Evidence vs Information
Here’s a question. Who knows best about how to teach children to read: teachers and headteachers, or the government? And here’s another question: who knows best about how to keep discipline in schools: teachers and headteachers or the government? They are serious questions, but one that education policy still fails to answer.
Most of the rhetoric around education at the moment focuses on giving schools more control over their own affairs. The people closest to the problem (those working in schools) know what needs to be done. And they are increasingly accountable directly to parents, through new governance arrangements and school choice – so let them get on with it.
But then there is also the mantra of ‘evidence-based policy’. If the research shows that synthetic phonics works best, then why not enforce that? If there are problems with discipline, why not do things like banning mobile phones?
The problem is that the two worldviews are in tension. What happens at the point when teachers and headteachers decide that it is a good thing for kids to have mobile phones with them at school? Because experience tells them it makes children safer, say. Or because they are being used imaginitively in the classroom. What happens if synthetic phonics doesn’t seem to be working for a child, but the national policy is to teach reading in this way? The professionals have the information about the progress - or otherwise - of the child, but government has the evidence that shows ‘what works’.
Here, I think, is another key issue to be resolved. Government has responsibility for schools, but how much should it prescribe in the way they are run? Particularly when it thinks it has clear evidence to support a particular approach. Some areas, like admissions policy, need a stern hand and clear rules set by government. But what else?
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It took Frank Lloyd Wright, an architect of all people, to point out that ‘the truth is more important than the facts’ and the great debates about education should really be concerned with allowing teachers the flexibility to teach each child as they need to be taught in order for them to reach their potential - and not prescribing how a teacher should teach.
Our own research for the project Building Communities for the Future is backing this up, in that government attempts at personalised learning models which are inherent in the BSF programme are coming up against a brick wall in some instances. As education funding means that money follows the students, the knock-on effect is that schools are wary of being radical in their visions for new forms of learning as they are competing against other schools in the area – often Grammar schools with very traditional models of learning. This means that targets and league tables take precedence over educational and pedagogical debates as each school is desperately seeking to fill all of its places for each school year. The danger for BSF and education in the next 25 years is that we will simply see a renewal of old building stock, and not a shift in how children are taught. Thus the attempt to update the Victorian model evident in many schools today will fail.
Although there is plenty of evidence to suggest that schools and students are improving year on year, the truth is that it is time to re-shape how children learn in the 21st century.