William Hogarth’s set of four satirical cartoons, Canvassing for Votes, published in 1758, showed prospective parliamentary candidates pouring beer down the throats of their constituents in the expectation of buying their votes.  We smile tolerantly at such stupidity, and reassure ourselves that nothing so stupid could happen nowadays, thanks to the rules that apparently govern parliamentary elections and electioneering expenses.

But we are not that clever, nor are we above making false promises.  Regrettably we are no more honest, it seems, than in Hogarth’s time as was shown earlier this year in the Cash for Honours scandal, and more recently in the abuse of parliamentary expenses.  Every generation needs a Hogarth to show up the shallowness of political sound bytes as we prepare for the final sprint to the 2010 Election.  Elections are won or lost by a party’s ability to capture the floating voter.

Consider education.  Do the politicians need the votes of the teachers or the parents?  It is simple if you do the sums.  There are probably 20 times as many parents (an average of say 1.25 parents to every child) as there are teachers/teacher assistants/administrators and other support staff.  It is all too obvious.  To say something that appeals to parents which might reduce their level of anxiety and lighten their consciences, would win many votes, but to remind parents about their responsibility to prepare their children for school, and then to consistently back up the agreed and stated policies of that school, would make a massive impact on who gets the teacher’s vote… but it would probably have relatively little impact on the parents.  At the time of a general election to be critical of teachers wins votes: to suggest that schools should take on ever more of what earlier had been the responsibility of parents, wins still more votes.

At the State Opening of Parliament on the 18th November the Queen declared “Legislation will be brought forward to introduce guarantees for pupils and parents to raise educational standards.”  The proposed Bill claims to provide guarantees for parents and pupils, and will set out what they can expect from a twenty-first century school system.  It is said that families will be made more aware of what they are entitled to expect from the schools.  A new school report card will be introduced.  But, of course, there is very little about what school teachers have the right to expect from parents.  There are few votes in that.

And that is the problem.  Twenty-first century politicians are no better than their eighteenth century predecessors in failing to recognise that what the country needs of its elected leaders is leadership.  Leadership requires moral courage to do the right thing in the long-run, and does not fall for the offer of a free drink.

See Actions 3, 4 and 9 of the Briefing Paper and
Chapters Eight and Nine of Overschooled but Undereducated

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Whether Ed Balls at the Labour Party Conference, calling for greater parental support to improve the behaviour of young people was doing this as a political strategy to attract voters or not, is largely immaterial, for the reality on the ground is often dreadful.  The behaviour of young people reflects (1) their home background, (2) the role of the school, and increasingly (3) the influence of their peer group.  For too long caring teachers and politicians looking for immediate solutions have implied that, at a time of massive social change, schools had better try to do everything.  After all it is only the school part of the equation that governments can legislate for, as parents tend to do whatever they believe they should do, and peer groups (especially in adolescence) are remarkably resistant to being told anything!

Politicians are as reluctant as their advisors to accept that they have less power than well-thought-out people’s belief systems.  And it is parents’ belief systems that matter.  Writing just after the Second World War John Newsome, who had recently become Director of Education for Hertfordshire, did his best to address this issue by writing a short guidebook for parents entitled The Child at School.  He wrote at a time when the majority of post-war parents had not, themselves, had any form of secondary education beyond the age of fourteen.

Newsome wrote “Education is ultimately a political issue, for it is concerned with a child’s relationship to the world both as a child and as 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 and economic society you would like to see, you cannot tell what sort of education a child should have.”  Strong words, well expressed; issues which society ignores at its peril.  He went on, “The most significant thing is… to provide the individual child with the best that the nation can provide, not only because the child has eventually to perform an economic function in society, but because the child in his or her own right, as a personality, needs education for its full development as much as [it needs] food or shelter.”

“Children are children first” wrote Newsome, “and only school children second.”

“Behaviour”, he wrote, “is determined much more by the standards set by the home, than by the school, for children of primary age are influenced much more by the conduct of their parents than by that of their teachers.”  You can’t make a more direct statement than that.  His words should re-echo down the years: “Parents can do a great deal to make the path less hard.  They can provide in the home the sort of educational influences which are necessary to compliment what is being done at the school.  It is not so much a question of discussing at breakfast… the vagaries of French irregular verbs, but it does mean doing all you can do to see that your child is exposed to influences which are likely to assist him or her to develop intellectual curiosity, form standards of judgement, and delight in high standards of achievement.  Above all it means behaving as if you respect his efforts to find truth, and sympathise with his difficulties; in other words it means going on with your own education.”

See Actions 3 and 4 of the Briefing Paper

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1. The “Helicopter Parents” Hovering over their Adult Children
2. Curious Teenagers, Busy Parents and Market Forces: Changing the face of education in the 21st Century

The first of the Party Conferences (the Liberal Democrats) is now over, and soon it will be the turn of Labour and then the Conservatives.  The media is, and will be, full of comment, and counter argument.  Confusion would dominate over-clarity as people try to understand what the different policies actually mean.

To help those politicians responsible for education the Initiative has, in the last few days, sent a short Paper, It’s Really Very Simple, to Ed Balls, Michael Gove and David Laws.

It starts with a very direct statement: “The solution to England’s education problem will be very simple once the country comes to appreciate the danger still being done by two Victorian myths that haunt everyday thinking.  Just as early years education was seen by the Victorians as little more than child minding which came cheap, so secondary education was accepted as being specialised and expensive, and most often delivered away from the child’s local home community.  A century or more later primary education is still allocated significantly fewer funds, and far less status, than secondary (which means that classes are much larger when pupils are young, and smaller with more direct teacher involvement, when they are older).”

The Paper concludes two and a half pages later: “Simple as this may seem, it won’t happen until the English people, individually and collectively, regain a sense of their mutual interdependence, and their responsibility for the future.  Nor will it happen until teachers are properly equipped to demonstrate they know as much about how children learn, and collaborative skills are developed, as they know about the subjects which they teach.”

Read It’s Really Very Simple here. It is also available to download as a Word document or PDF.

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1. It’s Really Very Simple … The Solution to England’s Education Problem

For all those reading the Briefing Paper for Parliamentarians, or the Book Overschooled but Undereducated, it may be helpful to explain The Initiative’s understanding of what it takes to bring about change. These ideas will become ever more relevant as the country gets closer to the General Election.

As far as I, now the Director of The Initiative, was concerned it started long ago with the belief that was shared by so many of us in the 1960s that it was the teachers’ task to equip youngsters to think for themselves, and balance their personal aspirations with general societal well-being. We were taught by people well-enough versed in the classics to help us understand the truth of Aristotle’s critique of popular education – “they repeat, but without conviction.” Like Plowden we saw a glorious opportunity, through a revitalisation of education, to strengthen the country’s ability to make democracy work. Initially as a teacher, then Vice Chairman of the Royal Geographical Society’s Expedition Advisory Committee, and subsequently headteacher, my theory of change was of the standard textbook kind… start small, define carefully your objectives, define the time scale, assess progress as objectively as possible, and then if appropriate prepare to scale up.

As the youngest head of a secondary school in the country I was much impressed with Lord Bullock’s “Language for Life” (1975), that, if young people were to communicate well, it was essential that every teacher, regardless of discipline, be also a teacher of communication skills. (“Why should I, a teacher of chemistry, do the job of the English teacher?” complained my then senior chemistry teacher.) Bullock, who now seems extraordinarily prescient, was ignored.

Seeing in the power of the word processor in the mid 1970s, a technology that could make easier the task of drafting and re-drafting, I scrimped, cajoled and borrowed enough money to create what became Britain’s first ever fully-computerised classroom in 1979 with a terminal for everyone. That was the easy part… what was much more difficult to achieve was the staff training as to how to integrate this into the pedagogy of the various disciplines in the classroom.

We were soon overtaken by politicians. Keith Joseph (a good man but nearing the end of his career, and death) was much impressed but, not having funds within the DES itself in those days for curriculum innovation asked David Young at the Manpower Services Commission to put this on a national basis by announcing the £700 million Technological and Vocational Educational Initiative (TVEI). This, as far as my thinking was concerned, almost totally missed the point by excessively linking the technology, not with pedagogy, but with specific vocational skills. Continue reading here.

See “No Smoke Without Fire”, Action 10 in Briefing Paper and the Introduction to Overschooled but Undereducated.

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1. Leeds (UK) Education 2000: Putting Theory to Practice
2. An Organic View of Educational Change

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.