Friday 16 November 2007

Mark Taylor on the Battle of Ideas 2007 education debates

There were a number of specific education-related debates at this year’s Battle of Ideas festival. The most prominent on Saturday included the opening keynote ‘What is education for?’ and ‘Academic freedom under threat’ as well as ‘All tested out: what’s the point of exams?’ On Sunday, attention shifted to ‘Debating Darwin: should evolution be taught as the only truth?’ and ‘Moralising the curriculum: the battle for children’s minds.’ A number of other debates also included educational themes, such as ‘Toxic childhood’, ‘Teach the world to sing’, ‘Child protection: has adult paranoia gone too far?’ and ‘School sport: selling kids short?’ Inevitably, what follows is only a snapshot of the weekend, as there was (refreshingly) too much choice for anyone interested in these themes, particularly teachers like myself who are drip-fed an intellectually impoverished diet of ‘Continuing Professional Development’ – or constant patronising drivel.

More surprising was how superficially non-education related debates ended up talking about educational issues. This included sessions on ‘The politics of well-being: do we all need therapy?’ and ‘The new heresies’. This unexpected shift possibly validates the idea of education as a ‘pre-political’ intellectual area, and cautions us not to conflate education and politics, although they can appear to be the same thing in times – like ours - of confused political authority.

What pleased me most about the debates I attended was the intellectual movement across the two days as presenters and attendees talked through key themes and ideas. There was a definite sense of collectively working through and questioning of key themes – some of which we had only scratched the surface on at previous Education Forums. Although there were few definite conclusions, the Battle of Ideas really crystallised the long-term work of the Education forum and in many cases enabled us to enter the debates at a high-level of both clarity and rigour right from the start. For example, in the first session on ‘What is education for?’ David Willetts usefully introduced education as the transmission of a fixed body of knowledge between the generations. A few months ago, that might have been a satisfactory starting point (and even finishing-point) for those concerned to defend subject knowledge against attacks from various sources. However, the debate has moved on as the speech from Keith Bartley of the GTC proved. Keith framed his response – following his recent call for ‘active registration’ by teachers in the GTC - as aligning well with David Willetts through a balanced defence of subjects and self-directed learning in the context of the achievements of ‘Every child matters’. However, Frank Furedi pointed out that the education debate at present reflects a wider lack of meaning and purpose because it has lost a sense of foundational authority. Furedi was raising the issue of the wider collapse of educational culture and general expectations of what it means to be an educated human being. Following questions from the floor relating to the tendency to either lower intellectual aspirations or shift educational aims to the understanding of the self rather than the study of the world, it became clear that there was more of a difference between the speakers than was evident in the initial introductions. Willetts response was more of a restatement of his initial position, while Bartley pointed out that there was a big attempt to ‘challenge and engage’ children to a high-level. Furedi – seeking a way out from the two positions - attempted to re-present education as a creatively open-ended bridge between past and present. However, in asking the question what is education ‘for’, perhaps this debate did shift the focus too much towards rhetorical conjectures rather than intellectual assertions, leaving Bartley to think he had answered his critics. I would say that he had not, as later debates proved.

The session ‘All Tested Out’ addressed the crucial question of how we judge the knowledge of another human being – at a time of an increasingly artificial official ‘debate’ about examinations (as I pointed out in my Battle in Print written for this session) and diplomas. Tony Neal of the GTC put the case for exams as useful but stressful and contrary to the happiness and well-being of students. This was developed by Eric Macfarlane, who pointed out that exams often mistake limited educational objectives for the whole process of education. He noted that multiple intelligences are not examined in the current system, leaving the skills of many students unassessed. Macfarlane interestingly added that while head of a sixth-form college he had pioneered the introduction of unexamined courses, without affecting A-level results adversely. Shirley Lawes countered that we need to be careful not to focus too much on how we examine at the expense of what we examine, particularly through the current drive to focus on ‘Assessment for Learning’. She warned that much of the stress perceived in the current system was more of an expression of adult’s lack of confidence in education than the expression of genuine childhood worries. The implication, to recall the earlier remarks of Keith Bartley in the morning, was that ‘challenging and engaging’ should depend more on the internal logic of subject disciplines than the ‘needs’ of the children to ‘enjoy and achieve’. The audience discussion split between those in favour of exams and those concerned that children are over-examined, although many of those voicing the latter view were themselves children getting ready for examinations, indicating the level of interest this debate had generated. Time ran out as Dennis Hayes, convenor of the Education Forum, made the point that examinations are for subjects, whereas assessments are for skills - and observed that the latter are beginning to dominate the former, thus diminishing and confusing the character of education. The audience, wanting more, were left to take the issues away with them to the Royal College of Music for the beginning of the evening.

Sunday began with ‘Debating Darwin’, where the confusion at the heart of modern education was stripped bare in a brief discussion of the theory of evolution and whether it should be taught as the only truth alongside creationism. Steve Fuller entertainingly appeared to call for some sort of ‘teaching the controversy’ as part of scientific literacy. Simon Conway Morris argued for evolution as far superior to intelligent design, without confronting the teaching process. Physics teacher Dave Perks meanwhile stuck doggedly to the need for scientific principles to be taught through the distinct disciplines of physics, chemistry and biology – without formalising the ‘controversy’ in the science curriculum. For a non-expert like myself, the three speakers seemed to encapsulate the confusions of the current debate well. Steve Fuller was like the government, over-actively confusing everyone through the introduction of ‘21st Century Science’; Simon Conway Morris was the voice of pure science, wanting to be left alone to get on with it, but equally aware of pressure to present a ‘public face’; Dave Perks expressed the frustrations of schoolteachers wanting to teach their subject so that the next generation can become physicists, chemists and biologists like Conway Morris – if only they can be allowed to do so.

Later in the afternoon came the session ‘Moralising the curriculum’, designed to consider whether the government was turning every current social preoccupation – obesity, health, work, personal finance, happiness - into a school subject. Robert Whelan, editor of the recent publication Corruption of the Curriculum, stated that the academic integrity of the current curriculum was indeed being drained by the new approaches. This point was confirmed by Alex Standish, who noted the influence of concerns such as ‘global warming’ on the Geography Curriculum – as opposed to the traditional spatial knowledge supposedly at the heart of the subject. Sean Lang, meanwhile, observed that the subject of History should be allowed to deal with the issues raised in new ‘subjects’ such as Citizenship. He added that he had started a petition to argue the case for History to be compulsory to age 16. However, the well-informed Chair Kevin Rooney (who also wrote a Battle in Print) did challenge Lang on whether he had himself contributed to the current problems through previously advocating the introduction of citizenship. This debate really developed well, particularly through impressive audience contributions. One contributor pointed out that, contrary to the speaker’s views, the new national curriculum is actually less prescriptive and allows teachers freedom to make their own judgement on what to teach, especially for those children who are not going to be academic. So, for him, complaints of a moralisation of the curriculum were exaggerated – although he possibly forgot that teachers should be wary of diagnostically deciding who is going to be academic or not. Other contributors pointed to the inevitable relativisation of knowledge entailed in the constant pressures to incorporate more and more unacademic opinion in previously academic curricula. This confusion was well expressed by the young contributor who asked, ‘So am I intellectually ignorant just because I don’t know where places are on the world map?’ For me, he is indeed inferior, as we all are, if we allow ourselves to substitute political opinion for the intellectual core that should be at the heart of the academic curriculum. And I think this returns us to previous points made on Saturday about what education is for. Furthermore, as was articulated from the floor, we ought also to be constantly dissatisfied with our existing level of knowledge – in the sense of Socrates - and seek to improve it and better ourselves.

My final comment on this developing debate was that it usefully and unpredictably revealed – in the best sense of the Battle of Ideas – that something more distinctive is going on than the initial session title revealed. What we are really witnessing is not the ‘moralisation’ but the amoralisation of the curriculum, as the relentless introduction of new initiatives in fact ends up undermining all values and principles, including that of education itself?

The debate will continue at the next Battle of Ideas, 1st and 2nd November, 2008!

Sunday 21 October 2007

Kevin Rooney sets the target of first class education for the working class

There is much to agree with in the Tackling Educational Inequality report produced for CentreForum, the Lib Dem think tank. For a start it’s refreshing to see that they are prepared to state clearly that social and economic background remains the biggest single factor in determining a child’s educational achievements.

Looking back at the educational reforms over the past thirty years, including Thatcher’s 1988 Education Reform Act and Blair’s Curriculum 2000, it’s quite striking how the question of class inequality is overlooked or redefined as a ‘social exclusion’ or ‘low parental aspirations’ relevant to only certain pockets of people.

However, the problem with Tackling Educational Inequality is its recipe for changing this. While the report does argue for increased funding for the most disadvantaged pupils and schools, it locates the key to the problem of social inequality as further marketisation and the auditing of teacher and pupil performance.

The report sets out a range of proposals which will not only fail to solve the problem, but could make things worse: personalised learning strategies; foundation profiling; more use of the ‘Data Revolution’ to track individual student progress; training school governors in the assessment of school data; opening up the role of the head teacher to outside professionals; giving schools kite-marks on the quality of their data systems using a Michelin star style system and an increase in bonuses and performance target related pay for teachers.

To prove my point, let’s take just one of these ‘solutions’, the ambitiously titled ‘Data Revolution’. This irrelevant ‘solution’ views pupils as figures being tracked along a graph in robot-like fashion, immune from the active agency of the teacher-pupil relationship. Predicted grades, attainment targets, and the general culture of measuring and auditing, are a backwards step and will do nothing to reduce inequality of achievement between the richest and poorest pupils. Likewise, to propose yet more performance related pay assumes that teachers are motivated by financial incentives rather than a spirit of professionalism and public service – luckily, at least at the moment, that is not true!

As to the suggestion that outside professionals come into schools as head teachers – this process has already begun and has done little to combat educational inequality. ‘Outside Professionals’ have so far either been business managers who are brilliant at controlling budgets, or ‘super heads’ who will apparently inspire and give confidence to directionless teachers who don’t know what they are doing – a patronising assumption.

So top marks for this report for diagnosing the illness -but 0 out of 10 for their medicine. Call me old fashioned, but the main way for children from disadvantaged backgrounds to achieve their full potential is to lift them out of poverty. And aside from investing serious resources, the only other way I know of doing that is to offer the poor a first class education. Now that’s my kind of target!

The CentreForum publication Tackling Educational Inequality by Paul Marshall, with Sumi Rabindrakumar and Lucy Wilkins, published in July 2007 is available at:
http://www.centreforum.org/publications/tackling-educational-inequality.html

Sunday 14 October 2007

Dennis Hayes says there's a big hole in the Comprehensive Future

As Chair of the Standing Committee for the Education and Training of Teacher (SCETT), a body set up in 1981 by all the unions and professional associations with a direct interest in teacher education and training, I know how hard it is to get these organisations to produce any sort of joint statement.

This slight, 48 page pamphlet, from the pressure group Comprehensive Futures, Fair Enough? School admissions – the next steps, is impressive because it is supported by, and contains articles from the leaders of all the major teacher unions. In fact, almost everyone who is anyone campaigning for comprehensive schooling has a short piece in it. I counted over twenty contributions but the themes of all of them are well summarised in the title of Sarah Tough’s article ‘Selection, segregation, life chances and social mobility’.

The most entertaining and the most serious piece is Frances Beckett’ s article on ‘The Word Comp’ (pp 22-3). Becket reminds us of how nice words can cover up crap. You once had grammar schools along side ‘schools for thick working class kids’ called secondary modern schools that were quickly labelled ‘comprehensive schools’ to cover up the poor quality of education on offer.

What this pamphlet and the campaign covers up is something worse. In arguing for fair admissions and an end to selection, in order to bring about a comprehensive secondary school system, they cover up an important distinction, the distinction between comprehensive schooling and comprehensive education. What is missing here is any discussion of what sort of education would be on offer in the comprehensive future. Putting all kids in publicly funded secondary schools on some sort of equal footing is only a worthy aim if they get a decent education when they get there.

A decent education requires an educational curriculum with real subjects in it, science maths, English, history and not the contemporary offering of ‘themes’, ‘skills’, ‘citizenship’ and a dose of ‘personalisation’. If Beckett wanted to expose a contemporary linguistic cover-up it would be covering up with the word ‘personalised’ the sort of ‘curriculum’ that was offered to pupils with learning difficulties, that is, one that focuses on overcoming barriers to learning rather than concentrating on learning. In the case of students with learning difficulties this was the correct approach, but to give this curriculum to all is to treat children as if they all had special needs. With personalised learning all children and not just the working class kids are treated as if they were ‘thick’.

If the various writers happily co-operating here in liberal social engineering were asked to give their views of the content of comprehensive education the result would be friction and some heated debate. Uncomfortable as this may be, it would be a real step towards building a comprehensive future.

Fair Enough? School admissions – the next steps, was published by Comprehensive Futures in September 2007, and is available on line: http://www.comprehensivefuture.org.uk/

Details of SCETT can be found on its web site: http://www.scett.org.uk/

Friday 12 October 2007

Kathryn Ecclestone and Dennis Hayes ask researchers and policy makers to ‘Leave the kids alone’

A recipe for educational disaster is this. First, frighten children with horror stories of a world in which we are all doomed because of global warming, unless they are good citizens who recycle. Second, lock them away behind walls, sealed doors and security cameras and treat anyone who comes near them as a potential knife wielding maniac, or a paedophile who must have a ‘criminal record’ check. Third, tell them they are in danger of early death or diabetes unless they give up chips for carrots, and follow the way of Saint Jamie Oliver. Fourth, get them obsessed about their lack of ability to ‘learn to learn’, their low self-esteem, how they find it hard to cope, and make them discuss their feelings endlessly in learning power lessons, circle time and philosophy for children classes. Fifth, make them scared about going to secondary school and make them take part in psychodrama workshops to express their fears through ‘role play’.

These activities are all going on in schools, turning the global, social, physical and mental worlds into frightening and destructive prospects rather than liberating challenges. The recipe for disaster is followed with a seemingly progressive and caring response, namely teaching them a ‘vocabulary of feelings’ through numerous therapeutic activities that claim to help them deal with their free-floating fears and anxieties. More than one parent has been surprised to hear their five-year-old declare: "I’m feeling a little stressy today", or for their nine-year-old to come home saying he’s had "a very anxious day".

And so to the sixth ingredient - the latest in a deluge of reports about the state of children’s emotional well-being, Robin Alexander and Linda Hargreaves’ first offering from the Primary Review, based on 87 discussions with a total of 750 people. It notes the ‘pessimistic and critical tenor’ (p5) of talk about ‘the big issues’, of children being under ‘intense and excessive pressure’ from policy-driven demands, the breakdown of communities and the ‘insecure and dangerous world outside the school gates’ and ‘alarm’ about ‘global warming’ and a fear of crime and a ‘generalised fear of strangers’.

The report acknowledges, sensitively, that it may just be reporting transitory opinions, but concludes nevertheless: ‘This, for better or worse, is what these people say and how they feel’ (p44). Sue Palmer, author of Toxic Childhood, commented on the report for the BBC, saying 'It is very worrying that children are not feeling safe, that they don't even trust their friends'.

Such comments and the numerous recent reports over the past year in a similar vein are blind to how contemporary policy-making works. You make children and young people describe their fears and insecurities and then demand that the government steps in to resolve them. Even when children seem not to be as worried as the adults think, you suggest they are merely 'repressing their fears'. No doubt schools will soon be receiving 'advice and guidance' about how to be trusting and less fearful as a result of the report.

The result of this report and all the interventions currently going on in schools to deal with insecurities and fears is a disastrous spiral of decline into an obsession with safety by politicians, journalists, teachers, parents and children themselves. This obsession is rooted in the very agency – government – that was its cause and is now asked to deal with it.

Children’s fears reflect the policy concerns of the last few years. They are not cooped up and fearful 'battery children' but Blair and Brown’s children singing back to them in angel voices about the moral panics and fears policy makers themselves have promoted. If the DCSF were truly 'committed to improving the lives of children', as they said in response to the Review, they would bow out of the classroom 'leave the kids alone' and give the curriculum and teaching back to the teachers.

The Esmée Fairburn foundation and University of Cambridge University, Faculty of Education, interim report, Community Soundings: The Primary Review regional witness sessions, was published on 11 October 2007. The full report can be read as a pdf.

Tuesday 18 September 2007

Kathryn Ecclestone welcomes the first public challenge to the Social Emotional and Affective Learning Strategies for Schools (SEALS)

The renaming of the Department for Education and Skills as the Department for Children, Families and Schools removes 'education' as a social and political aspiration for the first time in 60 years. This enables the government to tune into popular concerns about unhappiness and well-being and, through 'Every Child Matters', to change the key purpose of educational institutions.

There is an unchallenged assumption that we face an unprecedented epidemic of mental health problems is now a key feature of social and welfare policy in the UK: the chief executive of the charity NCH was quoted in the Daily Mail on 20 July 2007, saying "the lack of emotional well-being amongst our children and young people is undermining the foundation of any social policy to combat social exclusion, deprivation or lack of social mobility. We urge Gordon Brown and his new Cabinet to commit to tackling this hidden and fast-growing problem". The Conservative Party has commissioned a review of children’s unhappiness as has the National Children’s Society.

A political shift from education to welfare institutionalises popular concerns about emotional vulnerability and unhappiness. Emotional interventions attract rising levels of funding. The Social, Emotional and Affective Learning Strategy for Schools cost £10m in 2007-8, with a further £31.2 million ear-marked over the next three years. Anti-bullying schemes cost £1.7 million a year, while peer mentoring currently receives £1.75 million. Another £60 million was added in July 2007 for schools to improve emotional well-being, phased over the next three years to be £30 million in 2010-11.

Unsurprisingly, a huge and lucrative huge industry is flourishing around emotional well-being and emotional literacy. Over 70 organisations and growing numbers of private consultants, including university academics, have created a deluge of interventions, guidance, training courses and text books around slippery and interchangeable concepts such as 'self esteem', 'emotional and mental well-being', 'emotional literacy' and 'emotional intelligence'.

Such initiatives include ‘circle time’, ‘nurture groups’, anti-bullying and mentoring schemes, drama workshops to deal with transitions and bullying, activities to develop ‘learning power’, ‘learning to learn’ and ‘self-esteem’, ‘philosophy for children’ classes, ‘emotional audits’ and ‘whole school strategies for emotional literacy’. There are over 30 different instruments to assess emotional well-being. The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority requires schools to assess young children’s emotional competence in a Foundation Stage Profile while the National Institute for Clinical Excellence is drawing up formal guidelines for primary schools to diagnose emotional well-being.

Until now, there has been no public challenge to all this. A recent report from the Centre for Confidence and Well-Being is the first serious criticism of this policy. It questions the way in which children’s emotions are being formalised, regimented and trained. It points to the poor theoretical and empirical base of evidence for notions such as self-esteem, emotional intelligence and emotional literacy and challenges the government to justify carrying out a ‘national psychological experiment on the nation’s children’. The report challenges the way that policy is founded on and reproduces images of emotionally ‘fragile’ and ‘vulnerable’ people who need ‘support’.

Although the report is right that emotional interventions are founded on dubious evidence and incoherent concepts, it is precisely the lack of evidence and incoherence of underlying ideas that enables government to relate to public ideas about emotional vulnerability.

Carol Craig (2007) The potential dangers of a systematic, explicit approach to teaching social and emotional skills (Glasgow, Centre for Confidence and Well-Being) http://www.centreforconfidence.co.uk/docs/SEALsummary.pdf

Monday 17 September 2007

Dennis Hayes on a special edition of the British Journal of Educational Studies (BJES) on ‘Citizenship and Democracy’

Another collection of academic papers on ‘citizenship’! What is there that is new to say about this so-called ‘subject’? A start could be made by pointing out that the cash cow of ‘citizenship’ is a very well-funded New Labour project to protect them from the bankruptcy of their politics, and their constant worry that, like the 400,000 active young citizens who walked out of their healthy school canteens into the nearest chip shops, we might all walk out of the ‘political [third] way’ and start thinking and acting for ourselves.

That said, this collection does manage to do something new. It expresses the profound problem, if not quite the profound paradox, of citizenship theory.

This is best expressed in Elizabeth Fraser’s contribution ‘Depoliticising Citizenship’. She argues that citizenship is being depoliticised, not least by proponents of ‘citizenship’ themselves, and reminds teachers in particular of the importance of the ‘political way’. She reminds teachers that ‘Conflict…is a necessary condition of the political process’ (p259) and that what goes on in schools is so frustrating, patchy and ineffective that it can be, ‘an object lesson in how awful and petty and useless politics is’ (p260).

She argues that citizenship has lost any sense of the political way because ‘liberal democratic political cultures have lost sight of the foundational political power that underpins them’ (p259). To re-politicise citizenship requires that teachers ‘and the rest of us need to practise facing up to the difficulty of political conflict’ (p261).

Fraser does not go far enough in her analysis. It is not facing up to the difficulty of political conflict that teachers and the rest of us need to practise; we need to practise political conflict. Of course, it would be philistine to argue in any other subject than citizenship that theorists should get their hands dirty. However, by the logic of their own arguments, theorists of citizenship have a special duty to be citizens and to take the political way, otherwise they do not combat cynicism, passivity and indifference to democracy, they add to them. The implication of theoretical analyses of the need for citizenship by pure theorists is that active citizenship is not for the clever but for the great untheoretical masses they lecture from the sidelines.

Theorists could say that arguing for the political way is to take the political way, but that would be playing with words.

Citizenship today is not a real topic as it was, for example, during the French Revolution where there was a discussion of citizenship and the role of citoyens actifs and citoyens passifs. Nothing was said then about citoyens théoriques. The armies of citoyens théoriques that exist today - educationalists, consultants, academics and citizenship teachers - are not part of the solution to social and political passivity but an expression of that problem that has the perverse consequence of increasing passivity.

Do these theorists think they are too clever to need to be citizens and that doing theory is all that matters? Or is it just that it is comfortable and rewarding work? Whatever the answer, taking the moral high ground about citizenship and democracy is not enough. Here the example of Socrates shows us what a model theorist and a model citizen can be; endlessly examining every individual about what is the very best thing that they can do. The result of Socratic practice, real citizenship, is never the ‘free maintenance by the state’ that our current citizenship theorists enjoy.

In citizenship theory, theorising is simply not enough, and the eight contributors to this volume could start on the political way by picking a fight or two in the academic, if not the real world.

James Arthur and Paul Croll (eds.) (2007) ‘Citizenship and Democracy’, British Journal of Educational Studies, Special Issue, Vol. 55, No. 3, September 2007. http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/toc/bjes/53/3?cookieSet=1

Friday 3 August 2007

Sarah Boyes on The Music Manifesto

The Music Manifesto is one in a long line of educational policy documents aimed at revolutionising the school curriculum, and one of the first to focus on an arts subject. Developed by the DFES, DCMS and Ofsted, boasting a coterie of musicians, music teachers and the musically-minded on its steering committee (headed by ‘Champion’ Marc Jeffrey), its explicit two-fold proposal is for music-making to be central to 4-14 year-old provision, and for instrumental lesson cost to be buffered for all children. The Manifesto addresses a real need for music syllabus change, and has managed to attract a great deal of well-meaning enthusiasm and support from passionate music-o-philes and fed up teachers alike.

But the clue to its real agenda lies in the name, risibly, The Music Manifesto, which is actually bent at unifying and motivating a supposedly culturally disparate and politically apathetic nation. The Manifesto elucidates primarily a waffley political vision, one based wholesale on the power of music. It’s a bit sad really, both for politics and for music.

Early on the Manifesto puts forward what it labels an ‘argument’: everybody can sing, therefore singing is universal, and it bangs on about the importance about developing a universal music provision. It’s as if the only inalienable thing people have in common any more – both politically and culturally – is the fact they can open their mouths and make some pseudo-musical noises, and it’s the Government’s job to let them do it. The problem with this is two-tone: not just is the notion of the ‘universal’ easily shown to be a misnomer ('everybody can poo therefore pooing is universal' proves nothing about the importance of going to the loo); but the fact that music is good only as the last garrison of universalism means no proper discussion of the right way to teach it (free from Government interventionism) can get off the ground.

Because the Manifesto isn’t so much about music education (or ‘provision’), so much as about dictatorially outlining why music is valuable and how it should be engaged with by children and adults alike. The cultural sphere becomes the political. The Manifesto talks about classrooms alongside community centres; music teachers alongside professional musicians; and places the same value on the musical life of adults as it does of that of children. It advocates a no-holds-barred position when it comes to distinguishing cultural life from formal education, and distinguishing private life from public. Music, it seems to say, is important only as a shared phenomenon, where it delivers health and confidence benefits (actually not quite as daft as it sounds), whose highest function is to bring people together regardless of religious belief or cultural background.

To reflect this, it advocates getting kids singing by having a more diverse range of music genres in schools. It rightly says that Classical music is not the only important or interesting sort, but only because other genres – like hip hop, music theatre and jazz – are more relevant to today’s youth. Rather than saying different types of music can be understood and learned about regardless of cultural background or religious belief, it seems to say they are important only because people have different cultural backgrounds.

It misses the proper way to construct universalism when it comes to music, which is to highlight certain features that all music shares: rhythm, harmonic structure and patterns of tension and release. To get at these things, however, takes a principled and formal approach to music education, focusing on music theory and history. Presumably these things are too ‘dull’ for today’s yobs and fly in the face of the shallow concept of a ‘creative’ subject concerned with personal expression.

But the real drive of the Manifesto comes from its excessive insistence on ‘participation’: apparently, nobody has ever ‘participated’ in music lessons before. Marry this with the emphasis on ‘personalised learning’, which allows children to choose what they sing and the onus is on them ‘feeling’ they have an influence in setting the agenda, and music lessons become little more than mini exercises in some sort of bastardised democratic decision-making. Despite the idea that children should make some music in schools being a good one, it becomes lost in a macabre project of behaviour modification, which is not immediately apparent from an enthused reading of the enthusiastic and repetitively enthusing text.

A worrying long-term consequence of the Manifesto comes with its vision for the future of Britain’s music industry. Rather than music education showing children the complexity and diversity of music, giving them tools to explore, create and better it on their own and alerting them to its potential, it advocates arming them with the skills to improve their ‘economic well-being’ through getting music-related jobs. Music copyright should be taught because it’s a hot issue, since much mainstream music is about sampling and rehashing old tunes in order to comment on culture and assert identities; skills in dealing with music equipment are key. This cloying and static picture of what music is and where it can go refuses to acknowledge that music has developed over time and should continue to do so, and this sort of educational system will produce few inspiring and knowledgeable music teachers for future generations.

Worse, the Manifesto leaves little room for a personal and private appreciation of music. Whilst group singing is supposed to iron out inequalities in music opportunities by providing a music education for all, it does little to accommodate the tone-deaf, the potential academic scholars or the musically gifted. It seems to say anybody who isn’t moved by or interested in music – anybody who doesn’t feel the unconquerable need to sing every morning – is a lesser human being. The strange logical inference steps in again, where ‘I like singing’ seems to entail the truth of ‘everybody should sing’. Music becomes a necessarily shared activity, where learning to appreciate a symphony and growing with it over time, listening to the radio or attending a concert, are not sanctioned musical activity.

The Manifesto wants more people to make more noise, but it certainly doesn’t want more music.

The Music Manifesto has a dedicated website: http://www.musicmanifesto.co.uk/.

Monday 18 June 2007

Colin Christie ponders the educational jargon and flawed proposals in the Secondary Curriculum Review

The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) in its Secondary Curriculum Review presents us with a bewildering range of new educational jargon: ‘curriculum lenses’, ‘importance statements’, ‘curriculum dimensions’ and ‘key concepts’ among others. As so often, teachers are expected to embrace a whole new vocabulary and frame of reference. Familiar ideas are not developed and expanded within current frameworks but repackaged and relaunched to maximise impact. The result is confusion.

At the heart of the review is the aim of a more flexible curriculum where content overload is reduced and pupils and teachers alike have more room to explore areas in depth and make links between subjects. The implementation of this aim is flawed in several ways.With attainment elevated to such a key indicator of a school’s, and government’s success, published in league tables, one would expect any curriculum review to address the issue of how it will improve and measure attainment. The secondary curriculum review, however, appears to treat curriculum and assessment of learning as two entirely separate issues. The proposals highlight changes to the programme of study (what should be learnt) but nowhere propose revisions to the descriptors of the levels of attainment (what aspects of that learning must be demonstrated).

The argument may be advanced that the level descriptors themselves are in many cases very general and allow for a variety of content. However, this hardly represents a systematic, coherent approach to curriculum planning, whereby new syllabus content has to be grafted onto pre-existing assessment criteria.

Even if one accepts that the existing national curriculum assessment criteria can be fitted into the new curriculum, two questions remain.

Firstly, the backwash effect of the GCSE examination. The current national curriculum for modern foreign languages (MFL), for example, already allows teachers to stipulate content. It has, in effect, been content free since the areas of experience were removed in the last review. In practice, however, teachers import the GCSE specification into KS3. This has the demotivating effect of the KS3 topics being revisited (often in their entirety) at KS4. It is, in other words, the GCSE specifications which drive the KS3 syllabus for MFL as teachers seek to give learners an ‘early start’ to GCSE, taking the long view on maximising examination results. It seems totally irrational not to review the GCSE specifications at the same time, taking the KS3 outcomes as stepping stones to KS4 outcomes.

Secondly, the review states: ‘By its very nature, most assessment is not one-size-fits-all but must be specific to the learner, personalised and therefore inclusive, that is, relevant to all learners in the class’. This statement is simply at odds with the current national, centralised GCSE assessment regime. Alternatives, such as the German Abitur, where teachers submit locally devised assessments for approval by the regional education minister are not discussed. Instead, teachers and senior managers are encouraged to plan the detail of what is taught and how. It is highly questionable as to whether the job of curriculum planner, isolated in a department or even as a whole school, is a teacher’s role. If this is a valid role, it is doubtful that teachers will be given any extra quality time to fulfil it. In the field of MFL, in the late 1970s, teachers came together at grass roots level, in regional groups, to devise graded objective tests for learners. This was a successful enterprise, which formed the basis of the GCSE examination. It will take a similar time commitment for teachers to be able to work together to produce meaningful curriculum documents. Furthermore, it is important for teachers to work within the framework of a shared approach to subject-specific pedagogy, building on effective practice. The development of curriculum programmes on a school-by-school basis will lead to a further erosion of this shared understanding.

Finally, if it is the role of government to establish a coherent curriculum which teachers can then adapt, that coherence is missing. Teachers still have to work with different frameworks which are independent of each other: QCA schemes of work; subject-specific teaching frameworks, programmes of study, attainment descriptors and GCSE specifications. Only a review which considers all of these together would be one worthy of the word ‘coherence’.

Details of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) Secondary Curriculum Review can be found on the QCA web site: http://www.qca.org.uk/secondarycurriculumreview/.

Mark Taylor responds to the GTC’s view of the future of assessment in schools

The General Teaching Council (GTC) has applauded the Education and Skills Select Committee (ESSC) inquiry into testing and assessment in England’s schools. According to the GTC, England’s pupils are among the most tested in the world, leading to a narrowed curriculum where teaching is ‘to the test’. For the GTC, a broad and balanced curriculum would be better than the current test-based one, which encourages anxiety and de-motivates children.

Unfortunately, the GTC does not provide details of the content of such a curriculum. Instead, referring approvingly to 2020 Vision (see my review on Education Opinion), the GTC notes that the current assessment system ‘may impede the full realisation of new approaches to education, including more personalised learning.’ 2020 Vision is also praised for perceiving that national tests are not ‘diagnostic tools’ of pupils’ learning needs. Furthermore, national tests fail to develop ‘desired skills and aptitudes’.

The GTC also backs the fashionable pedagogical idea of ‘Assessment for Learning’ (because it redefines teacher-pupil interaction) and supports the government’s new 14-19 diplomas: ‘Their introduction provides the opportunity to begin the process of moving away from an assessment system dominated by the purposes of quality control and ….towards a more balanced model with a greater element of diagnostic and formative assessment for learning.’ (Paragraph 18)

This report usefully clarifies the educational aims of the GTC in relation to government policies. For both, there is no longer a connection between subject knowledge and assessment. Instead, assessment means creating ‘diagnostic tools’ to develop ‘desired skills and aptitudes’ in a more ‘balanced’ system. And ‘quality control’ (national testing) should be replaced by ‘cohort sampling’ (local self-evaluation based on ‘professional judgment’ by teachers). Not surprisingly, therefore, the GTC report confirms their opposition to the ‘measurement culture’ set up by the 1988 Education Reform Act, which originally introduced the national curriculum.

This can all sound appealing to teachers weary of government initiatives. But this is not ‘professional judgment’ in the sense that should matter most to teachers – their love of their subject and the way it is taught. And this is not ‘balanced’ in the sense of the education that most members of the ESSC have had. However flawed the 1988 Act was, at least it offered a national curriculum rooted in genuine subject knowledge. The GTC report is really arguing for the replacement of external examinations of subject knowledge with internal examinations of the child’s mind.

The GTC proposals merely aim to replace one measurement culture with another. It is a further indication that self-assessment is becoming the central component of the educational system - and that subject knowledge is perceived as irrelevant. The GTC is right to argue that tests are undoubtedly unimaginative and possibly overdone. However, children are perfectly capable of doing them – and so much more besides, if only they are taught by adults who themselves value a genuinely intellectual education – and the subjects that provide it.

The GTC paper Assessment in the Future: Building the Case for Change was presented to the GTC pupil assessment conference on 21 March 2007.

A paper based on the report was presented to the Education and Skills Select Committee in June 2007.

Sunday 10 June 2007

Dennis Hayes examines some arguments about the demise of subject teaching in a report from CIVITAS

The Corruption of the Curriculum, a new book from CIVITAS, argues that schools are used to promote political objectives, and fashionable values, whether or not they relate to the discrete subjects that made up traditional education. If a teacher does not pass on the particular ‘grammar’ of the ‘corpus of knowledge’ applicable to subjects, argues the editor, Robert Whelan, then pupils will be forever denied access to those subjects and, we should add, to the knowledge and understanding that constitute our essential humanity.

This theme is pursued by Frank Furedi, in his introduction, who argues that the contemporary crisis in education is unique because education has become politicised. There are three destructive tendencies in this politicisation: the loss of faith in knowledge; a philistine pedagogy that rejects standards of excellence in education as ‘elite’, and the infantilisation of children and young people brought about by seeing them as vulnerable and, therefore in need of therapeutic, or emotional ‘education’. Furedi suggests that we need to depoliticise education, and reverse these destructive tendencies, by arguing for knowledge, for elite education, and by taking children seriously and not denying their potential.

This is the context that explains the dire state of subject teaching in English (Michele Ledda); Geography (Alex Standish); History (Chris McGovern); Modern Foreign Languages (Shirley Lawes); Mathematics (Simon Patterson) and Science (David Perks).

Furedi’s identification of the destructive tendencies that constitute the contemporary crisis of education is a useful starting point as the authors that follow identify several specific instances of these in their own subjects. Ledda shows, by reference to the literature from examination boards, that what has been taken out of the English Curriculum is the canon of English literature, along with standard English, which is now treated as just another dialect. Standish details how geography is a vehicle for environmentalist propaganda and global citizenship training. McGovern tracks the impact of the ‘new history’ from 1972 to show how it brought about a rejection of history as a body of knowledge, particularly its chronological aspect, leading to political selection of topics and the fragmentation of understanding. Lawes criticises the dull instrumental approach that puts pupils off foreign languages and argues that, unless they are defended as giving access to high culture, their decline will continue. Patterson looks at the repetitious and incoherent subject that mathematics has become in the national curriculum, the structure of which precludes student understanding, and puts them off maths. Finally, Perks pulls to pieces the new science GCSEs and argues that, by approaching science through the contemporary academic prism of relativism, they make science uncertain rather than objectively true. He ends his paper with what is a six point manifesto for science education. It should be on every science teacher’s classroom wall.

This book does something different from the mass of works bemoaning the overwork and stress caused by an over-assessed and bureaucratised curriculum. It exposes the anti-intellectual political manipulation of the curriculum that is destroying education.

A young adult exposed to this new curriculum could have no idea who Milton is, be unable to speak standard English, point out important places on a map, know nothing of many major historical events, be unwilling to learn a foreign language, not understand basic mathematics, and see magic as an acceptable alternative to science. This disgraceful situation is not young people’s fault, but that of those who distort their education for political ends.

One general criticism of this book must be made. It is all well and good to describe the crisis of education and to assert that knowledge and the disciplines should be defended. It is another thing to provide a convincing case for what Furedi at one point calls a ‘faith in knowledge’. This book suggests that there is a need for another, In Defence of Knowledge, or the battle against the corruption of the curriculum will not be won.

Robert Whelan (Ed.) The Corruption of the Curriculum, London: CIVITAS: ISBN 978 1 903386 59 0. Price: £9.50. Published on 11 June 2007: www.civitas.org.uk

A summary appeared in the Daily Telegraph on 11 June.

Thursday 17 May 2007

Dennis Hayes on a new book from the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL)

This book from Johnson et al puts forward one simple idea. Let’s get rid of curriculum subjects! Not merely develop cross-curriculum themes and such like, but replace them entirely with skills. Why be stuck in a ‘subject-based mould which was outdated in the nineteenth, never mind the twenty-first century’ (p8). Why support an intellectual education that was the property of the privileged? Why support a dreadful situation in which education was set out ‘in the form of subjects [and]…Although each subject had its own methods and skills, it was described predominately in terms of its knowledge. [and] Facts were considered non-problematic’ (pp24-25). How dreadful! An intellectual curriculum described predominately in terms of knowledge!

What do they want to put it its place of the ‘knowledge model’? It’s not just academic or work skills but something based on ‘an analysis of what school leavers in the twenty-first century need’ (p71). They admit they aren’t producing a ‘definitive list of skills’ (p96). But they do look at lots of lists that contain things like:

"basic skills, effective communication, thinking skills, team work, information literacy, learning habits, social skills, interpersonal (listening; body language; empathy) and intrapersonal skills (self-esteem; self management), competency in using and working with the physical world, and skills of creativity…"

There is even a chapter on a ‘do-it-yourself’ local curriculum, full of skills oddly described, given the themes of the book, in terms of local ‘knowledge’. All this is claimed to be so much more modern than the old universal curriculum subjects that developed over two thousand years; science, mathematics, history, literature and philosophy!

This ‘radical’ approach is claimed to be a way of motivating pupils and teachers trapped in the over assessed and regulated ‘subjects’ of the national curriculum. In a final moment of bathos, Johnson et al say that their book may be seen as ‘wishy-washy’ or ‘heralding the end of civilisation’ (p148).

The best thing about their book is that they push to the limit the arguments of the government and many educationalists about the importance of skills in a changing world. It is good to have a book that draws out the logic behind initiatives such as citizenship ‘education’, ICT training and the ubiquitous ‘outcomes’ of Every Child Matters.

But Johnson et al have really gone ‘skill crazy’. It is not skills based on what a child ‘needs’ that are modern, but subjects. Of course some school ‘subjects’ are not subjects, ‘citizenship’ being the obvious example. But the broad division of human knowledge in subjects is a way of initiating children into their very humanity. It is the intellectual that makes us human. At a time when scientific knowledge is expanding, and Bacon’s vision of knowing the ‘causes and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible’ is becoming real, Johnson et al want to deny future generations access to this knowledge.

There is a diminished idea of children and young people operating behind this ‘radical’ proposal. The authors give it away when they say: ‘We need a bit of honesty in this analysis. Most people are not intellectuals. Most people do not lead their lives predominately in the abstract. It is not clear that it would be preferable to do otherwise: the world cannot survive only through thought’ (p72). The message here is that ordinary people are basically only fit for training not education.

This is a profoundly anti-intellectual position which, by dressing itself up in criticism of ‘social elites’, masks the fact that this proposal actually takes away education from ordinary children. It is depressing but typical of our times. Politicians and policy wonks, often with Oxbridge backgrounds, have no faith in education for the masses.

How different it was ninety years ago, when policy makers saw that ‘elite’ education was should be for all children. H.A.L Fisher put it well in 1917 when introducing his Education Bill: ‘education is one of the good things in life’ he declared, and that the ‘principles upon which well-to-to parents proceed in the education of their families are valid; also mutatis mutandis for the families of the poor’.

The response to this radical book should be as bold and simple as its underlying thesis but should clearly state the counter thesis: stick to the subjects.

Subject to Change: New Thinking on the Curriculum was launched 9 May 2007. By Martin Johnson, with Nansi Ellis, Alan Gotch, Alison Ryan, Chris Foster, Julie Gillespie and Monique Lowe. ATL: London. £9.99.
http://www.atl.org.uk/atl_en/news/Media_office/releases/curriculum_launch.asp

Tuesday 20 March 2007

Joanna Williams on Raising Expectations

“If you don’t want to be here, there’s the door,” has been a much used phrase of mine when teaching unruly sixth-formers. In twelve years I’ve only ever had one person actually leave but the reminder of the voluntaristic nature of their presence settles even the most rowdy miscreants. However, new proposals outlined in the government’s Green Paper, Raising Expectations: staying in education and training post-16, look set to change all of this. No longer will youngsters be free to decide at sixteen whether to remain in education or training or to take their chances in the labour market. Raising Expectations sets out plans for “compulsory participation” (p.5) in a bid to ensure that even the 10% of seventeen year-olds not enticed by bribes of Educational Maintenance Allowance payments are forced to remain in education or training.

The main argument to emerge from Raising Expectations is that the economy of the future no longer needs such a large supply of unskilled labour as it has done in the past and so to ensure the employability of the nation’s youth, they must all gain qualifications. Indeed, the gaining of accredited qualifications is actually considered more important than any actual skills youngsters may gain: “in order to count as participating, young people would be required to work towards accredited qualifications,” (p. 6). Assuming the DfES is correct and the economy is changing, there are good arguments to suggest that compelling seventeen and eighteen year-olds to remain in the classroom will not make them remotely more employable.

Most importantly, this legislation will serve to infantilise older teenagers by denying them an initiation into the adult world and prolonging their childhood for an extra two years. At present, even youngsters staying on at school have somehow made a decision about the future direction of their lives. Those gaining even low level employment are forced to grow up and take on board more adult responsibilities. Flipping burgers requires you turn up on time, wear the correct uniform and follow health and safety procedures or you are out of a job and without a wage: a consequence far more real than any idle threats a teacher may come up with. Although clichés, there is undoubted truth in sayings such as ‘the best way to get a job is to have a job’ and that when it comes to gaining employment, ‘it’s not what you know but who you know’. Being cut off from entering the labour market prevents youngsters gaining experience or meeting the adults who may eventually help them find work.

In the classroom, youngsters already turned off by school, perhaps placed on Increased Flexibility Programmes or drilled by former-squaddies in basic skills since the age of fourteen, are not likely to greet a further two years with renewed enthusiasm. Young people are not daft: they will be fully aware that in the future, with everyone working towards gaining accredited qualifications until they are eighteen, those of them with low-level paper credentials will merely be seeking the same employment (and at the same wage) as previously sought by unqualified sixteen-year olds.

This infantilisation has damaging and dangerous consequences, not just for a young person’s employment prospects, not just for teachers forced to think of ever more ridiculous ways to entertain disillusioned youngsters but for education and for the whole of society. Education of older teenagers depends upon voluntarism, teachers assume youngsters are interested in what they have chosen to study. Remove the presumption of free will and what we are left with are dumbed-down containment programmes that certify participation. As a nation we are left with a youngsters prevented from reaching maturity, although physically adult and able to marry and have children, eighteen year olds will still be financially dependent and in a state of prolonged intellectual and emotional adolescence.

The green paper was published on 22 March 2007 and can be found at: http://www.dfes.gov.uk/publications/raisingexpectations/

Shirley Lawes on ‘The Dearing Languages Review

When it was first announced that Lord Dearing and Dr Lid King, National Director for Languages, had been appointed to investigate the crisis in foreign languages in schools, teachers and foreign language specialists welcomed the attention to be given to their beleaguered subject. It was no mean challenge to try to sort out the mess of government policy on foreign languages and to salvage their role as an essential element of the school curriculum.

Their recently published Languages Review is disappointing on both counts. The report seeks numerous ways of reinvigorating foreign languages, calling for ‘action to recover the situation’ and extra funding, as well as placing great emphasis on the importance of foreign language learning in the primary school. However, Dearing side-steps the real problem: in 2004 the government made foreign language learning optional at Key Stage 4 and since then numbers have fallen drastically. As a result of this policy decision, foreign language learning in English state secondary schools is in terminal decline. But, instead of proposing the reversal of the policy, Dearing prefers to recommend ‘incentives’ to schools to encourage greater participation. Only if schools don’t manage to halt the decline in numbers of pupils opting for continuing to learn a foreign language at Key Stage 4, does the report propose a return to statutory status. This is more than a missed opportunity, it is an evasion of the key issue which has the effect of legitimising the prevailing view that languages are too hard for most young people and they aren’t up to the challenge.

The Languages Review notes that the fall in numbers of pupils taking foreign languages at Key Stage 4 is closely linked to social class. He is right, since 2004 schools with higher levels of pupils from relatively deprived backgrounds were first in the queue to abandon compulsory status in 2004. The message went out to schools and young people: that foreign language learning was not for the working class, and as a result they opted out.

Dearing’s attempts to address this issue will only make the problem worse. Instead of defending foreign language learning as part of what should be a good education for all, he recommends that in order to encourage pupils to continue with languages after Year 9, schools should be looking at alternative accreditation to GCSE. He suggests a curriculum development that reflects what has already been introduced in science, that is, ‘alternatives which suit the different requirements of young people depending on their aspirations and aptitude (for science)’. For foreign languages, this means the abandonment of any meaningful learning that sees foreign language as a gateway to universal culture, in favour of formalising a ‘get by’ curriculum for the majority. It will be left to the independent sector, where the study of languages continues to be compulsory to GCSE level, to take foreign language study seriously. Already 30% of undergraduates come from outside the state sector. Foreign language learning is once again becoming an 'elitist' subject area.

The Dearing Languages Review as a whole reflects the prevailing preoccupation with the functional foreign language learning for vocational reasons. Despite a number of individual recommendations that one wouldn’t argue with, like funded immersion courses, trips abroad, and a review of the GCSE exam syllabus, the report offers an impoverished view of what foreign languages could contribute throughout every young person’s education.

The Dearing Languages Review, published on 12 March 2007, is available at: http://www.teachernet.gov.uk/teachingandlearning/subjects/languages/languagesreview/

Kevin Rooney on What schools are for and why by John White

Have you ever stopped to consider why we teach the subjects we do in schools? Why is it that no rationale has ever been put forward to justify why English schools teach what they teach? This question forms the introduction to John White's pamphlet, What schools are for and why. The author has spent nearly thirty years thinking about this question. His latest thoughts are significant for two reasons. He goes further than ever before, in attacking most of the current subjects taught in schools as elitist and irrelevant. He also puts forward his own proposals for what the underlying aims and objectives of the National Curriculum should be. The author is correct to point out that the aims and direction of education policy are not the preserve of teachers to decide upon. This is a political question and links into what type of society we want to live in and what sort of society we want to create for the future. However, this is the only point in the book I agree with.

The climate in education today is one in which very few people are prepared to unapologetically defend knowledge content or subjects in their own right. White is hostile to academic learning for its own sake. He goes to great lengths invoking the Victorians, and the Puritans before them, to demonise the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Throughout the book there are constant references to subject knowledge being a middle class or elitist pursuit.

My concern is that this approach to intellectual enquiry in schools is a view shared by government and QCA. When no one makes the case for a broad based liberal education based on the pursuit and transmission of knowledge then it was only a matter of time before something else filled the vacuum created by the hollowing out of knowledge content in school subjects.
In the past society affirmed the role of schools in terms of the balance between the explicit transmission of knowledge and the implicit socialisation process. Now that balance has been reversed and the transmission of knowledge has been dramatically downgraded to make way for more instrumentalist demands.

The model of a young pupil is no longer a robust curious individual capable of thriving through the study of history, science or a range of ideas. As White himself notes more than half of the time is now spent on developing personal skills and character. The author argues that school should teach more relevant life skills and that these instrumental skills are more relevant and valuable than abstract study.

Unfortunately, this is what schools already prioritise: ‘Be healthy, stay safe, economic well being, sex and relationships, citizenship, participation, cultural diversity. These are now the staple diet of today’s schools. White’s attack on traditional subjects is packaged as radical and egalitarian. In reality he is singing from the same hymn sheet as the educational establishment. There is nothing radical or progressive in denying every young person no matter what their creed, class or colour the accumulated wisdom of humanity. This is a noble ideal and well worth defending. By downgrading subject knowledge and transforming schools into explicit conduits of socialisation tasked with a range of instrumental demands like tackling social exclusion or apathy and poor voter turnout the government make two grave mistakes:

1) they transform schools into philistine institutions more concerned with brain washing and behaviour modification than real education;

2) they look to schools to solve the perceived breakdown in social cohesion be it cynicism towards politics or the crisis of British identity.

The point is…these are political and social problems, best dealt with by politicians and civil society not teachers!

Contrary to White, subject based knowledge and enquiry is a universal aspiration that does not belong only to a particular elite. For me, it drives the very essence of what it is to be human. There is a body of knowledge worth defending. It’s time those of us who value our respective subjects came out fighting and entered the battle of ideas over exactly what schools are for and why.

John White’s What schools are for and why (IMPACT Pamphlet No 14: Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain) was launched on 27 February. Details are available from http://www.philosophy-of-education.org/branches/branch3.asp

Mark Taylor on 2020 Vision: Report of the Teaching and Learning in 2020 Review Group

‘Personalised Learning’ is all the rage in current educational debates. The 2020 Vision report makes ‘personalisation’ a central aim of schooling, as a way of liberating children from the perceived failures of the ‘factory’ comprehensive model. Instead, ‘learning guides’ are proposed to support children’s learning in a system where students pay more attention to ‘learning how to learn’ than to subject knowledge. As part of this process, primary school methods are proffered as educational ‘best practice’ for all.

The educational innovators behind this report, although they would reject this accusation, constitute a deeply conservative elite. They appear to debate different approaches to education whether through the idea of our ‘multiple intelligences’, learning styles, or emotional literacy, but they are really rationalising the fact that they no longer believe in a humanistic education for all children and young people.

Their lack of confidence in a universal humanistic education has led them to do a number of things. Firstly, they have begun to dismantle key university departments and school subjects; secondly, they have begun to focus their thinking on subjective intelligence and learning more than public knowledge and education; thirdly, they use an increasingly obscure language with which to explain their proposals. ‘Personalisation’ is now the concept through which they hope to cohere the dismantling of universal humanistic education. Through the apparently anti-elitist language of personalisation they are removing access to the subject based education that initiates young people into human culture in favour of an impoverished idea of human nature based on the idea -- familiar to teachers of children with ‘special needs’ -- that learning to learn is more important than what is learned.

‘Personalisation’ means that the rationale for education becomes increasingly behavioural rather than intellectual -- and the word ‘intellectual’ is put on the defensive. But a system increasingly focused on learning behaviours shifts the emphasis of schooling and parenting. Teachers and parents are increasingly pressurised to ‘support’ or ‘mentor’ the child in their learning. Or, to put it another way, developing learning behaviours is being substituted for the acquisition of subject knowledge.

With the ‘personalisation’ of schooling, children relate only to themselves, and are guided only to learn about themselves. The child, despite the psychological rhetoric about valuation, uniqueness and learning, has been intellectually abandoned. The clearest example of this is the idea that what is needed is not ‘personalisation’ but the even more obscure notion of ‘deep personalisation’ that leaves the teacher and the child floundering in an attempt to construct their personal understanding of the world.

Far from being an educational advance, ‘personalisation’ articulates a proposal to abandon education as we knew it.

2020 Vision: Report of the Teaching and Learning in 2020 Review Group was published on 4 January 2007. It is available at: http://www.teachernet.gov.uk/docbank/index.cfm?id=10783