The second in a series of post-forum podcasts is available to download now. Listen to Education Forum members Mark Taylor, Toby Marshall, David Perks, Dennis Hayes and Shirley Lawes discussing family learning and other current education stories.
Download mp3 (28:05) (128kb)
Friday, 29 February 2008
Friday, 1 February 2008
Education Forum Podcasts
The first in a series of post-forum podcasts is available on the Education Forum Section of the Institute of Ideas website. Listen to Education Forum members Mark Taylor, Toby Marshall, Dennis Hayes and Dave Perks discussing the Children's Plan and several current news items.
Download mp3 (30:40 mins) (128kb)
Download mp3 (30:40 mins) (128kb)
Thursday, 31 January 2008
Mark Taylor thinks that the Children’s Plan is a contemporary 'Minor Carta'
Few people appear to have realised the real significance of the name change that occurred when Ed Balls became Secretary of State on 28 June 2007, and promptly created the Department for Children, Schools and the Family to replace the Department for Education and Skills. However, the truth really is in the title: there is no desire to educate the people anymore. Instead, after 10 years in power, the Children’s Plan exposes the intellectual wasteland at the heart of Labour’s education policies.
Balls claims that the plan responds to the desire for more support, and observes that children’s needs must come before traditional institutional structures (although he wants schools at the centre of the newly unstructured structure). The plan wants Britain to be the best place in the world to grow up by 2020, but does not explain how the necessary comparison will be developed with other countries to work out whether this has been achieved.
The plan’s chapters attempt to rationalise – but not really order – the multifarious existing policies which already affect children, from registered childcare to 20 mph traffic zones, to obesity checks, parenting advisers, softer skills, Surestart, testing and zero carbon schools. A unifying theme of the plan is ‘partnership with parents’ and a ‘new relationship’ between schools and parents based on a personal tutor for every child. One conceptual innovation serves to cohere this rationalisation: ‘social pedagogy’, a term I expect we will be hearing more of in the next few years. Unfortunately, it appears, like personalisation, to express the collapse of the intellectual relationship between government and people and its replacement with a behavioural one.
Perhaps this is too harsh a judgement on the government? Surely, there is still education in the plan? Certainly, the case is made for a Master’s qualification for all teachers. But will it make them masters of teaching subjects or masters of diagnosing stages of intervention? And what will they teach if, as the plan states, the curriculum is being built around ‘assessment to identify support and intervention’? Similarly, a system based on ‘stage not age’ testing (another idea in the plan) will ultimately lead to more testing, not less, and people may eventually forget what they are supposed to be testing for (also see my BOI 2007 essay on exams on the website). And will it really be possible for children to think for themselves when involved in so many needs assessments to gauge the required support? And won’t the multiplication of adults in supporting roles simply confuse everyone about the source of intellectual authority in the classroom? In any case, social pedagogy suggests a shift in teacher training away from the theory of knowledge about the world and towards a knowledge of theories about the child. The curriculum, negatively in my view, will therefore tend to focus more on internally referenced psychological limits than externally referenced epistemology. The result may be to further isolate teachers who really want to teach their subjects, and possibly to indoctrinate others in lowering their intellectual expectations. If the plan succeeds, teachers may eventually be seen as just another of the ‘key workers’ who support children. And the voluntary parent-teacher association may become the compulsory parent-state association.
The plan was created from a ‘consultancy’ with adults and children, as well as the convening of three ‘expert’ groups for age groups 0-7, 8-13 and 14-19. With such coverage, the impression can be given that the plan is coherent, and that the public have spontaneously ‘demanded’ support. However, this is far from the case, and the question really has to be asked about whether this is a plan at all, as opposed to an attempt by Ed Balls to understand his remit. The expert groups based their findings around a superficially enlightened desire to offer ‘opportunity’ rather than ‘deficit’ models of childhood. This adds up to less than the sum of its parts, however, because the groups all replace the intellectual liberation potentially offered by academic subjects by stages of childhood. Thus, they are experts on everything but education, and the only debate within their findings is intra-psychological (about when to intervene), rather than educational (about what to teach and when to let go). These reports therefore legitimise the shift expressed in the main plan from the idea of education in academic subjects to intervention in the lives of diminished subjects. References in the main plan to how it conforms to UN articles on the ‘right to an education’ cannot hide the fact that this only means - a more evasive idea - personal development.
In short, a new ‘care elite’ is institutionalising itself in government, more through imaginative default elsewhere than the power of their own ideas. Their increasingly confident educational and political use of the language of support and parenting obscures the truth that people who have become successful principally for social reasons are trying to convince others that success is only rooted in the personal sphere – as long as the latter are supported by the former. This represents a morally dubious conflation of care and authority over both children and adults. Seen this way, the Children’s Plan, in a Runnymede moment, is a contemporary 'Minor Carta'. The question remains whether any children, and that appears to be all of us these days, will really want to be partners in such a diminished view of education, government – and ourselves.
The full text and the Executive Summary can be found at the DfES website (pdf).
Mark Taylor’s 'Battle in Print' essay, 'The debate over examinations is little more than a War of the Poses', can be found at the Battle of Ideas.
Friday, 4 January 2008
Lynn Erler argues that educators need to know about neuroscience to avoid ‘neuro-myths’
The Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP) is a research initiative funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), running from 2000-2011 and supporting to date over 65 education research projects. The TLRP commissioned a review, which appeared in 2007, of neuroscientific findings considered to be of relevance to education and educators. The review was carried out by UK-based researchers Uta Frith and Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and was followed up by a TLRP seminar series called “Collaborative Frameworks in Neuroscience and Education”. These moves mirror concerns that are world-wide, according to the OECD, over the infiltration into formal education of scientific developments that can alter learners’ thinking and activities in the classroom. In the US, for instance, schools use medications for hard-to-control and difficult-to-teach children.
The short pamphlet, Neuroscience and Education: Issues and Opportunities is based on the Frith/Blakemore review and the TLRP seminar series. It is an attempt by specialists to present an idea of the impact, breadth and influence on education of neuroscience-related issues to non-specialists (educationalists, the public in general) in an accessible way. The contributions are from researchers in neuroscience and psychology, and include 98 references to science publications that are already impacting on developments in education-related industries. Some publications present some clear conceptual models that are useful and can be thought-provoking to people involved in teaching and learning, particularly school-based education.
The 28 pages of the pamphlet contain succinctly presented information about the brain, brain development and brain “care” including neuro-myths, developmental disorders of dyslexia, dyscalculia and ADHD which have supplied the principal thrusts of neuroscience research and consequent alleviation projects and products, explanations of why “brain-based” education programmes may help learners be more alert in the classroom but can be classified as neuro-myths that have little or no scientific basis. “Issues on the Horizon” that cross between neuroscience and education are then addressed in the final section. Scientists have been appalled at what has been done with snippets from ‘scientific’ reports and are looking at the future and have issued here a report that informs but also warns and admonishes for collaboration between science and education to ensure “careful educational and scientific scrutiny at all stages” (p. 24), of what is already possible in the classroom in terms of tracking and controlling brain functioning.
Neuroscientific research findings have been and will continue to inform aspects of education, particularly in areas of disability and learning impairment. However, there have been other “spin-offs” identified by Frith and Blakemore (2000) as neuro-myths, which have filtered into UK schools as commercial “brain-based” programmes. The reader is put straight about several such programmes that “too often do not survive scientific scrutiny” (p. 15). For example while a conceptualisation of “learning preferences [styles]” may be of value in encouraging teachers to use “a full range of forms and different media” for learning materials, the “existing research does not support labelling children” (ibid.)
The document concludes with two strands:
The short pamphlet, Neuroscience and Education: Issues and Opportunities is based on the Frith/Blakemore review and the TLRP seminar series. It is an attempt by specialists to present an idea of the impact, breadth and influence on education of neuroscience-related issues to non-specialists (educationalists, the public in general) in an accessible way. The contributions are from researchers in neuroscience and psychology, and include 98 references to science publications that are already impacting on developments in education-related industries. Some publications present some clear conceptual models that are useful and can be thought-provoking to people involved in teaching and learning, particularly school-based education.
The 28 pages of the pamphlet contain succinctly presented information about the brain, brain development and brain “care” including neuro-myths, developmental disorders of dyslexia, dyscalculia and ADHD which have supplied the principal thrusts of neuroscience research and consequent alleviation projects and products, explanations of why “brain-based” education programmes may help learners be more alert in the classroom but can be classified as neuro-myths that have little or no scientific basis. “Issues on the Horizon” that cross between neuroscience and education are then addressed in the final section. Scientists have been appalled at what has been done with snippets from ‘scientific’ reports and are looking at the future and have issued here a report that informs but also warns and admonishes for collaboration between science and education to ensure “careful educational and scientific scrutiny at all stages” (p. 24), of what is already possible in the classroom in terms of tracking and controlling brain functioning.
Neuroscientific research findings have been and will continue to inform aspects of education, particularly in areas of disability and learning impairment. However, there have been other “spin-offs” identified by Frith and Blakemore (2000) as neuro-myths, which have filtered into UK schools as commercial “brain-based” programmes. The reader is put straight about several such programmes that “too often do not survive scientific scrutiny” (p. 15). For example while a conceptualisation of “learning preferences [styles]” may be of value in encouraging teachers to use “a full range of forms and different media” for learning materials, the “existing research does not support labelling children” (ibid.)
The document concludes with two strands:
- What is already, and will shortly be available from neuroscience in the realm of cognitive enhancers (e.g. Ritalin and drugs for Alzheimers are used by enterprising student who hope for higher exam results), and the use of neurofeedback to increase and improve productivity such as carried out on students at the Royal College of Music.
- The limits of neuroscience, which has until now only been able to focus on the individual and which has a long way to go in conjunction with many other disciplines - psychology, social sciences, education - to be able to provide holistic improvements in learning.
The authors of the document wish for collaboration between neuroscience and education to conceptualise frameworks for working together to scrutinise the transfer of concepts between neuroscience and education, to avoid future repetitions of “popular ideas about the brain [that] have flourished without check and are impacting upon teaching and learning already” (p. 24) without scientific and educational evaluation. While brain gym might be considered innocuous and in fact a support for being alert in the classroom, more insidious enhancement mechanisms are already available and are being used, not to mention future developments, which are sure to be said to emerge from “ science”. The pamphlet is an attempt by scientists to inform educationalists and to urge them to action: to become informed and together with scientists to inform, and not to leave developments to the government to regulate.
Just how the collaboration across neuroscience and education is going to take place is not ventured in this document, which is a huge detriment. Clearly an exchange across disciplines must be undertaken and a response from the educational community is in order. To be able to enter into a dialogue and to influence future policies at all levels, however, educationalists need themselves to propose a clear conceptualisation of what it means to be human, what it means to learn with dignity and to be respected for human difference.
Neuroscience and Education: Issues and Opportunities was launched at Portcullis House, Westminster on 15 May 2007.
The pamphlet is available as a pdf: http://www.tlrp.org/pub/documents/Neuroscience%20Commentary%20FINAL.pdf
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!
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
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/
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/
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