
2. Public Meeting, Larkhall, Bath
3. A School that Fits

Related posts:

1. Overschooled But Undereducated: How the crisis in education is jeopardizing our adolescents
2. Review : Doubts and Loves by Richard Holloway and Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choice by Paul R. Lawrence and Nitin Nohria.
3. Shakespeare and the nature of adolescence: A reconsideration of The Winter’s Tale in the light of recent developments in the fields of neuroscience and evolutionary psychology.

People who wish to have their name added to the circulation list for new material should send that to the Initiative, mail@21learn.org.

Related posts:

1. Book launch at the Centre for Urban Education, Manchester.
2. Sir Gustav Nossal, Department of Pathology, University of Melbourne
3. Book launch at Alma Park Primary School, Manchester