When everyone is accountable, no one is responsible
The intractable problems in the regulation of public services that have emerged in the past few years have finally come to a head. Barely a day goes by without a national newspaper or news bulletin highlighting major failures and inconsistencies, or the absurdities of ‘regulation gone mad’.
The failings of Ofsted have become so obvious, the problems so unmanageable, the rules so abstruse and confusing, the outcomes of inspections so unpredictable, that even those whose careers depend on implementing government initiatives, such as headteachers and directors of children’s services, have started to speak out. And as the schools and hospitals regulators are being lambasted from all sides, Ofsted responds by blaming boring teachers, while the Care Quality Commission (CQC) thinks the problem is an excessive reliance on numerical data.
One thing is certain: public confidence in the system has been undermined. Many now realise that often the reports that are supposed to guarantee the quality of public services are not worth the digital paper they are written on. How can Ofsted give Haringey children’s services three stars one moment and fail them the next? How can hospitals that have just received a good rating by CQC then be failed by Monitor? And how can the same hospital trust, South Manchester, be rated one of the ten safest in the country one year and a failing hospital the next by the Dr Foster report? Have the people who work there suddenly become incompetent? The same point applies to public examinations. How can both GCSE and A-level examination results improve without fail every year? Surely one would expect to see some cycles, even if the longer term trend is upwards? The media have treated the recent very slight fall in primary SATs scores as a scandal, but cycles should be normal. The real scandal should be the artificial increase in scores. There must be a degree of creative accounting in this ‘system of accountability’.
Unfortunately, with the regulators and the regulated shifting the blame onto each other, the part of the system that should be held responsible the most, government policy, has been let off the hook. This should come as no surprise, since the purpose of regulation is precisely to shift responsibility away from government policy and onto ‘systems of accountability’. In order to understand this shift, it is worth reflecting on the difference in meaning between the adjectives ‘responsible’ and ‘accountable’. They are often used as synonyms, but they refer to very different kinds of ethos.
Those who are responsible follow their own judgment and take full responsibility, as far as it is humanly possible, for their activities; those who are accountable only take limited responsibility. Their responsibility is limited to following the rules and fulfilling the targets they have been set and for which they are accountable. If they have followed all the rules to the letter and a patient still dies, a child is abused or remains ignorant, they cannot be held responsible, and rightly so, as the rules, not their own judgement, are responsible.
A responsible teacher exercises his own judgment and concentrates on teaching his subject to the best of his abilities, while an accountable teacher worries about teaching to the test, telling children about levels and assessment objectives, filling in lesson plans and writing WILFs (What I’m Looking For) and WALTs (We Are Learning To) on the board, and all the worst practice Ofsted enforces. Similarly, a responsible doctor exercises her own judgment and acts in the best interest of her patients, while an accountable doctor practises defensive medicine and worries about meeting targets.
A responsible politician will try to implement a policy that embodies a particular vision and public spirit, whereas an accountable politician will ask focus groups and independent inquiries what to do. Accountable politicians will say that vision should come from consumers and that what matters is ‘what works’. In this way, government policy is not judged according to a particular ideal of public service, but only assessed on whether it meets the targets it sets for itself, or that have been set by an ‘independent’ body.
Of course, real people in real life situations are never entirely responsible or entirely accountable. Since no system is perfect, professionals have always had to cover their backs to some degree, as well as exercising their judgment and following the ideals of their profession. Life doesn’t follow precise rules and in the real world you do need to exercise your own judgment. Without human judgment, nothing would work at all. Yet today there are more and more powerful pressures on the increasingly regulated to abandon judgment and responsibility and to embrace accountability.
When a tragic death occurs that captures the media’s attention, an independent inquiry will be set up, taking both the heat and responsibility away from politicians. Lord X or Sir Y will make proposals for new and more stringent regulations with the promise to make another tragedy more unlikely ... until the next one happens, that is. In the process, the ability of professionals to exercise their judgment and take responsibility is further restricted. They are more and more encouraged to follow guidelines and cover their own backs. This only creates a vicious circle of anxiety, which leads to more and more regulation and less and less responsibility.
Many seem to think that we could not live without a ‘system of accountability’, that it would be impossible for public services to function without a regulator. Yet there was a time when people thought they could not live without guidance from the Church of Rome. Then they realised that it was possible to read and interpret the Bible by themselves, to exercise judgment and be directly responsible for their own actions.
I think that we need a similar shift from external guidance to self-government, and that the best and most efficient way to run public services would be to inject some public spirit into them and establish a system of responsibility. In order to do that, we need a government that knows what it is doing, but also autonomous professionals who refuse to tick boxes and citizens that refuse to behave like angry customers and decide to take responsibility instead.
Tuesday, 22 December 2009
Monday, 21 December 2009
Battle in Print: Is Philosophy Becoming Therapy?
Education forum member, Dennis Hayes, examines the teaching of philosophy
Link below:
http://www.battleofideas.org.uk/index.php/2009/battles/3557/
Link below:
http://www.battleofideas.org.uk/index.php/2009/battles/3557/
Battle in Print: Explaining the Public's Perceptions of Education
Education Forum member Toby Marshall explores public responses to education
Link below:
http://www.battleofideas.org.uk/index.php/2009/battles/3560/
Link below:
http://www.battleofideas.org.uk/index.php/2009/battles/3560/
Battle in Print: The Empty Staffroom
Richard Swann, English teacher and Vice Principal of the Harvey Grammar School, reflects on the empty staffroom
Link below:
http://www.battleofideas.org.uk/index.php/2009/battles/3433/
Link below:
http://www.battleofideas.org.uk/index.php/2009/battles/3433/
Battle in Print: Rethinking Therapy
Education Forum member Kathryn Ecclestone Rethinks Therapy
Link below:
http://www.battleofideas.org.uk/index.php/2009/battles/3435/
Link below:
http://www.battleofideas.org.uk/index.php/2009/battles/3435/
Rethinking Therapy Culture
Education forum member Dennis Hayes chairs: Nicola Barden (University of Portsmouth); Professor Kathryn Ecclestone (University of Birmingham); Professor James L Nolan
(Williams College) and Professor Andrew Samuels (University of Essex) at the 2009 Battle of Ideas.
Link below:
http://www.archive.org/details/BoI09_Therapy
(Williams College) and Professor Andrew Samuels (University of Essex) at the 2009 Battle of Ideas.
Link below:
http://www.archive.org/details/BoI09_Therapy
Professor Frank Furedi Rethinks Education
Link to podcast from the 2009 Battle of Ideas:
http://www.archive.org/details/BoI09_Education
http://www.archive.org/details/BoI09_Education
Sunday, 4 October 2009
Forthcoming Debates at the Battle of Ideas 2009
And not forgetting the Battle of Ideas Festival 31 October - 1 November at the Royal College of Art, which has eight events produced in association with the Education Forum.
Details of all the above education debates can be found in the Battle of Ideas brochure:
Thursday, 9 July 2009
Evidenced Based Education
Mark Taylor, of the Education Forum, chairs a discussion with Kathryn Ecclestone (Oxford Brookes University), Tony Neal (General Teaching Council UK) and Geoff Petty (author of Teaching Today) on the value of 'evidenced based education'.
Clink on the link to FORA TV below:
Tuesday, 9 June 2009
Education Forum Podcast No. 8
The eighth EF Podcast is available to download now. Listen to Education Forum members Shirley Lawes, Dennis Hayes, Mark Taylor, Toby Marshall and David Perks discuss SATs and Helene Guldburg's excellent new publication "Reclaiming Childhood"
To purchase a copy of Helene's publication click here
Click on the triangle below
Or to download the podcast, click here
To purchase a copy of Helene's publication click here
The Battle Over Homework
Recording of The Battle Over Homework, a debate held at the Battle of Ideas 2008, chaired by Toby Marshall, with Kevin Rooney, Hilly Janes and Susan Hallam speaking
Click on the triangle below
Watch out for more education debates at the Battle of Ideas 2009, see www.battleofideas.org.uk
Or to download the podcast, click here
Watch out for more education debates at the Battle of Ideas 2009, see www.battleofideas.org.uk
Wednesday, 27 May 2009
Kathryn Ecclestone finds the middle class depressed by The Class
In any current poll of ‘the great education films of all time’, it is a depressingly likely bet that The Class will soon trump older favourites like To Sir with Love or Dead Poets’ Society. At my local cinema, this film ran for 4weeks to packed audiences, way longer than the week’s run for most films (and even longer than the run for Mamma Mia). It clearly touches a cultural nerve. In the showing I was at, mostly of middle class parents, teachers and students, there was a depressed silence throughout the whole thing.
The film has been widely praised for being ‘realistic’ and ‘relevant’, the very qualities that teachers increasingly want to bring to their own classrooms. It is a stark contrast to those older films which offered images of a confident, passionate teacher who believed he could transform his disaffected students’ lives through the power of his subject. Watching those, you sensed the scale of the challenge and rooted for the teacher in doing something inspiring.
In Brendan O’Neill’s has already great review of The Class in which he focuses on the crisis of legitimacy of the French state in the face of multiculturalism and the problems this crisis presents for French schools. But there is another crucial theme which is equally telling of the current crisis of education, also picked up by Cosmo Landesman in The Sunday Times, who points out that the teacher resorts to ‘therapeutic education’ in order to gain the interest of their disaffected students and to ‘engage’ them in learning, as the jargon goes.
The film shows how a diminished view of the students’ lack of ability, motivation and basic social skills, held by almost all the teachers in the school, finally leads the main character to abandon his attempt to teach them French. Instead, he asks the children to use the ‘inspiration’ of Anne Frank’s diary to write a ‘self-portrait’. The students are initially incredulous at why he would want to know about their banal and uninteresting lives, and what educational purpose it has. He wins them over with flattery; that it will allow him to get to know them, it will celebrate their lives.
And so they spend hours putting together their portraits. Fleetingly, the task seems to win over the most difficult and disruptive boy in the class. They present their ‘portraits’ which encompass their prejudices about football, race and relationships to the class and the teacher praises them; for a brief moment, they bask in his esteem.
Ultimately, his attempt to distract them from the difficulties of learning French or from having to discipline them to do anything worthwhile is all for nothing. The disruptive boy is expelled, the teachers in the school continue to despair of their students, and the students are contemptuous of their teachers.
In the final scene, the teacher asks his class what they have learned this year. One girl has found Plato’s Republic on her own yet he shows no ability to use this truly inspirational, albeit fleeting sign of her willingness to think and learn to good educational effect. Another girl has learned absolutely nothing and is terrified of going to ‘vocational school’.
The salutary thing is that many teachers watching will probably think that the teacher’s attempt to build self-esteem and get to know his students better is a laudable thing to do in the face of the problems he faces. In the British context, children and young people are increasingly familiar with and adept at doing a host of activities to develop ‘self awareness’ and to empathise and listen to the personal accounts of their peers. And those regarded as ‘disaffected’ are used to this in spades.
Therapeutic interventions for students that teachers regard as impossible to educate might be in the early stages of development in French classrooms. Although the young people in The Class see right through the pathetic attempt to engage with them and build their self-esteem, the film shows all too depressingly the underlying diminished conditions that lead to therapeutic self-portraits and personal development.
Brendan O’Neill’s review of The Class is available on-line:
Class’ http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/6324/.
The film has been widely praised for being ‘realistic’ and ‘relevant’, the very qualities that teachers increasingly want to bring to their own classrooms. It is a stark contrast to those older films which offered images of a confident, passionate teacher who believed he could transform his disaffected students’ lives through the power of his subject. Watching those, you sensed the scale of the challenge and rooted for the teacher in doing something inspiring.
In Brendan O’Neill’s has already great review of The Class in which he focuses on the crisis of legitimacy of the French state in the face of multiculturalism and the problems this crisis presents for French schools. But there is another crucial theme which is equally telling of the current crisis of education, also picked up by Cosmo Landesman in The Sunday Times, who points out that the teacher resorts to ‘therapeutic education’ in order to gain the interest of their disaffected students and to ‘engage’ them in learning, as the jargon goes.
The film shows how a diminished view of the students’ lack of ability, motivation and basic social skills, held by almost all the teachers in the school, finally leads the main character to abandon his attempt to teach them French. Instead, he asks the children to use the ‘inspiration’ of Anne Frank’s diary to write a ‘self-portrait’. The students are initially incredulous at why he would want to know about their banal and uninteresting lives, and what educational purpose it has. He wins them over with flattery; that it will allow him to get to know them, it will celebrate their lives.
And so they spend hours putting together their portraits. Fleetingly, the task seems to win over the most difficult and disruptive boy in the class. They present their ‘portraits’ which encompass their prejudices about football, race and relationships to the class and the teacher praises them; for a brief moment, they bask in his esteem.
Ultimately, his attempt to distract them from the difficulties of learning French or from having to discipline them to do anything worthwhile is all for nothing. The disruptive boy is expelled, the teachers in the school continue to despair of their students, and the students are contemptuous of their teachers.
In the final scene, the teacher asks his class what they have learned this year. One girl has found Plato’s Republic on her own yet he shows no ability to use this truly inspirational, albeit fleeting sign of her willingness to think and learn to good educational effect. Another girl has learned absolutely nothing and is terrified of going to ‘vocational school’.
The salutary thing is that many teachers watching will probably think that the teacher’s attempt to build self-esteem and get to know his students better is a laudable thing to do in the face of the problems he faces. In the British context, children and young people are increasingly familiar with and adept at doing a host of activities to develop ‘self awareness’ and to empathise and listen to the personal accounts of their peers. And those regarded as ‘disaffected’ are used to this in spades.
Therapeutic interventions for students that teachers regard as impossible to educate might be in the early stages of development in French classrooms. Although the young people in The Class see right through the pathetic attempt to engage with them and build their self-esteem, the film shows all too depressingly the underlying diminished conditions that lead to therapeutic self-portraits and personal development.
Brendan O’Neill’s review of The Class is available on-line:
Class’ http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/6324/.
Friday, 6 March 2009
Education Forum Podcast No. 7
The seventh EF Podcast is available to download now. Listen to Education Forum members Shirley Lawes, Dennis Hayes, Mark Taylor and David Perks discuss the 'Rose Review' of primary education, and other education stories.
Download mp3 (24:33) (128kb)
Download mp3 (24:33) (128kb)
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