Last evening’s (8/2/10) BBC’s Newsnight report on the Swedish Private (for profit) School system prompts the question as to whether any other country can teach English schools how to improve, without the English first rigorously and honestly analysising what is the essence of their educational predicament.  Contrary to what I suspect their glossy Party Manifestos will say shortly there is no one panacea that can deal with the numerous, yet inter-related, problems which have placed English education in a difficult, unpleasant and often embarrassing situation.

Unless politicians of every Party are prepared to admit the nature of this predicament – something which the Conservatives were largely responsible for between 1979 to 1997, and for which Labour has been responsible for the past 13 years – there can be no reasonable discussion of what needs to  happen next.  Despite home-grown statistics claiming the opposite, international studies point to the steady decline in the performance of English schools, and in the declining well-being of English children and in the increased levels of mental stress amongst their parents. Without acknowledging these ‘difficulties’ in their entirety any political reform will flounder.

The English place an unrealistic confidence in their schools to do for their children what the parents, and the rest of society, are no longer willing to do for themselves.

… have separated the emotional needs of children from their intellectual development, placing undue emphasis on the latter at the cost of often trivialising the former.

…have forgotten that “a complete and generous education [should] fit youngsters to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously both in their public, as well as in their private lives.

… have also forgotten what the skilled craftsmen of old knew well, that education has to start a dynamic process through which youngsters are progressively weaned from their dependence on teachers and instruction, and given the confidence to manage their own learning as a lifelong activity.

… have been slow to accept that how we are treated as babies and toddlers determines the way in which what-we-are-born-with turns us into what-we-are.  It is the combined influence of home, community and school upon which the country is dependent if future generations are to be capable of doing new things well, while retaining the wisdom of the past.

… can no longer assume that a well-educated person is the by-product simply of the study of a range of academic disciplines, and have to recognise that every child needs the ability to think for itself, to communicate clearly, collaborate with colleagues, and to be able to make its own decisions.

… need reminding that quality education is everything to do with teachers, not much to do with structures, and very little to do with buildings.  Teachers do what they believe in very well, but what they are told to do merely to a mediocre standard; they need both technical subject knowledge and considerable expertise in both pedagogy and child development.

… have to understand that while Britain is one of the world’s richest countries we are also one where the differential between the wealth of the richest and the poorest is greater than almost anywhere else, and that we suffer from some of the highest recorded levels of clinical depression.

Finally, politicians and people alike have to remind themselves that for a democracy to be fully functional, the state cannot simply be defined in terms of government that makes and administers laws within which individuals are left to do their own thing.  Most day-to-day activity has nothing to do with the law.  It is about getting on with our neighbours and creating a quality of life that depends on access to people we trust and admire.  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.

In addition to understanding such difficulties, there are three structural issues which compound the English education predicament.

The first such structural issue is the almost arbitrary splitting of primary and secondary education at the age of eleven. This dates from 1944 when, to fund a national system of secondary education at a time when funds for only one additional year of schooling were forthcoming, led to three years being ‘clipped off’ the old elementary school curriculum to create the new secondary school.  This was encouraged by the specious argument that intelligence tests administered at the age of eleven could accurately sort people into the three types identified 2,000 years before by Plato as being those with gold in their blood who were destined to be the rulers, those with silver who would form the administrators, and those with only iron who were predestined to be the workers and farmers.  The 1944 Act equated such destinies as needing grammar, technical or secondary modern schooling.  It was not until the late ‘60s and early ‘70s that the importance of culture in modifying inherited predispositions finally entered the equation.

Subsequently, secondary education has achieved a higher status than primary partly due to the charitable origins of elementary education as being a concern for the well-being of the poor.  Secondary status was further enhanced in the years after the introduction of comprehensive schools (1965) when each such school – attempting to show that they were as good as the former grammar schools – started to build their own Sixth Forms.  From this point the tail started to wag the dog for, in order to provide Sixth Forms with a range of options, such schools had often to be several times the size of primary schools so creating an atmosphere in which disillusioned adolescents (rebelling against the didactic nature of schooling) needed a higher level of teacher control than was the case in the smaller primary schools.

The second of these structural issues relates to the very different kinds of teachers in primary and secondary schools. Primary practice grew out of the need to develop children emotionally while secondary school practice had its origins in subject-specific skills appropriate for university entry.  The old adage; “primary schools teach pupils, but secondary schools teach subjects,” still applies, yet secondary schools also need teachers who understand the emotional development of teenagers, and primary schools need teachers with subject-specific skills.  The answer to both these structural issues is best illustrated by the Finnish all-through 7-16 community school, with teachers of such quality that they can teach right across the age range, and where the schools are sufficiently small and related to their communities that the total society is involved in the bringing-up of its children.

The third structural issue relates to the numbers of children who attend fee-paying schools (over 7%). It is the basic right of parents (subject to the fewest number of safeguards) to educate their own children in the way they think most appropriate.  However, at a time in England’s history when a growing proportion of better-off people virtually  make a statement of their wealth by not even considering state education for their own children, it seems that the issue of a two-tier education, Disraeli’s Two Nations, has returned to haunt England.  A solution favoured by some is to make all state schools in some way ‘independent’, and so encourage the belief in a totally free market.  But education is not an impersonal commodity, as it is as much concerned with attitudes that are caught from social interaction within the community, as it is from what is actually learnt from a teacher.  Education is not just about individuals, but how those individuals pull together.  The more people who see themselves as strong enough to grab one of the few lifejackets and swim to shore, the fewer of the oarsmen left to bring the others to safety.

In a country which, since the early 1980s has primed itself on cutting taxes (which initially hit school budgets very hard indeed as the revenue collapsed) this has released monies for an increasing proportion of families that educate their children separately to the rest of society – while only 7% of pupils attend independent schools, to the stage at which half of those gaining entry to Oxford and Cambridge are now from fee-paying schools.

FINALLY, there are the problems created by the tension that has existed for more than twenty years between the respective roles of local and national government.  This will continue to be a major issue at the Election.  However, this is such a major issue as it relates to the future of our democratic society that I will explore it more fully in the next blog post.

No related posts.

John Abbott reviews the widely discussed Cambridge Primary Review in great detail here:

http://www.21learn.org/archive/articles/abbott_cambridge_primary_review.php

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

In late August a copy of the Briefing Paper on the design faults at the heart of English education was sent to all MPs.  Within 40 pages it distilled all the thinking of the Initiative (which itself depends on the writing of hundreds of eminent researchers and practitioners) and set out Ten Actions which would need to be taken by an incoming government.  By mid September, not having heard anything from Michael Gove, other than a polite acknowledgement that he had received this, I sent him a personal letter… the sort of “pep” letter that I might have written years ago when I was tutoring bright sixth formers as they prepared to sit the Oxbridge Scholarship Exam.

Before setting four or five practice questions to sharpen candidates’ powers of critical analysis, I used to advise sixth formers on the need to make a good impression on the examiners by showing in advance that, while they would be able to answer these set questions well, they should show a bigger view of their academic future than could be gained from their essay answers.  “Speak up for yourself”, I used to say, “and prove that there is more to you than simply what you’ve been taught.”

I wrote in a similar vein to Michael Gove, “What you say, and how you say it in Manchester, will establish the persona that you will have to live with.”  This I suggested was an opportunity to ally himself with one of England’s greatest thinkers and philosophers, John Milton, and call for, as he had in 1644, a complete and generous education (to) fit a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously, all the offices both public and private of peace and war.  That, I suggested, would be a clarion call around which many citizens in our diverse culture could surely rally.

While I was by no means certain that Michael Gove would actually see my letter – I had earlier met him briefly three times and he had written to say that he had found my soon-to-be-published book of value – I urged him to treat these questions seriously because, and I picked my words most carefully, “it is important to add some deep insights into education to your already strong journalistic and political skills.”

Here were my four questions:

1. Why, given the wealth of England’s intellectual tradition, is it the Finns and the South Koreans (two vastly different countries), rather than the English who head up the OECD league tables for academic achievement?
2. Why has England become such a dysfunctional society when it was we who pioneered parliamentary democracy in the 17^th century?
3. Why, given their idealism, do so many newly-qualified teachers leave the profession after only a few years, and why is there such a shortage of candidates for headship?
4. Why, given what is now known about the malleability of the young brain, does England spend more on the education of 16 year olds than 5 year olds, so resulting in larger classes when young children need more individual attention, and smaller classes when what the adolescents really needs is to work things out for themselves?

Not having heard from him (not surprisingly because he is obviously very busy) I thought I should send to him, as well as to Ed Balls and David Laws, a kind of three-page crib sheet on these major issues as they prepared for their Party conferences.  That crib sheet, entitled It’s Really Very Simple, is up on the website for you to download.

So with all that ‘coaching’ how well did Michael Gove, as the candidate for the expectant vacancy as Minister of Education, do in his presentation to the Manchester Conference?

You should read his speech for yourself, as it is available in full on the Conservative Party website.  Then you can come to your own conclusions.

As for me, I continue to be impressed by his zeal and sympathy for those children whose home backgrounds have not done enough for them.  However, I can see why – though it disappoints me – he didn’t ally himself with John Milton for, as yet, Michael Gove’s thinking is too much that of the politician, and has a long way to go before matching the grandeur of the philosopher.  The question, as of now, is whether he can lift his public statements away from all-embracing criticisms of what he sees as a secret underground army of evil bureaucrats, and an equally sweeping condemnation of “faddy ideologies imposed on our schools, which ignore the evidence of what really works in education,” to a view of what “being educated” does to a man or woman.  (Incidentally, did Gove include this Initiative in that condemnation for the emphasis we place on the learning strategies that go with the grain of the brain as being a “faddy ideology?”  I sincerely hope not.)  Gove was totally right to deplore the dumbing down of academic standards but he should turn his anger on his colleagues in the House of Commons, rather than the teachers, most of whom deplore that dumbing down as much as he does.

As to those four questions, while he ignored answering question 1 by substituting Sweden, America and Canada (probably Ontario) as political models that he saw fitting his own theory, he was simply not prepared for the other questions.  The second one about why England has become such a dysfunctional society with such a weak form of democracy, he simply ignored.  Then he completely missed the point of question 3 by not attempting to explain why such high-flying entrants to the teaching profession don’t stay the course for very long.  As for question 4 it seems that Gove has unwittingly been so ‘house-trained’ by government and Party procedures, that the suggestion of moving resources from one sector to another just has not occurred to him (any such cross-subject thinking does not readily occur if people are educated in the narrow and prescriptive manner he appears to commend).

So, my conclusion?

The candidate really means well.  He has lots of energy, has an engaging personality, handles the media well but still has not mastered his Brief.  Furthermore, he risks antagonising the very people whom he has to persuade to work with him – the teachers.  The best teachers command the respect of pupils because they know how to respond to the intellectual needs of each of them; to talk about introducing military discipline into the corridors of schools is a travesty of what teachers are about.  In the case of the job Gove is applying for, when it may well become available in early summer, any candidate who can’t provide convincing answers to these four questions will fall flat on his face because these are the issues that the country understands are at the root of all the problems.  If these are not sorted out all the most imaginative initiatives that Gove or others can think up, will fall fowl of the retched design faults that haunt English education.

Post Script:  No sooner had this Review been written than David Cameron in his concluding speech to the Conference confirmed that the Party, if elected, would move quickly to open opportunities to private organisations to run schools, with money provided by government, and would be allowed to make a profit in so doing.  A Review of this speech will follow shortly.

Related posts:

1. Quotes and Questions

It was in the early 1980s that several business people and educationalists came together to consider whether there was a role they could play in helping education become more relevant to the needs of a technological age.  They had noted with dismay the findings of a recent Engineering Council report which showed that, on average, all the components for significant technological change had been known for at least twenty years before somebody found a way of combining them into a single innovation.  Thinking that they could speed up this process as far as schools were concerned, they established a Trust optimistically called Education 2000 – the target year to bring about a fundamental shift in the practices of English education.  In 1985 I was appointed the Trust’s Director.

Eight years on, and having done much to draw educationalists’ attention to what neurological research was revealing about the grain of the brain, I found myself facing John Patten then the Minister of Education.  “Now, Mr Abbott, what’s all this you go on about international research?  What is there that we don’t already know?”  I tried as best I could to explain to a man who couldn’t relate any of this to his political framework.  Grudgingly he closed the meeting by saying, “I’ll get my people to take a look at it.”

Six weeks later I found myself in a cramped room with some 18-20 Heads of Sections from the Department.  “I must thank you for sparing the time to come this afternoon”, said the Deputy Secretary in his introductory words, “You’ve all read John’s Paper.  This is an unusual meeting.  I doubt if we have ever met as a group before.  I have talked with John several times about these issues, but I have to confess that I’m still not clear in my mind what all this actually means.”  He gave me a weak smile: “Put me down, John, as being agnostic rather than an atheist!”

Trying not to be daunted by the studied looks of indifference on their faces, I set out my stall as best I could, but I achieved little.  The lecture over, there were few questions.  One of the last to leave opened up a little bit: “Please don’t be surprised if none of us is anxious to ask any questions.  You see, what you said would mean that some of us here would be losers, and some winners.  Obviously we don’t want to antagonise our colleagues by suggesting we know in advance which way this will go.”  Institutions, I was forcefully reminded, are about self-preservation.

After a further three years I received a surprise request to describe these ideas to the Policy Unit in Downing Street.  The six or seven people sitting around the table gave me a good hearing and asked some good questions.  Then the Prime Minister’s Senior Advisor moved to close the meeting.  “I can’t fault your argument, you are probably educationally right, and I would think certainly ethically correct.  But the system you are arguing for would require very good teachers.  We don’t think there will ever be enough good teachers, and so we are going for a standardised way of running schools.  That way we can get a uniform standard.”

And that, spelt out so clearly in 1996, is why in 2009 the average teacher leaves the profession in just over nine years.  Policy makers still haven’t caught on to what is the root of the problem – teachers teach because they like being creative, not being told what to do; likewise, pupils do well when they are with teachers who don’t try to squeeze them into pre-formed, standard shapes.

See Parts Eight and Nine and Action 1 of the Briefing Paper

No related posts.

The Labour Party it seems is to go into the Election with a proposal that schools will in future be organised into Federations with a single Superhead responsible for six or more schools, with only a Deputy Head left on site.  The Conservatives, mindful of their often stated explanation for failing schools as being stifling local authority bureaucracy are proposing to create five thousand Swedish-style, parent-run, Primary Academies.  Both Parties seemed confused as to how schools should actually be run, and what is the role of the headteacher.

A good Head makes an extraordinary difference to the quality of a school because they draw around them staff who, united behind a common vision, give of their best.  I was fortunate to have been appointed Head in 1974 of a comprehensive school in Hertfordshire, a well-run authority that had enthusiastically built many new primary schools following the 1944 Act.  Twenty years later Hertfordshire (a Conservative Authority) had embraced comprehensive reorganisation. Reorganisation had preceded relatively smoothly because the Authority saw its key role as supporting the constructive autonomy of every Head to do what each knew was in the best interest of their children in their community.

On the day I was appointed I was told, in no uncertain terms, that “Your job is to be the best teacher in the school.  Your teachers have to admire you for your classroom skills.  Administration has to take second place.”  For its part the Authority shouldered the lions’ share of the administrative load, so enabling me to run a school of some nine hundred boys with only two secretaries and a part-time bursar.  And to teach a one-third timetable.  It was an immensely satisfying job.  It depended upon my trusting County Hall to do their bit of the bargain, and give me the support of specialised staff when I needed them.  I did comfortably what I had to do, and still had the time and opportunity to see the forthcoming implications of the new technologies so that, in 1979, we opened what was to become England’s first ever fully computerised classroom with a terminal for every child.

Other Heads didn’t see the job in such terms, and progressively lobbied County Hall to delegate more of the administration to themselves.  They enjoyed that administration, but it reduced their teaching load.  When in 1983 a new Education Minister, Keith Joseph, made a speech about cutting the fat from the educational bone, I suggested that we should band together and write to tell him how wrong he was.  Few of my colleagues accepted that this was part of their job, and were fearful that this would upset the County Officials.  However, believing that it was my responsibility to speak up for the needs of children and teachers, I wrote personally to the Minister, and copied the letter to The Times.  Three days later I had a phone call from his office: “Sir Keith is interested in your views and would like to visit you at your school next Friday.  I hope that is convenient to you.  We already checked that out with your Chief Education Officer who is agreeable.”

That was more than a quarter of a century ago.  The enthusiasm of my colleagues to be seen as effective managers has turned into a Faustian bargain; every year Heads now receive from the Department documents equivalent to all the words in the King James’ Bible, for which they are now held personally accountable.  In the process they have lost their professional responsibility to be leaders.  Leaders and managers are fundamentally different; managers, it is said, do things right, but leaders do the right things.  The Labour Party see Superheads as being managers, but unless the Conservatives balance their enthusiasm for primary Academies with a reinvention of central support facilities, the Heads of these Academies will become so immersed in administration that they will lack the professional zeal to stand up and lead their schools in the right direction.

See Part Nine and Action 6 of the Briefing Paper

Related posts:

1. Paul Fisher, Teacher
2. Martin Pritchard, Educational Consultant, former Secondary School Assistant Head
3. Article written by Kevin Hawkins, Head of the Arusha campus of the Moshe International School, Tanzania

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.

Related posts:

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

Under the Education Act of 1944 English state education was based on a partnership between central government who defined the structure, and provided most of the funds through national taxation, and the 140 or so Local Education Authorities (LEA) whose responsibility it was to administer this in the most appropriate way on the ground.  Each school was constituted with a governing body made up of representatives of the Authority, local people, parents, and sometimes pupils.  If you didn’t like your school you complained to County Hall, and you voted to remove the councillor whose views you did not approve.

However wisely parliament legislated ‘the devil, was always in the detail’, which meant that the task of LEAs in balancing the overall needs of their community, with the specific needs of particular schools, was often extremely difficult, if not impossible.

The financial crisis of the late ‘70s resulted in Conservatives becoming determined to restrict public expenditure.  To Margaret Thatcher the most difficult element of public expenditure to control was that of the LEAs with their endless expensive ‘adaptations to local conditions’.  When parliament cut its annual grant to LEAs many responded by raising extra local taxes, whereupon government began to ‘rate cap’ – for every pound raised through extra local taxes, government cut its grant by the same amount.  Determined to further weaken the LEAs, and so extend the control of Whitehall, schools were invited “to opt out” of LEA control (on a vote of the parent body) and receive their funds directly from central government, together with a share of those other monies that would have earlier gone to the LEA to meet specific local needs.  This was an offer too good for well-heeled schools in the suburbs to ignore.  The more schools that opted out the less money was available to help the schools with special problems.

All that started in the early 1980s.  Then Kenneth Baker went further in setting up City Technology Colleges.  With a token donation of two million pounds an industrial sponsor could release ten to fifteen million pounds of government money to build a technology college as a ‘state-funded independent school’, acting totally beyond the control of the LEA within whose community it physically sat as a most obvious enticement to other schools to become wards of Westminster rather than County Hall.  But by 1991 most business leaders realised that, nice as the new buildings looked, the way in which this was extending the control of central government and damaging local democracy, undermined the scheme.  The last to be approved was Kingswood in Bristol on which government spent eight million pounds on a single building, when the entire City was only allowed four and a half million pounds of capital to meet the needs of the other hundred and fifty thousand children.

Time has passed, and memories have faded.  Ten years later a Labour government invented what it called City Academies, meaning an all-ability secondary school funded with a nominal payment from a sponsor, which then attracted a massive additional grant of as much as twenty million pounds from central government.  As with CTCs such Academies were to be totally independent of the LEAs.  In July 2005 Tony Blair announced that his “legacy” would be to establish two hundred City Academies by 2010.

Academies are but part of the story.  So reduced had the powers of the LEA become by 2006 that they were effectively abolished and their responsibilities for administering schools according to the dictates of central government (rather than set by local councillors) were transferred to a Director of Children’s Services which combines education and social services within a single unit.

It’s hard any longer to find the right person at County Hall to whom to complain, while local councillors shrug their shoulders and wait for the next instruction from central government.

See Part Nine and Ten and Action 7 of the Briefing Paper

No related posts.

Chris Woodhead, writing in The Sunday Times about examination results, said “children are not equal.  Physically they come in all shapes and sizes… some have a capacity for academic education, others do not…”  Which is true in all respects but one; while it is self-obvious that they don’t all look, or weigh the same to claim that they are not all equal (a judgement apparently based on academic affairs) is to deny that each matters.  The English are fortunate to live within a democracy where, in terms of their right to influence the future, each has just one vote because, at law, Jack is as significant as his master.  So, it surely follows Mr Woodhead, that each has to be well-enough educated to use their vote well?

Woodhead often goes off at a tangent but now Ed Balls, Michael Gove and the recluse-coming-out-of-retirement Kenneth Baker, are each beating around second order questions – the quality of exams, independent schools, the role of private sponsors, academics, vocational qualifications and academic excellence.  None of them are bold enough to put their heads above the parapet and state just what they think education should be all about.  In their numerous confrontational statements none of them seem able to set out a vision for the individual in terms of what this might mean for each person – singular and collective.

One Englishman did, and he did it more than 350 years ago when England was in the midst of a horrible Civil War.  John Milton was both poet and philosopher, and at the time was Oliver Cromwell’s Secretary for Foreign Affairs.  Milton did it in a mere thirty words in a ten-page essay entitled “Of Education” which he contributed as a thought-piece to that great European intellectual, Samuel Hartlib.  Milton was most certainly an intellectual but he was also a fervent theologian, a convinced republican and totally committed to the ideal of democracy.

Man of ideas Milton most certainly was, but he firmly believed in the unity of thinking with doing.  He despised the claims of those who posed as intellectuals but possessed no practical skills.  “Though a linguist should pride himself to have all the tongues that Babel cleft the world into, yet if he had not studied solid things… he would nothing so much to be esteemed a learned man as any yeoman or tradesman competently wise in his mother tongue only.” He laid out plans to establish in every town an Academy where theologians, lawyers, classists and mathematicians should share space with hunters, fowlers, shepherds, gardeners, apothecaries, anatomists and mariners.  To Milton the “esteemed man” was the one who knew both what to do, and why to do it.

This is what Milton wrote: “I call therefore a complete and generous education that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously all the office both private and public, peace and war”.  You can’t state it better than that.

Let Woodhead, Balls, Gove and Baker ponder how a better approach to justice, skilfulness and magnanimity would lead to “a complete and generous education.”  Get this first-order question right, and some politicians would be surprised at how quickly the other lesser issues fall into place.

See Part Ten of the Briefing Paper

Related posts:

1. Leaders, Learners and the Hero’s Journey
2. Occasional Pieces: Education: A Question of Democracy

A boy who had just left school was asked by his former headmaster what he thought of the new building.  “It could all be marble”, the young man replied, “but it would still be a bloody school!”  Significantly that was said neither this year nor last but was recorded in a Ministry of Education Report of 1963.

Half a century later a proud government announced a thirty billion pound programme to replace every secondary school in the country to provide “flexible, inclusive, attractive learning environments.  This will be the largest single capital investment in schools for more than fifty years.”  Photographs of the few schools that have so far been finished show lavish glass, steel and precast concrete structures as carefully set amidst a comfortable mixture of lawns and shrubs as are upmarket shopping malls.

Yet in essence their fundamental design still reflects a honeycomb of classrooms and teachers’ desks, while buzzing students rush across the hive between, say, business studies and mathematics, technology and history when conditioned by the sound of an electric bell.  To survive, pupils have to build mental models of the route to be followed everyday without, in too many cases, ever appreciating how this combination of disconnected subjects amounts to the education of the rounded person.  Planners too often forget that it is what happens in the mind that matters, for quality education is so much more than the by-product of the efficient teaching of subjects.

That boy of 1963 is now probably a grandfather.  I would be prepared to bet that, if taken by a grandchild to see such a school, he would shake his head and mumble “It could all be marble, but unless what happens within these schools changes dramatically they will still be ‘bloody schools’.”

The architects of these schools know that well in principle.  Consequently in a way dear to government bureaucrats they say “we have made it clear that BSF must deliver significant improvements in pupil achievement through innovation and reform.”  Which, in Big Brother speak, means conforming to the present prescription which is all about teaching, and oh so little about the human dynamics involved in learning.

Fortunately the financial crisis is slowing down this building programme just sufficient for Parliamentarians to see that they have put the cart before the horse.  Quality education is everything to do with teachers, not much to do with structures, and very little to do with buildings.

See Part Nine and Actions 1, 2, 5, 6 and 8 of the Briefing Paper

Related posts:

1. Occasional Pieces: What Schools for What Future?
2. “Faith in the Future” (or “Prophets of a Future not our own”)
3. Our Secondary Schools Don’t Work Anymore (Introduction)

I am having to take a short break from the tedium of “topping and tailing” letters to be sent out to every MP with the Briefing Paper in three days time.  After writing Dear so-and-so, and signing “yours sincerely” six hundred and sixty times, my writing is almost indecipherable.  Having to concentrate on spelling three of the Clarke’s with an e, and three without; on four Davies’ with an e, and one without, and sorting out which of those two dozen Scots start their surnames with Mc as apposed with Mac, ought to be enough to keep me awake!  But it is not, for the human brain likes novelty, not repetition.  I am no exception.

I make myself concentrate not only on the Member’s name but try to envisage for five seconds or so the nature of their constituency – how will these ideas play out in Manchester Central or Winchester; in Tooting or Basingstoke, or in Totness, and the Forest of Dean?  I stumble over some of those surnames as I try to write in flowing longhand names like KAWCZYNSKI or LAZARAWICZ and double-barrel surnames that too easily spread across the page.  I wonder about the anthropological and social reasons for why there are so many Smiths and Taylors in the House of Commons but no longer any Butchers, Bakers, Thatchers or Farmers, several Browns (with or without e’s) but no Whites or Blacks?

Will they take notice?  Will there be something that encourages Members to spend just enough time reading this letter (one amongst hundreds they each receive every week), that they turn to the Briefing Paper and allow the ideas to stimulate their minds.  That is what is needed.  “You employ very powerful and cogent arguments, and I think the Paper will make many candidates think who have not previously spent much time reflecting on the validity (or otherwise) of their pre-conceived ideas about educational policy,” wrote one Parliamentary candidate earlier today.

Good policy cannot be created by politicians, young or old, unless they have a proper understanding of where the nation has come from, and where it needs to go both in the short, and long, term.  In the inimitable words of Josh Billings, a 19th century American colonist, “it is not people’s ignorance you need to fear, it’s what they know which just ain’t true any longer, that does all the damage”.

See Action One of Briefing Paper and the whole of Overschooled but Undereducated

No related posts.