“The biggest shake-up of education since the 1944 Education Act” proclaims the media while Mr Gove loses no opportunity to explain that this will revitalise the economy and strengthen individuals to accept greater responsibility for themselves.   We live, he and the Prime Minister tell us in most difficult times.

The 1944 Education Act was born in difficult times; conceived by an academic Tory in the midst of war, it was actually birthed by a former communist by then the first Labour Minister of Education.  Its tentative first steps were guided by a new Minister, George Tomlinson, a man whose own education had ended at the age of fourteen.

While Ministers and their civil servants were sorting out the minutiae for a national system of secondary schooling (England being one of the last countries in Europe to do this) a most remarkable man – remarkable in the sense that he saw nothing remarkable in what he did – set out to explain in everyday language to the eight million men and women whose children would attend these schools, just what kind of education they would receive.

John Newsom set out his thoughts in what became a truly successful bestseller entitled The Child at School published by Pelican at one shilling and sixpence (7 ½ new pence).  Newsom reminded his audience of the most basic of all facts that “children are, first and foremost, children, they are only school children second.”  Then he wrote “Education is ultimately a political issue, for it is concerned with a child’s relationship to the world both as a child and a future adult.  In other words, until you have decided what the relationship between man and God or man and other men should be, and what form of political economic society you would like to see, you cannot tell what sort of education a child should have.”

“This is where the difficulties begin,” warned Newsom for “much of English education is a medicine sold under a label that does not tell you what it is intended to cure.  We have prescribed the physic for diagnosing what the patient needs, and sometimes its magic bottle labelled Education.  Cure for all Ills can have disastrous results, like many medicines which are taken too liberally, or for the wrong complaint.”

The English are uncomfortable when forced to define abstract principles, especially about something so personal as our own, or our children’s education.  Some cling to the metaphor of filling an empty mug, others of a potter at his wheel while some prefer the gardener with his watering can.  “Not good enough,” said Newsom to his eight million audience as they sat down of an evening to consider their own children; “you need to go back to John Milton with his ‘oft quoted “I call a complete and generous education that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously…”

Magnanimity was as interesting a concept to focus on for Newsom at the end of WWII as it had been for Milton as the Civil War raged around him and men fought to the death with their own sons.  Magnanimity means bigness of soul, generosity of spirit; it is about the moral courage which derides resentment, rancour or jealously.  It means developing personal strength so that you can support others.  It means going the extra mile.  Quoted by the humble, pipe-smoking John Newsom, it was about reminding parents that their children needed to grow up strong enough to develop personal courage, endurance, self-sacrifice, initiative, discipline and common purpose, as much in their private lives, as in their public responsibilities.  This was the Civil Society that the Puritans dreamed of, and which idealists in the late ‘40s still strove to create.  Why don’t we?

Newsom concluded “It is important to think a little about the purpose of education, before attempting to judge whether individual schools are doing their job properly or not.”  Over to you Mr Gove before you jump to too many conclusions based simply on objective statistics.  Magnanimity does not show up mathematically, but it is the essence of a responsible society.

See Chapter Nine of Overschooled but Undereducated

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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.

Related posts:

1. A Briefing Paper for Parliamentarians on the Design Faults at the Heart of English Education
2. St Anne’s Academy, Victoria, Canada : Ministry of Education

It is nearly forty years ago that, as a newly appointed Head, an older colleague gave me a piece of priceless advice.  “Divide the morning’s mail into two piles, the urgent and the important.  Immediately deal with the important and leave the urgent until later in the day when you will probably find that somebody else has sorted it out.”

That advice has guided me ever since.  It has never been easy.  Too often people in authority, including Prime Ministers and Headteachers, crave the publicity of the gallant trouble-shooter rescuing a venture at the last moment, while most often the problem would not have arisen if he or she had earlier concentrated on rectifying the root causes of the difficulty.

At first the telephone, then the fax, and now emails give us a continuous flood of messages and it is hard to put them in some kind of order.  The ability to decide what is important and what is merely urgent becomes an ever more pressing problem.  Not just for teachers, of course, but even more so for politicians as we get closer to the Election.

In August of last year the Initiative published a Briefing Paper for Parliamentarians on the design faults at the heart of English education, as a means of testing politicians’ policies in advance.  The Paper concluded with Ten Actions that would need to be taken.  They were:

One Parliament must take the lead in showing the country that the task of education involves far more than producing pupils able to pass exams.

Two Under too much pressure to improve examination results schools tend to develop superficial “quick wits” rather than the more robust, long-term “hard wits” which breed flexibility and adaptability.

Three How we are treated as babies and toddlers determines the way in which what we were born with can turn us into men and women capable of doing new things well, not simply repeating what earlier generations have already done.

Four Legislators must appreciate the evolutionary significance of adolescence, and provide opportunities for young people to extend their learning in a hands-on manner.

Five A far less content-prescriptive curriculum emphasising such skills as the ability to think, communicate, collaborate and make decisions is required.

Six Quality education is everything to do with teachers, not much to do with structures, and very little to do with buildings.

Seven While Britain prides itself on being a democracy it frequently forgets that such a fragile concept cannot flourish unless each new generation is well-nurtured in the affairs of the mind, and appropriately inducted into the responsibilities of adulthood, and the maintenance of the common good.

Eight It is not more money that is needed to transform English education, rather it is to reallocate those funds that are being spent now in ways that should go with the grain of the brain so as to radically enhance the quality of education, the life of children, and national well-being.

Nine All-through schools from 5-16 should be based on an extension of present primary school practice so as to restore the balance between school, home and community.

Ten For a democracy to be fully functional, the state cannot simply be defined in terms of a government that makes and administers laws in which individuals are then free to do their own thing.  Just to live within the law means very little; but to live within the law and have a sense of civil society, is to create a great place in which to live.

Do the candidates in your constituency recognise that these are the important issues, on which future policies have to be based?

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By using the life story of Peter Puget to illustrate the relationship of prepubescent learning to the nature of the adolescent brain, I may have lost interest of those readers with no affinity with the Pacific Northwest.  The significance of the map-making skills of that twenty-two year old might have been lost on those who have never seen the beauty of Mount Baker, or stood on the shores of the Olympic Peninsula.  Just as Australians don’t know of Peter Puget, neither do Canadians or Americans know of Lachlan Macquarie, now widely recognised by Australians as “the father” of their country.

Lachlan Macquarie was born two years later than Peter Puget on the small island of Ulva just off Mull on the West Coast of Scotland.  Although Lachlan’s father was the clan chief the Macquaries, a poor and tiny clan living, as did all other Highlanders, in cottages made of dry-stone walls and thatched with reeds.  They were, nevertheless, a fiercely tough and resilient people.  The young Lachlan had as good a ‘Mark Twain’ kind of childhood as had Peter Puget but his father, like Puget’s father, fell on hard times when the boy was coming up to fourteen.  The Macquaries went bankrupt.  Lachlan made his way to Edinburgh where he enlisted in the army and went into the 84^th Regiment of Foot and fought in the American War of Independence.

Losing that war England no longer had a place to send convicts, and was forced to find an alternative.  In 1784 the “First Fleet” sailed for Australia to establish the colony of New South Wales based on one of the world’s finest natural harbours – now known as Sydney.  The early years of the colony were chaotic; the fifth Governor, William Bligh (of the ill-famed HMS Bounty) was particularly cruel and ineffective.  Twenty years after its establishment, a state of anarchy prevailed.

Then, into Sydney Harbour in June 1814, sailed Lachlan Macquarie, appointed by the British government as the new Governor.  Since his early days fighting in America, Macquarie had been promoted to Captain in 1789, Major in 1801 becoming Lieutenant Colonel of the 73^rd Regiment of Foot in 1805.  With an extraordinary mixture of firmness and a fine appreciation of human nature, always linked to a sense of good order and discipline, Macquarie turned the chaotic colony into the beginning of a self-respecting settlement which, by the time he retired in 1821, was already home to an expanding population of both free settlers, and pardoned convicts.  He expanded the frontiers of the colony, and sent expeditions into different parts of the continent.  Contemporaries and historians alike have been amazed at Macquarie’s achievements.

Years later Macquarie was asked how it was that he, a man from such a tiny insignificant island in the shadow of the great mountain mass of Ben More on Mull, could have developed such phenomenal powers of leadership.  just before he died he wrote,

“If you are born on a mere speck of land in the middle of the ocean you quickly discover how things work, and why people do as they do.  Learn that lesson well, and you are equipped to become a citizen of the world.”

What a magnificent expectation – to become “a citizen of the world”!  Following my lecture last week on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia, this will now hang on the walls of the Gulf Island’s Secondary School.

Surely it should also hang on the walls of every British primary school for that surely is what education has to be all about?  As then, so now, the strongest of the next generation will be the ones who have been allowed the most challenge, and given the strongest support, when young.  They are the ones who, like Peter Puget, Lachlan Macquarie and England’s Horatio Nelson, will grow up strong, thoughtful and – most importantly – be able to turn ideas into actions.

See multiple references to Adolescence in Overschooled but Undereducated

Related posts:

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

How this should be done in the 21^st century engages the thoughtful attention of David Conway in the context of today’s national curriculum.  Conway makes a robust case for why “a free society cannot operate without a body of well-educated citizens who have the ability and confidence to hold government and public services to account”  Like Thomas Jefferson before him, Conway argues that if the people are not enlightened enough to participate within political affairs the remedy is not to take that responsibility from them, but to educate them well enough to participate with full comprehension.

To create such an educated citizen, Conway argues, it is necessary to draw upon the wisdom of the ages classified into separate disciplines each with its own particular methodology.  Conway deplores the attempts by modern educationalists (he specifically sites Richard Pring of Oxford) to simplify such studies to fit the limited attention span of what they see as an ever less thoughtful and careless society.  This is not just a problem of our own time for Aristotle understood that what might make sense to a mature mind could mean little to youngsters who had no experience of life and could only repeat high-flown phrases ‘without conviction of their truth.’ Without experience of the rough and tumble of life questions raised by a liberal education mean little to the young.

A functional democracy, such as England, requires men and women of affairs who can think like philosophers and philosophers who can think and act as craftsmen.  John Milton understood this when he said that “although a man should pride himself to have all the tongues that Babel cleft the world into, yet if he had not studied solid things as well as words he would nothing so much be esteemed a learned man as any yeoman or tradesman.”  The English have subsequently done themselves great damage by either not recognising this or falling into the trap of so watering down intellectual study that it becomes almost worthless.

The solution does not lie in the promotion of somewhat nebulous topics that start with an issue of immediate interest, but have no methodology which can ultimately provide a lifelong framework for thinking straight.  Rather the answer lies in having teachers of such a wealth and depth of academic and human understanding that they can infuse the teaching of an intellectually rigorous discipline with the multiple connections to other bodies of knowledge that keeps a child alert and involved.  Without this, in Livingstone’s words, a curriculum becomes “a bursting portmanteau (overnight cases) which ought to be confined to the necessary clothes for a journey through life, but becomes instead a wardrobe of bits of costume for any emergency.”  Milton magnificently bridged the perceptual gap between the affairs of the hand and the heart, between the private and the public, when he defined “a complete and generous education [as one which] fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously, all the offices, public and private, of peace and war.”

It is the very lack of a unified understanding of what English schooling should be about that the Bristol Report on Transition so shockingly demonstrates.  Bristol is a patchwork of different kinds of schools – state and independent, ancient foundations, secondary modern schools redesigned as comprehensives, Academies and Foundation Schools, each with their separate ethos and character, receiving children at the inappropriate age of eleven from more cohesively planned primary schools.  And it is here that English schooling falls apart for the differences between the primary and secondary schools are fundamental and include the assumptions, the prejudices, “the language, the approach, for the very nature of the phases are as different as any two cousins can be.”  Bridging that gap consumes all the time and energy which teachers should be putting into developing “a complete and generous education.”  The system, the Report concludes, reinforces the culture of “two tribes, the tribe of secondary teachers and the tribe of primary teachers” which squeezes out any genuine attempt to ensure that liberal education for which Conway and Milton (and probably Pring) plead so convincingly becomes the bedrock of democracy.

See Civitas for “Liberal Education of the National Curriculum; The University of Bristol’s Transition from Primary to Secondary School; Action One, Six and Seven of the Briefing Paper and Chapter Eight of Overschooled but Undereducated

Related posts:

1. Who will take Education where?
2. Occasional Pieces: Education: A Question of Democracy
3. It’s Really Very Simple … The Solution to England’s Education Problem

“The more you trust people the thinner the rulebook, while the less you trust them, the thicker the book becomes,” declaimed the late, redoubtable Al Shanker, President of the American Federation of Teachers some years ago at a conference in London.

It is such an obvious truth you would think it unnecessary to say it.

But it is not trust that dominates the good ordering of today’s schools.  It is compliance which, according to the Oxford Dictionary, means the act of conforming to, or with, the wishes or commands of a superior.  It is the way in which the state, now with enhanced opportunities offered through information technology, ensures conformity at every level.

English politicians, like the public at large, long ago persuaded themselves that they would not be able to recruit sufficient teachers worthy to be trusted on their own and so, as was explained to me in the Downing Street Policy Unit 13 years ago, “Instead we’re going for a teacher-proof system of organising schools – that way we can get a uniform standard.”  For more than a decade teachers have been denied the opportunity of exercising their own judgements in favour of meeting what Tony Blair once called “standards of performability.”  To every possible eventuality, there has to be a pre-prepared statement of procedures.  The rulebook grows remorselessly.

Ofsted was set up in 1993 to ensure compliance to a government-defined curriculum through the extensive monitoring of teaching, and the analysis of exam results.  It replaced the more gentle role of HMI whose traditional confidential advice it turned around into highly public criticisms.  “Name and shame” is the sting in Ofsted’s tail.  In 2007 Ofsted was expanded to include social services, so making it the biggest regulator in the country.

“The question needs to be asked as to whether Ofsted has the appropriate skills and experience to carry [such a broad responsibility],” asked one of its own former Chief Inspectors, “[for] systems that rely too heavily on data and tick boxes is not what we need.”  A primary head comments; “Many millions of pounds of public money and unethical quantities of time and emotional energy are being thrown at surviving the latest incarnation of inspection.”  There is a climate of fear driving a panic response that is ignoring the needs of the moment in order to meet an increasingly massive and seemingly bizarre range of preparatory measures, that are politically motivated, decorative nonsense with little or no basis in really caring for children.”  As if to bear that out Christine Gilbert, the Chief Inspector, is reputed to have said, “Fear is an excellent motivator in school improvement.”

Can that really be true?  Fear leads to stress, and stress is an intrinsic part of the human condition.  Stress causes the brain to inject the hormone cortisol into the bloodstream.  When faced with challenging, personal or social opportunities it is this higher level of cortisol that gives you the edge necessary to “rise to the occasion.”  However if the stress is excessive (distress) then still higher levels of cortisol in the blood cause exactly the reverse reaction, leading to the brain “downshifting” – in simple survival terms this is a good thing for it focuses all your energy exactly where it is needed.  All else is ignored, especially any form of higher-order thinking or sophisticated routines.  It is rather like watching Sergeant Majors barking instructions as they drill terrified new recruits and very quickly getting the desired result.  The recruits quickly learn to ignore everything other than following the orders.

PhDs, and quality ‘A’ levels are not written on noisy parade grounds, but in silent, or near silent, libraries.  Downshifted brains do routine operations remarkably well, but are useless in dealing with complex, original thinking.  It is this disproportionate emphasis on compliance that is trivialising England’s classrooms, and undermining the professionalism of teachers.  It is killing adult creativity, and destroying pupil’s imagination.  No wonder English 15-19 year-olds want even less to do with further education than do adolescents in almost any other country.  Compliance, it seems, destroys what it seeks to achieve.

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This is the blog I hoped never to have to write.  Those who listen to the songs of the ‘60s will remember Paul Simon singing “A vision softly creeping/Left its seeds while I was sleeping/And the vision that was planted in my brain/Still remains/Within the sound of silence.”  A haunting phrase… “the sound of silence.”

I started my teaching career a year after that song was written in 1965.  I loved teaching, I enjoyed my subject and was fascinated by the way in which youngsters grow.  Coming from that generation who, having played on the bombsites of English cities and treasured whatever toys we could find, this was the time when an older generation gave freely of its energy to us youngsters in the belief that we would, in our turn, make most positive contributions to the life of our country.  We were expected to be practical idealists.

After twenty years teaching I helped set up Education 2000, the predecessor to this Initiative, to remind the English that, important as schools might be, they could never be good enough to provide children with all the education that they needed.  Ten years into that and I went to Washington D.C. and began exploring the implications of emerging research on how humans learn for the possible restructuring of schools.

Steadily a vision of what that might look like – a world that respected the inquisitiveness of children, and provided them with the very best teachers that society could create – was planted in my mind.  Last year I finished writing my book Overschooled but Undereducated that, according to one reviewer, “may well be the most important and significant book that young people and those involved with them will ever read.”  Because it was going to be November before this book was published, and with a General Election in the offing, the Initiative published in the late summer an analysis of the implications of all of this for policy and sent it as a Briefing Paper, with a personal letter, to every MP.

We received acknowledgements from less than 10% of the 660 Members.  While one Scottish Member wrote, “this Paper is highly pertinent, stimulating and timely and [if] the key points were adopted [they could] bring about the dramatic difference that is needed to develop a ‘world class’ education in this country,” most of the other comments seemed to be platitudes, for few had read it.  We heard nothing from the Minister, his Department or from the other Party’s’ spokes people, or any Member of the Select Committee on Education.  We heard from only five of the Headteachers of the 300 or so English independent secondary schools.  We received no feedback whatsoever from any of the Headteachers of one entire Education Authority.  We had just one response from all the Professors of Education in English universities, but not a single response from any of the 140 Directors of Children’s Services across England.  Just how depressing is that?

What has happened?  Paul Simon sang of “In restless dreams I walked alone, [through] narrow streets of cobbled stone.”  Ordinary dialogue in England seems to have dried up as the pace of professionally directed formal statements, and counter statements, has increased.  There are more news bulletins than ever before, but less genuine personal conversation.  Twenty years ago when I wrote to a Minister I always got a response – not necessarily the one I wanted – but I always realised that my message had got somewhere.  Equally, a letter or phone call to a Chief Education Officer always got a response and the possibility of taking the matter further.

But not now… for all is silence.  Rather than possibly making themselves vulnerable through becoming involved in dialogue, the advice to those in authority seems to be ‘don’t say anything.’  There is an impenetrable wall of silence.  “Fools”, Paul Simon sang, “You do not know/Silence like a cancer grows.”  And visions – possibly grand visions – are lost in the “wells of silence.”  When people feel that it is no longer worth saying anything the trust so necessary for holding civil society together, disintegrates.

See Chapters Eight and Nine of Overschooled but Undereducated

Related posts:

1. Book launch at Alma Park Primary School, Manchester
2. Towards finding a new order in education : 99 theses

“Education is the ability to perceive the hidden connections between phenomena,” wrote Vaclav Havel the President of the Czech Republic, a man once derided and imprisoned for his political beliefs, a courageous man, and one of the deepest thinkers of our time.

You have to think very carefully about that statement.  It is not so immediately obvious as the classical description based on the Latin word “educare” meaning “to lead out,” but it is not far from Milton’s definition of “a generous and complete education… fitting a man to perform.”  But hidden connections, especially in a society where children see their education as measured by achievements in separate, and largely disconnected, subjects, poses a profound question about the nature of our education system.  Do we really measure what actually matters?

I wonder how many people saw the connection between three items in The Guardian of December 2^nd?  The first was an opinion piece written by Sue Gerhardt whose book Why Love Matters; how affection shapes a baby’s brain shows that chasing parents back to work just when their young children need them most will cost the country dear in the long run. Gerhardt explained that the first two or three years of life are the crucial windows of opportunity when various systems that manage emotions are put in place such as self-control, empathy, emotion and motivation.  To develop these emotional connections children need to develop strong bonds with those people they regard as safe and familiar and who, above all else, love them.

It is simple-minded of governments, Gerhardt concluded, to force parents into work as being the most effective way to end child poverty.  She notes that many chronic welfare dependants have themselves experienced economic deprivation, social exclusion and emotional trauma as children and, as a result, have become the teenage parents, the substance abusers, the aggressive, unreliable, under qualified, psychosomatically ill, emotionally unskilled, unemployable people who are such a financial burden to society.  All children need to develop strong bonds in the earliest years of life with people they regard as safe and familiar, and who, above all else, love them.  Front-loading the system in fact.

The second article, Primaries failing to teach basic skills, now seems to be the routine annual rehearsal of league tables and SATS results.  Something which delights the media.  They should not be so cavalier.  A majority of children in one-third of London’s primary schools fail to achieve the recommended standards of achievement for literacy and numeracy.  This problem has been going on for a long time, so long in fact that it led to the third news item; UK plummets in education table for teenagers.  According to the most recent OECD findings British children have fallen from 19^th place out of 30 ten years ago for the proportion of youngsters between 15 and 19 in full time education, to 26^th place out of a possible 28.  All that despite massive increases in funding.

If the proof of the pudding is in the eating then surely the proof of a successful education is how many youngsters want still more of it?

By such a yardstick England stands condemned… and the reason very obviously goes right back to the limited support so many youngsters get in their homes, which deprives them of the emotional energy to make the most of primary education.  Having failed by the age of eleven they quickly come to despair in their secondary years so the last thing they want is more schooling.  It is incredibly sad for it makes England the dunce in the OECD corner.

See Chapter Three, and Reference 35 of Overschooled but Undereducated, and the whole of the Briefing Paper

Related posts:

1. Making the Connections, and Closing the Gaps – Is it really that hard?
2. Component 5 : Making Connections: The use and misuse of information communication technologies in young people’s learning
3. Suggested Reading List 4: Making Connections: The use and misuse of information and communication technologies in young people’s learning

The latest report from Ofsted will no doubt be quoted, selectively, by government as an endorsement of its policies.  There has been a sustained four-year increase in schools rated good or outstanding, writes Christine Gilbert the Head of Ofsted, but that could be speeded up if ‘dull’ lessons were eradicated.

But three of the main ‘users’ of the education system, each of them major employers, see things differently.  Immediately some will dismiss such criticism on the basis that education is about much more than job preparation and therefore such a narrow focus on whether schools have been successful in meeting the needs of employers does not count.  But their views should indeed count, and count in a very real way.  However much youngsters know about history and geography, biology, philosophy or information communication technology (and I would argue that they can’t ever know too much about such subjects) unless they can find a job in the marketplace on the basis of things they can actually do, education will have failed them.

In mid October Sir Terry Leahy, Chairman of Tesco’s, now undoubtedly the nation’s largest grocery store said, “We are  particularly concerned about education.  As the largest private employer in the country, we depend on high standards in our schools, as today’s school children are tomorrow’s team.  They will be the ones we need to help build our business in our stores, depots and offices.  Sadly, despite all the money that is being spent, standards are still woefully low in too many schools.  Employers like us, and I suspect many of you, are often left to pick up the pieces.  One thing that government could do is to simplify the structure of our education system.  At Tesco we try to keep paperwork to a minimum; instructions are simple; structures are flat; and – above all – we trust the people on the ground.  I’m not saying that retail is like education, merely that my experience tells me that when it comes to the number of people you have in the back office, ‘less is more’.”

Early last week Sir Stuart Rose, Executive Chairman of Marks & Spencer’s told the CBI that Britain’s school leavers are “not fit for work” despite record levels of public spending on education.  He went on to say that he was extremely concerned about the huge gap between the best and the worst qualified school leavers.  “We have to worry about those people who don’t have the 21st century equivalent of metal bashing, whether that is computer literacy or something else.  They are not fit for work when they come out of college.”  A few days before that Richard Lambert, the Director General of CBI, said that addressing the long tail of poor schools and the huge number of people who leave school without any qualifications, should be a priority for whichever Party wins this coming General Election.  And it’s not a matter of money because, as Lambert reminded the CBI Conference, the UK spends more than the average country in the OECD on the education of every child.

I once heard a previous Chairman of Marks & Spencers explaining to a Headteachers conference, “You may think that the reason M & S are interested in education is to ensure a steady supply of appropriately educated future employees.  M & S will always be able to recruit good staff.  My interest in supporting you teachers goes well beyond that.  Unless you generally educate vast numbers of young people so as to grow up as responsible, thoughtful citizens, we will not have a country fit to trade in.”

See Parts Nine and Ten of the Briefing Paper pages
And Chapter of Overschooled but Undereducated

No related posts.

Some years ago I wrote a short Paper on the relationship of education to democracy.  It read: “To send your child to the local school, or decide to go private, is a question that splits families apart.  It raises a fundamental question – is education primarily for private gain, or for the public good.  Although we rarely see it in these terms, isn’t this actually a question about our faith in democracy?”

“I’ve never thought of it like that,” said a experienced journalist some weeks ago.  “As far as I’m concerned I just want what is best for my child.”  Which sounds so very obviously right, could anybody ever challenge it?  But there is a problem; within any closed society what may be best for one may create a problem for the others.

When I compared my life experience with that of the journalist I realised how different it had been.  I grew up in post-war Britain as it struggled to clear the bomb sites and build a welfare state.  The message of my schooling was that the more privileged you were, the greater the obligation on me to assist the less well off.  Of my closest friends at school two became scientists, one a doctor but most became teachers.  The journalist, being 25 years younger than me, had been born into a world which was already pretty comfortable, but where fewer more able Sixth Formers thought of becoming teachers.
Teaching geography in the early 1960s taught me as much about the world as it taught me about youngsters and so, within seven years, I moved from the intellectually challenging, but comfortable, post of teacher at a grammar school to the administrative and philosophically challenging post of headmaster of a comprehensive school.  In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s both Labour and Conservatives supported comprehensive education.  In the spirit of the time my generation (and that meant many of the parents of pupils in the school) had a great faith in democracy for, after all, had not the war been fought about the superiority of democracy over totalitarianism?.  We also had a deep faith in what is called social capital – those nebulous and largely invisible sets of relationships that hold families and communities together.

To people of my way of thinking education, social capital and democracy are all part of the same piece.  It is why we thought that to send any child of ours to a ‘socially segregated’ independent school weakened the kind of society we thought it was our responsibility to build.  Democracy can’t flourish unless each new generation is well-nurtured in the affairs of the mind, and appropriately inducted into the responsibilities of adulthood and the maintenance of the common good.  To me important as school was, it was only one of the key three components of a child’s life – home, community and life in school.

Important as is the education of our own children, so inevitably has to be the education of everyone else’s children.  As John Donne expressed it so eloquently in the 17th century: “No man is an island, entire of itself.  Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.”  It is why that great democrat John Milton 20 years later wrote “I call 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.”

Until the English believe that in their public life as well as their private affairs, democracy really does matter, and matters for every man-Jack, they will never understand why every child matters.  Woe to British democracy if we continue to ignore such an ages-old reality.

See Action Ten of the Briefing Paper and
Chapters 8 and 9 of Overschooled but Undereducated

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