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

The English have a predilection for argument, and especially love those who challenge political correctness.  We like the underdog.  First it was the historian, Professor Raul Hilberg, denying the scale of the Holocaust; more recently it has been a stream of scientists (of whom James Delingpole in The Spectator is the most recent) denying the causes of global warming, and now it is the fans of scientific fiction who deny that man ever reached the moon.  Such deniers do society in general a good service by making us question our assumptions but if taken too seriously they can do enormous damage.

Governments are frequently in the process of denial so that it’s difficult to perceive the truth.

Not long ago politicians were claiming that the worst performing schools could be turned around by a strong Head.  There is some truth in this.  Schools are nothing if not organic.  Whether they pulse with life, or groan with internal tensions, is more to do with the state of mind of the people within them, than it is to do with the quality of their buildings.

I enjoyed enormously the 12 years that I spent as Head of a large comprehensive school, largely because I organised it to ensure that, whatever happened, I taught a one-third timetable.  Even in the 1980s most people thought this was unrealistic.  I didn’t.  It was the teaching that gave me the energy to get through the administrative load.  It was being with children in the classroom that helped me remember what education should be all about.

Twenty-five years ago the administrative pressures were already building up (computer and information technology has made teachers’ jobs more about collecting and processing statistics than being with children) that I felt I had to move on and promote the nature of “a complete and generous education” from outside the classroom.  But I still retain my belief in the importance of the headteacher, not as a miracle worker (the results of that kind of thing wear off quickly) but as the person who knows what is going on, who has a dream of what could be going on, and is the kind of person who epitomises what the institution wants to be all about.  Especially that person needs to be approachable.

In recent years so heavy has become the administrative load (an artificial load created by politicians who don’t understand the dynamics of school) that few younger teachers are willing to become headteachers.  The statistics are grim; within five years 40% of headteachers will retire, and within 10 years most will be gone.  So, forgetting all the praise they had earlier heaped on headteachers for their role in school improvement, government now proposes linking four or five schools together under a Super Head who, like a good regional manager within a national chain of franchise operations, will “keep them all in order.”

This is management, it is not leadership.  It is not about headteachers.  It is about delivering systems.  It is not about growing minds, nor is it about intellectual curiosity.

And why is this being done?  The answer is all so simple.  Government is denying that schools, as organisations, have been so messed up by a mixture of false educational objectives and confused management theory, that the very people needed to make schools the places for the steady cultivation of young minds, have themselves fled the nest.  They don’t believe any longer that the skills they have to offer are actually needed. Denial.

See Part Nine of Briefing Paper and Actions 1 and 2

No related posts.

Such has been the English belief in the importance of team games for youngsters that long ago the Duke of Wellington could claim that the Battle of Waterloo had, actually, been won on the playing fields of Eton.  Lacking those playing fields in the back streets of Liverpool, Manchester, and other industrial cities, determined youth workers and ardent clerics set up hundreds of youth football clubs which, over the course of the last century, were steadily United into ever bigger clubs which now – having long forgotten their origins – stalk the world stage and exchange their players for tens of millions of pounds at a time.

Back in the 1940s and ‘50s as England at last began to build an education system open to everybody, new secondary schools were required to have a minimum of 18 acres of playing fields, and primary schools at least 6 acres.  Forty years later, after successive governments had sold off many such playing fields to raise capital for further building projects, the number of secondary schools able to offer full facilities for cricket has fallen to about 10%.  While most schools offer a greater range of sports than in years gone by, the actual need for sporting opportunities has increased proportionately to the continuously growing number of obese children who take very little exercise.

Recognising that politicians would not act unless put under pressure from the public an initiative was launched by The Cricket Foundation in 2005 to raise fifty million pounds within ten years from private sources to provide more opportunities for youngsters to play the game as part of the school curriculum.  The initiative, called “The Chance to Shine”, intends to shame government into providing opportunities for cricket in every school, believing that team sports help youngsters to realise that it is not which side wins that matters as much as how each person ‘plays the game.’

But should it be left to enthusiasts to draw the attention of the thousands of policymakers in central and local government whose very job it is to make sure that educational provision always adapts to real educational needs.  Why, with all the money they are paid and all the funds they hold for innovation, does the impetus for change have to come from outside the system?

Which raises the question that goes far beyond cricket, or playing fields, or the structure of schools.  It is simply this.  Are institutions now so over concerned with management issues that they have lost the art of self-adjustment?  If so, they, as any biologist would know, will lose the ability to survive.

The good team captain knows when he or she has to make the rules, and not simply follow them.  That is what England is so short of… leaders who do the right thing, not simply managers who, by the rules around them, simply do things right.

Related posts:

1. Policy Paper
2. Learning for All: Policy Dialogue for Achieving Educational Quality
3. Review : Doubts and Loves by Richard Holloway and Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choice by Paul R. Lawrence and Nitin Nohria.

“Education is what remains after you have forgotten everything you ever learnt in school”, claimed Mark Twain.  We don’t remember, at least I don’t, the content of what we learnt all those years ago, but what we do use every day (quite literally for our survival) is just how to learn.  That was the vital lesson.  But here is the problem.  It is impossible for children, or us, to learn how to learn without having some content to learn.  While it is comparatively easy to define what a child should learn, and measure this (like testing a child’s memorisation of history dates) it’s much harder to assess the process that they adopt to do this.  And it is the process which is the transferable, lasting, part.  For instance, should children simply memorise the dates of English kings and queens, or have the understanding that if Henry VIII’s daughter Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558 Henry must have died sometime before that because her sister Mary and brother Edward each ruled before her.

Which is why “pedagogy” (the theory of teaching) has to be at the heart of primary education and why the relationship between pedagogy and ‘curriculum’ (that which is taught) is so difficult.  Too often formal assessment schemes simply measure that information which is likely to become redundant with time, and largely ignore that which should be with us for a lifetime.  The contrast between content and pedagogy is politically sensitive.  Whether one harks back to the opposition as posed in the 1960s between the child’s need and the curriculum’s need, or the current polarisation which is no less helpful between knowledge and skills, the Cambridge Primary Review “Towards a New Primary Curriculum” out today warns readers that the “curriculum is not just a political and professional battleground; it is also a conceptual minefield” which is why the Cambridge Review has upset the government who is placing its own confidence in a Review which itself had already commissioned, but which operates within limited criteria.

The author of the Cambridge Review, Professor Robin Alexander, warned that too much emphasis on testing the basics was impoverishing learning across areas such as the humanities and creative arts.  It argues that the inadequacies in the primary curriculum stem from mistaken belief that breadth in the curriculum is incompatible with improved standards in the “basics” of maths, literacy and numeracy.  This goes to the heart of what has been government policy over recent years.  To such a charge a government spokesman predictably accused the Review as being “insulting” and insisted that all commentary should be deferred until its own enquiry completed its work later this year.  To which I was asked to make a comment:

“Primary-aged pupils have to learn to listen attentively, formulate their own ideas, and reflect carefully on criticism before making sweeping statements.  We should expect nothing less from government spokesmen who should surely understand that the relationship between the mastery of basic skills, and the excitement of spontaneous learning, is undoubtedly complex.  For government to regard criticism of their pet ideas as ‘insulting’ (BBC News 20^th February) seem more like the rough-and-tumble language of the playground, rather than the intelligent classroom that government claims to be encouraging”.

Related posts:

1. Gloucester Association of Primary Heads’ Annual Conference
2. The Hammersmith and Fulham Primary Headteachers’ Course (1999-2000)
3. Book launch at Alma Park Primary School, Manchester