It is hard to fault David Cameron’s comment that, when a child steps through the school gates for the first time, the most important thing is who the teacher is.  To have a teacher who understands the child’s emotional and intellectual needs, and appreciates the journey that the child is embarking upon, is what every parent hopes for as they nervously wave goodbye.

What makes a good teacher is not so easily defined.  Nor for that matter is there as much clarity as is needed about how a balanced education depends upon the child’s quality experience in home, community and school.  Children need good parents, good neighbours, as well as good teachers.

In his recent speech Cameron unpacked his proposals for education.  He promised to create teachers as good as the Finns, by ending the current system whereby people in England with third-class degrees can get taxpayers’ money to enter post-graduate teacher training.  I’m just not sure how Cameron (more specifically Michael Gove the Shadow Secretary for Education) can make such a cast-iron linkage between the nature of good teaching, and a first-class Honours Degree, and between bad teaching with a third-class degree.  As a former headteacher I have seen some appalling lessons delivered by people with first-class degrees who can’t communicate, and brilliant lectures delivered by people with pass-degrees but the ability to understand how children’s minds work.

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 extraordinarily well, but what they are told to do merely to a mediocre standard.  Productive pupil/teacher relationships are based on explanation, on talking things through, and seeing issues in their entirety.  Which is why teachers not only need to know a lot, but be wise enough to draw upon only that which is necessary for the learner to know at that stage.  To achieve that teachers need both technical subject knowledge and considerable expertise in both pedagogy and child development, combined with the old-fashioned avuncular skill of a brilliant storyteller.  In my albeit limited experience of being a headmaster of a major secondary school I found that too many high-flying academics lacked the ability to speak at an appropriate level to young people to capture their imagination.

If David Cameron is to quote Finland in the future he must tell the whole story.  It starts with an explanation that Finnish society is more strongly bonded within itself than is the case in England.  Part of that is economic; the income of the richest fifth to the poorest fifth in Finland is only 1-3.7 while in the United Kingdom it is 1-7.2.  The Finns explain their success by quoting the Czech philosopher Commenius whose book The Great Didactic said “Following in the footsteps of nature (learning) will be easy if it begins before the mind is corrupted, if it proceeds from the general to the particular; from what is easy to that which is more difficult; and if a pupil is not overwhelmed by too many subjects, and if its intellect is forced to nothing to which its natural bent does not incline it.”

In terms of their pedagogy the Finns believe that emotional development precedes intellectual growth, and so insist that every teacher hold both an Honours Degree in an academic discipline (which is what Cameron understands) as well as having completed a three-year Pedagogic Degree, also at Honours level (which Cameron either doesn’t understand or doesn’t think he has the political clout to achieve).  In practice, Finnish teachers have to combine what the English see as the separate expertise of primary and secondary practice, and apply such insights when teaching pupils of any age.  The English have to do the same, or nothing in the classroom will change.

See Action 6 of Briefing Paper and Chapters 8 and 9 of Overschooled but Undereducated

Related posts:

1. Making the Connections, and Closing the Gaps – Is it really that hard?
2. Cognitive Apprenticeship: Making Thinking Visible
3. Teachers in Technology Initiative

A day or so before the Conservative Party Conference someone let slip that, in addition to providing for up to 5,000 primary schools to become parent-run Academies, the Party would make it possible (by a liberal interpretation of the law) for these to be run on a profit-making basis.  This, it was argued, would provide a financial stimulus that would ‘smarten up’ the whole system.  Not only would good schools attract more pupils, their proprietors would make a profit.  Wasn’t this just the stimulus that England needed to finally breakthrough all the bureaucracy and academic inertia that (despite what the government claimed about rising standards) seemed to hang like a pall over large sections of our educational system?

“I can’t see anything wrong in that,” said a well-regarded businessman renowned for his willingness to get involved with community issues, “Competition draws the best out of people.  It works well in business, so what is so different about schools?”

Well, what is different about schools is that many of the teachers do what they do, not to get a lot of money, but because they have a feeling that this is the one thing in life they should be doing.  They have a concept of vocation, a compelling sense that, in the fullness of what you think life is all about, you have an individual ‘calling’ to a specific task.  Vocation comes from the Latin word “vocare” meaning ‘to call’ – a sense that there is something almost unique in the role that you personally have to undertake.  In a secular world such an apparently religious view of life may antagonise some, but to many others such a calling is an inexplicable reality.  Many nurses feel such a calling as do some doctors, social workers, artists and very many teachers.  Vocationalism is to professionalism what a covenant is to a contract – it is loaded with deep emotional commitment.

Good teachers, I know from the long years I spent as a headteacher, do those things that nobody else notices as well as those things that everybody sees.  They are essentially self-starting people, but they are certainly not easy to manage; they tend to do those things they believe in and are in the best interest of children.  They will fight any authority that forces them to do something they don’t approve of.  Such people become so caught up in helping children to develop their talents in multiple ways that they never watch the clock.

I fear they are a dying breed.  The reason goes back to the industrial turmoil of the 1980s and government’s intention to root out lazy teachers by defining, in the clearest possible terms, what teachers were paid to do – and paying them ‘well enough’ for the 1,265 hours of formal classroom contact time that was agreed between unions and government.  Over the years this has had the most devastating effect on schools; if you are told that you are paid to do one part of what you had earlier come to see as a bigger task, you will concentrate on that – and let the other bits slip, especially if you see that that is what other people are doing around you.  Which professionally distresses teachers because, as they are forced to recognise day after day, there is no end to what teachers could attempt to do on behalf of their pupils, and there is probably no end to the amount of money that it could cost.  That is why teachers become so bitter when a faltering economy forces governments to reduce funds for education.

If, on the top of all that, teachers were to feel that the proprietor was making a profit on the shoulders of all those hours that they had been putting in for the sake of the children over and above what they were paid for, they would leave the profession in droves.  Schools depend upon good teachers being generous of their time – destroy that sense of vocation and no amount of privatisation will compensate.

See Action 9 of the Briefing Paper

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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

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The tranquillity of the summer holidays is soon to be broken as the media indulges in its annual analysis (orgy?) of examination results.  Each will stone their favourite victim with a welter of statistics.  Even those who have made the grade will still face sceptical employers who ask a job seeker “okay, but what can you actually do?”

It is no new problem.  Aldous Huxley, five years before writing Brave New World, wrote an essay entitled The Dangers of Good Teaching.  The language may sound slightly arcane, but the message could not be clearer – make schooling too easy for children and they will be unprepared for life.  This is what he wrote:

(Many teachers) work (their) way dully and mechanically through the prescribed curriculum.  But teachers may be, and frequently are, charming, intelligent, and persuasive.  They put things well; they may speak in a way that will command attention and awaken emotion and enthusiasm; they have a power of making difficulties seem easy.  The child will listen to such teachers and will greatly appreciate them ─ particularly if he has an examination to pass in the near future.

But the more accomplished a teacher is in the art of lecturing or coaching, the worse he is as an educator.  Working on the old-fashioned system, the clever teacher (deplorable paradox!) does almost more harm than the stupid one.  For the clever schoolmaster makes things too easy for his pupils; he relieves them of the necessity of finding out things for themselves.  By dint of brilliant teaching he succeeds in almost eliminating the learning process.

Never has the complex relationship between teaching and learning been better expressed.  Huxley then went on to say…

The experienced teacher knows how to fill his pupils with ready-made knowledge, which they inevitably forget (since it is not their knowledge and cost them nothing to acquire) as soon as the examination for which it was required is safely passed.

The stupid teacher, on the other hand, may be so completely intolerable that the child will perhaps be driven, despairingly and in mere self-defence, to educate himself; in which case the incompetent shepherd will have done, all unwittingly, a great service to his charge, by forcing him into a rebellious intellectual independence.

So, graduating students of the Class of 2009, do you understand how to find things out for yourselves, and are you confident that the overschooled but undereducated society of which Huxley complained 80 years ago, has finally gone into retreat?  Or does it live still?

See Part Ten of the Briefing Paper and Actions 1, 5 and 6

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1. Book launch at Alma Park Primary School, Manchester
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Yesterday was busy.  It was late, and I was tired as I arrived at Paddington some 7 or 8 minutes before my train left. Noting that there was to be a ‘travelling chef’ on the train I decided against buying sandwiches at the station, and take my chance with the buffet. 

The only hot food left was a cheeseburger which, the young and apologetic ‘travelling chef’ expressed, was now half price as it was the last journey she would make that evening.  Ordering a beer as she popped the pre-prepared burger into the microwave the chef grinned: “Not much of a supper that – it’s not what I will give my man later on”. 

As I returned to my seat and gingerly bit into an over-hot, rather plastic version of what I might have eaten at Scout Camp many years ago, I was forcefully reminded of an astute comment made by a 15-year-old Canadian girl recently as she described the limitation of modern teaching methods.  “The trouble with you teachers is that you regard teaching like a pre-packaged television dinner.  You expect us to go to the deepfreeze, pull out a package, read the instructions and peel off the plastic wrapping and put it into the microwave.  You watch to make sure that we read the instructions carefully and set the microwave at the right temperature and for the right length of time.  When the pinger goes and it comes out you look over our shoulders and say ‘That was good – you get 10 out of 10’”. 

“Such an approach to schooling means nothing to us at all”, the Canadian girl had continued, “we would far prefer to invent the recipe for ourselves, go out and find the ingredients and work out how to mix them in the best way to produce something edible.  It might not look quite as professional as the pre-packaged meal, but even if you only gave us 3 out of 10 for doing it, we would feel a great sense of achievement.  By giving us 10 out of 10 for something that doesn’t really matter to us leaves us feeling that schooling is vacuous.” 

Leaving most of the cheeseburger uneaten, I sipped the rest of my beer as the words of the travelling chef came back to me: “Not much of a supper that – it’s not what I would give my man”.  And that is exactly what many of today’s teachers feel as, exhausted by the sheer boredom and pressure of daily routines and preparing pre-packaged lessons, they resign in frustration from the teaching profession.  It is a terrible shame.  It wasn’t that the ingredients in that cheeseburger were wrong, any more than it is that the ideas which are to be found in a school curriculum are wrong, it was just that they hadn’t been combined together in a way that satisfied my hunger, or – mixing metaphors – fulfilled a child’s need to work things out for itself.  And by pretending that this was a proper meal could never give job satisfaction to a so-called travelling chef.

Related posts:

1. A Journey Towards an Understanding of Learning: A Headteacher travels with Education 2000 to the 21st Century Learning Initiative
2. Paul Cappon, President and CEO of the Canadian Council on Learning
3. Relearning Learning: An Interview with John Abbott