Seeing beyond political correctness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See Part Nine of Briefing Paper and Actions 1 and 2

This article is tagged: Education, government, politics.