Education is about more than making sure the numbers add up
3:09pm Wednesday, 21st November 2007
The Conservatives yesterday unveiled some education policy proposals, but what is surprising about the substance of these policies is that there is a distinct lack of new ideas. Moreover, it seems that there is also something of a reluctance to look beyond a familiar source for policy inspiration. This is particularly evident in the proposal to allow parents and organisations to set up their own schools away from Local Authority input. There are a number of reasons why this is not where the debate on education policy in the UK needs to go.
Over the last few weeks and months, we have been speaking to a significant number of headteachers, teachers and others involved in educating the next generation of British adults for our project which examines the role of communities in the government’s ambitious Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme.
What strikes me most, is that for the people who are delivering centrally formulated education policies from day-to-day, there is a real gulf between political rhetoric and the experiences of schools. Even for a policy as visionary and undeniably ambitious as BSF, the realities of implementing a radical change in the model of learning in this country are concerned with handling a large number of competing, and often conflicting, priorities.
Inspections, targets and league tables, PPPs, PFIs and procurement as well as a funding model which breeds cutthroat competition for pupils are the issues which occupy a headteacher’s days. Despite the ‘evidence’ from Sweden, muddying the waters of school structures is no way to innovatively move education a step forward beyond such issues.
In fact, it is worth noting that such proposals aren’t innovative at all.
The Conservatives first tried this with grant-maintained schools under the Education Reform Act in 1988. This move was at no stage seen as a success, and the decade of grant-maintained schools was summarily brought to a close by the School Standards and Framework Act in 1998. What has brought Cameron and The Conservatives back to this notion is the relative success of some similarly run schools in Sweden.
It has been previously documented on this blog that David Cameron is somewhat of a fan of various aspects of ‘The Swedish Model’ in its current incarnation, but there is a danger of underestimating the differences between the UK and Sweden, particularly in the culture of schools and the wider learning community.
What matters most is not how a school is run, but how the children in the schools learn. The debate in this country needs to move towards what kind of adults we want to leave schools and sixth form colleges, and how children can be allowed to learn in a way that facilitates this.
Over the last few weeks and months, we have been speaking to a significant number of headteachers, teachers and others involved in educating the next generation of British adults for our project which examines the role of communities in the government’s ambitious Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme.
What strikes me most, is that for the people who are delivering centrally formulated education policies from day-to-day, there is a real gulf between political rhetoric and the experiences of schools. Even for a policy as visionary and undeniably ambitious as BSF, the realities of implementing a radical change in the model of learning in this country are concerned with handling a large number of competing, and often conflicting, priorities.
Inspections, targets and league tables, PPPs, PFIs and procurement as well as a funding model which breeds cutthroat competition for pupils are the issues which occupy a headteacher’s days. Despite the ‘evidence’ from Sweden, muddying the waters of school structures is no way to innovatively move education a step forward beyond such issues.
In fact, it is worth noting that such proposals aren’t innovative at all.
The Conservatives first tried this with grant-maintained schools under the Education Reform Act in 1988. This move was at no stage seen as a success, and the decade of grant-maintained schools was summarily brought to a close by the School Standards and Framework Act in 1998. What has brought Cameron and The Conservatives back to this notion is the relative success of some similarly run schools in Sweden.
It has been previously documented on this blog that David Cameron is somewhat of a fan of various aspects of ‘The Swedish Model’ in its current incarnation, but there is a danger of underestimating the differences between the UK and Sweden, particularly in the culture of schools and the wider learning community.
What matters most is not how a school is run, but how the children in the schools learn. The debate in this country needs to move towards what kind of adults we want to leave schools and sixth form colleges, and how children can be allowed to learn in a way that facilitates this.
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I agree that there is a big debate to be had about the purpose of education + about the kind of learning which will support that. And that is a debate that the standards/structures debate misses, despite being arguably the bigger question.
But that doesn’t mean that how the school system is organised doesn’t matter. How effectively children learn is not separate from how a school is run – it is, in part, a function of it. And how a school is run is, in part, a function of how the system around it is organised. Which brings us back to inspection, league tables and choice – and whether they produce an effective system or not.
The evidence fromSweden UK
As someone said, you can remove the policy but that doesn’t remove the policy dilemma that it was trying to solve. We can get rid of choice, leagues tables, and inspection – but that still leaves the question of how to address the gross unfairness of catchment areas, how to make sure there is proper accountability and how to spur innovation.
In my opinion, we have got it wrong when it is inspection, league tables and choice which ‘produce... a system’ and form the basis upon which teachers operate. In Finland, to hold up the currently accepted ultimate in educational models, there are no school inspections for example. What is really interesting about Finland is the different culture and attitude to teaching and learning. It is certainly not the case in this country that the famous Finnish statistic of having ten applicants for every teaching post holds true. Inspection and league tables as well as choice are about ensuring standards are as high as they can be. Surely it is wrong to set up these instruments around a system which is as outdated as our current model of teaching and learning - which hasn’t been reformed since the Victorian times – despite any utility these instruments may have.
This interesting article outlines just a couple of problems that were unforeseen in Stockholm, and increasing competition between schools to attract children is just adding another priority (marketing) to an already over-stretched Headteacher’s remit. One way around this may be to employ school business managers to address capacity issues, but this is then another step down the road towards a privatised education system. I am not saying that this is inherently a bad thing, but is it the most responsible and logical course of action when systemic curriculum change along the lines of flexible and personalised learning has not been at all tested?
I guess what I am fundamentally trying to say is that re-organisations along the lines of grant-maintained schools and other such systemic re-shuffling have been attempted before and have not changed the schooling our children receive on a mundane level. There has been much debate about the New York ‘schools within schools’, vertical tutor groups etc. but as a result of the looming inspections and competition for places, such innovation and experimentation is stifled rather than encouraged.
I am not simply bashing the policies and making a swift escape, I’m actually trying to articulate that it’s time to address the most difficult aspects of the education system. We’ve had the organisational debates and we will continue to have them, but what I’d really like to see is a debate and policy ideas (schools within schools etc) about what curriculum model and forms of learning will produce 21st century learners with the skills and confidence to contribute to modern society.
Inspections and structures define the rules of the education game - they matter immensely. It could be argued that the really significant improvements in education over the past decade were largely catalysed by systemic and nationally-driven reforms.
But real change is driven from within schools and a degree of experimentation is needed with new models of education - and we know that experiments are happening, not least in areas like Knowsley.
The difficult bit isn't encouraging teachers to innovate, but getting a systemic shift in the education system towards new models of learning. The problem is political - look at the way the Tomlinson report got buried because it dared to question the supposed 'gold standard' A-level.
The truth is that we face some real tensions around what and how we teach. Middle class parents are highly attached to the idea of a traditional education that leads their kids through the golden gates of the Russell group into the land of delicious goodies. At the same time, a lot of kids aren't even getting the basics of reading and writing.
So the political question is this: how does a system that often can't get the basics right, and which has a huge weight of tradition behind it, launch a paradigmatic shift into the information age?
The political is inexorably linked to the personal through public services and I agree that there needs to be political thought leadership in order to catalyse the change that needs to happen in individual schools.
Standards will continue to improve under the current system, and there is certainly the potential for elements of the Swedish system to work over here. The basic skills that are lacking in some kids when they leave school won’t be fundamentally addressed in Cameron’s scenario however, as it is still using the same teaching models.
So the political problem as I see it, is that politicians seem to want to act as uninterested plumbers in this scenario – fixing the old, leaky lead pipes and making sure they are checked regularly and rigorously to ensure the fewest possible leaks in the future, when what really needs to happen is a complete re-think of the whole system starting with what we want the sleek new infrastructure to support.
It’s probably time to stop the analogy here before I start equating new BSF school buildings with ‘floating’ toilets and Dyson handryers, but what would be great is if all sides of the political debate started talking about BSF and education in terms how we best equip young people in this country to participate in a global society as it’s terrain shifts in the future.
A paradigmatic shift could potentially be launched by debating these issues.
The subsequent question is whether such a shift could occur as part of a debate about how to squeeze the last drops of educational nectar from the old models as is being currently debated.