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.