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