Stop the world, has been the age-long plea, I want to get off.

Sometimes amid all the confusion what seems to be very little thing suddenly stands out.  Such things, or ideas, chase around our minds, looking for a suitable link to make with other thoughts.  There is no time to deal with them now, but you feel they are too important to be ignored, they excite you, and they could be the missing link in your own thinking.

Two evenings back, reading through one of my favourite quarterly journals – Human Givens – I came across a quote from Plato made some two and a half thousand years ago.  I give it to you to ponder over the course of the holidays:

“Those who think they are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber.”

The second was a cutting I had taken from an article in the BA High Flyer magazine ten years ago, entitled The Mystery of Creative Families.     I don’t know who wrote it.  Something in that article, however, stands out very powerfully now, a decade later.  It reads:

“A stream seems to run through creative families.  Such children are not necessarily smothered with love by their parents.  They feel loved and wanted, and are secure in their home, but are often more surrounded by an atmosphere of work and where following a calling appears to be important.”

Think on that one as well for, as the Initiative has said so many times, “however good schools may become they can’t do it all on their own” and “a balanced education involves home, community and school as equal partners.”

* Desiderata, taken from mid 17^th century Latin as meaning something desired, something worth working to achieve.

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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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“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

It was a three-day residential conference during which some 60 headteachers were exploring the significance of new research into learning to find ways to improve classroom practice.  By the end of the second day some people were obviously flagging, and their attention was wandering.  Rather than pressing them too hard late in the afternoon, I gave them two pieces of reading to do overnight in preparation for what would happen the following day.  The pieces were not long – one was four sides, the other five.  The following morning it was obvious that significant numbers of them had not done the reading, but rather had enjoyed the social experience of communal living.  So I delayed the start of the conference and suggested that I would provide everybody with a 20-minute reading period to catch up on the material we needed to work on for that day.  To my amazement six of the headteachers left the room.  When they came back 20 minutes later they gave me a short note.  “Reading is not our preferred learning style, that is why we did not do what you suggested last night.”

I was dumbfounded.  Western society depends not simply on people who can read, but upon people who know how to deal with what they read, and turn it into ideas which help make further sense of other things.  In recent attempts (all highly laudable) to make school more attractive to those youngsters who come from homes in which the concentration needed in the classroom is not practiced in their informal lives, teacher-trainers have emphasised to would-be-teachers the need to understand different forms of learning – some people learn visually, others verbally; many do better when they are working in teams, while others are at their best when curled up in a corner with a book.  So teachers have been encouraged to fill their lessons with a variety of activities so that pupils will move on to the next task before getting bored.

But for people holding responsibilities within schools to use this research to suggest that, because reading is not their preferred learning style, they just don’t have to do anything about it is just obviously absurd.  Successful writers from Dickens through to J.K. Rowling have always had to discipline themselves so that, on bad days, they force their pens to draft and redraft before they can recover the sense of flow of their good days.  Good teachers intuitively understand this.  By and large good teachers don’t bore their pupils, but that is because they are people of deep understanding.  Unless teachers learn to be such proponents of deep understanding then they will inevitably end up boring their pupils.

I had hoped that that experience was only a blip, and that few teachers thought like that.  But I was dismayed only a few weeks ago to meet a man whose main job is to act as mentor to newly qualified teachers.  He also organises conferences for some local authorities.  We fell into conversation and he was interested in what I was doing.  I suggested that he should take a copy of the book.  He smiled and said he would oblige me by buying a copy of the book, but the chances of ever having the time to read it was almost negligible.  “After all,” he said, “I’m not really a reader.  And because of that I don’t find time to do it.”

When I remonstrated with him that only by knowing what we are talking about would we know how to change and improve the system his response was stark.  “But I never realised why we do need to change the system,” he said.  “We just need to get people to be more efficient and work harder.”

See Action 6 of the Briefing Paper

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1. Suggested Reading List 2: Evolving Ideas about Learning
2. Suggested Reading List 1: The Biological Roots of Learning
3. Suggested Reading List 3: The New Economy’s Impact on 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

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It’s a month now since the media sought photographs of teenagers jumping for joy as they flourished their  A-Level and GCSE results.  Featuring one such girl our local paper asked “Is this Britain’s brightest girl”, explained that she had achieved eleven grade A’s at GCSE.  Her father, the paper noted as they sought for a genetic explanation for her achievement, was a former Bristol Rovers footballer, and her mother a former beauty queen.

What makes for a successful education?  I’m not going to explore the finer points of philosophy, argue the pros and cons of phonics, or even the appropriate age for transfer from primary to secondary school, instead I want to suggest a far more interesting field of study – history books.  Not the old-fashioned 1066 and all that, or the finest writings of the Oxford histories.  Think instead of that new generation of female historians who, in writing about women in the past, use a 21^st century appreciation of what being female actually means.  These writers now breath a level of life and vitality into the women of the past that make previous histories seem pallid.  Think of Queen Elizabeth the first.  There was a clever girl if ever there was one – not just clever in an academic sense (which she undoubtedly was), but emotionally, politically and socially astute, a woman of extreme resolution who succeeded brilliantly against the odds.

For me it was Jane Dunn’s Elizabeth and Mary published in 2003 that first caught my imagination, and now it is Tracy Borman’s Elizabeth’s Women, published a few weeks ago, that adds a new dimension to the historian’s ability to understand the human spirit.  That Elizabeth survived was not a matter of chance, but due to her supreme ability to empathise with the other women around her, and to outplay men at the games they thought that women didn’t really understand.  Elizabeth had almost everything against her in her youth.  Her mother was executed, on her father’s orders, when she was less than three.  She had several illegitimate siblings (one even by her own aunt).  Her first stepmother, Jane Seymour, with whom she was very fond, died a few days after her brother Edward was born, and another was executed for adultery.  Her third stepmother, Catherine Parr, with whom she lived after her father died, quickly married a well-born charismatic adventurer, Thomas Seymour.  Seymour appears to have had considerably more than a stepfather’s interest in the fourteen-year-old Princess, and Catherine, sensing that Elizabeth’s teenage emotions were getting dangerously confused, banished Elizabeth from her home.  Two years later Seymour was executed for treason, and her other guardian, Archbishop Cranmer, was burnt at the stake.  Fearful that she, too, would be executed, the young Elizabeth worried about whether her head would be cut off with a sword, or an axe.

Both Dunn and Borman show just how much Elizabeth’s character was shaped by the emotional warmth that grew from her relationship with her long-term nurse, Kate Ashley, and the influence of her two tutors who gave her such a mastery of Greek that it was claimed that, when she was eighteen, there were no more than three or four men in the entire country who could use Greek as effectively as she.  In some of the letters she wrote at the age thirteen, she showed an amazing use of the English language and an appreciation of other people’s feelings, that stands comparison with Jane Austin.

That education is as much to do with the emotions as it is with the intellect was demonstrated by Queen Elizabeth long before Matthew Goldman wrote his eminently readable book on Emotional Intelligence.  Clever girls, as much as clever boys, are not simply the product of teachers in a classroom.  The England of the second Elizabeth has forgotten that real love and affection, and a delight in the rigors of high scholarship are what see a person through the roughest of times.

See Actions 2 and 3 of the Briefing Paper

Related posts:

1. Occasional Pieces: Teachers Good and Bad

My friend is a remarkably fit and shrewd 85-year-old still able to make most valuable comments at the governing body of a secondary school.  A General Practitioner for more than 40 years he has ‘seen it all’ but is never judgemental yet always full of sound advice, particularly on general health issues such as obesity and mental health.

Making his point about the devastating impact of obesity caused by a too easy access to fat and over-sweet foods, he recalled how, in the summer of 1938 when he was 14, he had wanted to visit his grandparents in Huddersfield.  At the time he was living with his parents in southeast London.  Early one morning his mother packed up two-days’ worth of sandwiches and the young, one-day-to-be-a-doctor set off on his bike to cycle across London and started to make his way north.  He slept the night in a hayrick and later the following day reached Huddersfield.  After several days with his relatives his grandmother packed him up some more sandwiches and he set off south, slept in another hayrick and reached southeast London later the following day.  His slight figure and merry twinkle reflect a life in which he has always been attuned to his environment, and where most problems have a solution… if you look around enough.

I’m not such a cyclist, but at 16 I remember setting out with a friend to spend a week hitchhiking around Scotland.  It was slow going to start with, so we decided to separate and try our luck separately.  We hoped to meet at a certain farm just over the border at Carter Bar on the A68, but if we missed each other we would rendezvous the next day at the post office in the town of Callendar some 30 miles from Edinburgh, on the hour, until the other turned up.  Cliff never made it to the small wood by the farm, and for the first time in my life I camped alone.  Setting off the next morning I again started to ‘thumb’.  Reaching Callendar I was delighted to find Cliff already there – in fact, so successful had he been that he had actually got there the night before while I was camping 150 miles to the south.  Returning from Edinburgh the following week I reached Portsmouth, where I then lived, in 14 hours and coincidentally, in 14 lifts – one of which bought me a very good lunch in Grantham.

On that trip alone I must have trusted myself to the responsible behaviour of some 40 drivers, totally unknown to me (or to my parents) before that.  We are told that it is different now.  “You are a pervert and a danger to children,” wrote A N Wilson in The Daily Mail, “unless you can prove otherwise,” which totally contradicts the basic principle of English law that one is innocent until proven guilty.  To hold to that principle means running all kinds of risks, but to accept the alternative – as proposed in the Vetting and Barring Scheme – is to replace a respect for freedom with the fear of penalty.  To assume that children are surrounded by perverts is to deny them the priceless opportunity to grow up by discovering the diversity of the world around them.  The horror of so much child molestation is not that the police have failed, it is that neighbours have not noticed what is going on around them.

To provide a cycle track to Huddersfield would make it safer for a child today to cycle to see his grandparents, but to threaten an adult with a £5,000 fine for stopping to give a young person a lift without having first been vetted at a cost of £64 would have denied me the opportunity of learning how to deal with all kinds of people.  Hitchhiking was a most important part of my growing up, for however else could I have learnt how to hold conversations with a lorry driver, a priest, a housewife, an architect, and a Rear Admiral all in one day – and on a one-to-one basis.  I wish today’s youngsters had that opportunity, for it was what made me a person strong enough to deal with so many of life’s problems.

See Actions 1, 3 4 and 10 of the Briefing Paper

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Queen Victoria created a most dangerous myth when she told the English that “little children should be seen and not heard”.  That myth lives on today in school budgets which allocate more money to older children than younger children so resulting in larger classes for the youngest, and smaller classes in the upper years of secondary school.

I was working in America in the mid ‘90s when powerful research showed the significance of early-years nurture, which challenged the pre-imminent assumption that intelligence was mainly due to inheritance.  First it was the book, Meaningful differences in the everyday experience of young American children, which showed that professional parents addressed 482 ‘utterances’ every hour to their babies at the age of 18 months; that fell to 321 utterances amongst medium income parents, and to 197 for parents on welfare.  By the age of three children of professional parents would have heard more than 30 million words, working class children 20 million and children of parents on welfare only 10 million.  A further Report from the Kellogg Foundation showed that the biggest predictor of success at the age of eighteen was the quantity and quality of dialogue in the child’s home before the fifth birthday.

It was with this knowledge that Jesse Jackson told the Principals of America “Go to every city, farm and town and say ‘no parent is too poor not to turn off the television set and sit down and labour alongside their child every evening’.”

Returning to England ten years ago I was horrified to discover that here, as in the States, early child caring facilities originally set up to enable poor parents to enter employment were now being taken over as a resource to enable parents, already rich, to work even harder by leaving their children in the care of other people.

Now, in 2009, Alison Gopnik’s The Philosophical Baby takes the most recent findings from neurobiology and cognitive science to explain what an expanded understanding of children’s minds tell us about “truth, love and (ultimately) the meaning of life.”  Is that a wildly ambitious claim?  Not really.  The research of ten years ago about the use of language was only the tip of the iceberg – while children hear and internalise the words they hear us speak, at a much deeper level evolution has equipped them to so study us that what they are really learning is how our minds work.

The more opportunity they have to do this the quicker the brain grows.  “An American child learns what American minds are like and a Japanese child learns what Japanese minds are like”, Gopnik wrote, “ just as they learn what American and Japanese tables and chairs and landscape are like.”  It is why I was treated to such an interesting description of the fossils of middle Dorset two weeks ago by 12-year-old Louis, the only child of two highly successful journalists.  While both parents probably had good genes it was the way that the boy had studied the way his parents’ brains worked that actually mattered.  510

SeePart Eight and Actions 1 and 2 of the Briefing Paper

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The opening of the gigantic new Academy in Nottingham yesterday for 3,500 secondary pupils, with twenty classes in each year-group, appalled me.  Maps had to be issued to every one of the bemused 11-year-olds on their first day at ‘big’ school.  Not long ago ‘big school’ to 10-year-olds was that place a short bus ride away inhabited by youngsters so big that they looked like adults and, with 600-700 pupils seemed frighteningly impersonal.  Is a bigger version of schools whose design failed last year’s children really the solution to today’s problem?

Is bigger really better?  I was reminded of the story about the limitations of conventional thinking in times of profound change, which went like this: During the Second World War the Americans were much impressed by the performance of the two enormous Cunard liners, the Queen Mary, and the Queen Elizabeth, which each transported tens of thousands of troops across the Atlantic so fast that the German U-boats were unable to catch them.  Once the war was over the American government subsidised the building of an even faster passenger ship, the SS United States, which could go faster and, in time of military need, carry even more troops than the old Cunarders.  The SS United States entered service in the mid-1950s, and at a speed of 40 knots she cut the travel time from New York to England to just under 84 hours.  Everyone was very excited; I sailed on her once, and she was a lovely ship.  But after three years this splendid ship started to lose money and within ten years was taken out of service and lay rusting for a quarter of a century.

Why the demise of this grand ship?  Simply because the De Havilland Brothers had seen the value of a new technology and built a commercial jet aircraft, The Comet.  In 1960 the British Overseas Airway Corporation had started flying passengers across the Atlantic in a mere eight hours.  There was nothing wrong with the design of the SS United States but her steam engines had been made obsolete by jet propulsion.

It is the findings of neurobiology, cognitive and social sciences into the nature of human learning, and especially adolescence, that provides the newly understood ‘technology’ which should shape the future nature of secondary education.  Children can learn at a phenomenal rate if they are emotionally secure and intellectually poised to start exploring knowledge to make sense of the world around them.  If the educational policy makers really understood this they would strengthen enormously small primary schools, and increasingly supplement the secondary school with its orderly boxes of classrooms, with endless networks of hands-on apprentice type learning situations across the community.

I wish no ill to those who will labour in Nottingham and possibly elsewhere, to defy the inevitable… but one day such enormous Academies will, like the SS United States, find themselves in the breaker’s yard as an expensive out-of-date technology irrelevant to the needs of tomorrow.

See Part Ten and Actions 1, 4, 5 and 8 of the Briefing Paper

Related posts:

1. Upside Down and Inside Out: Why good schools alone will never be good enough to meet the needs of the 21st Century