The two worlds of education discourse
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… and Skills Select Committee, discuss the findings of the Cambridge Primary Review. The report, three years in gestation and three years in researching and writing, is the most comprehensive and far reaching review of primary education since the 1967 Plowden Report. So extensive was the consultation exercise undertaken by the research team and advisory panel it is hard to imagine anyone interested in primary education didn’t have the chance to get their voice heard.
But …
Family, character and class – the Cameron view
Our Trustees’ AwayDay (which was neither away nor a day, but very useful nevertheless) having finished, I find myself with a rare opening in my diary. How better to fill it than reading David Cameron’s speech on character and parenting delivered yesterday at Demos.
And what a fascinating speech it is. I hope it justifies this long post.
Let me start with some of the things I really liked about it.
It has a strong core narrative. It isn’t just a list of facts or sound bites. It is genuinely interesting. A couple of points made me pause, just to let them sink in. Like this for example:
‘ Commercialisation and the culture of children’s rights means that children are treated like adults while a great knot of rules and regulations and over-the-top bureaucratic nonsense means that increasingly adults are treated like children. With a culture of suspicion and paranoia that is increasingly preventing adults from even interacting with young people. We can’t go on like this. It’s time we gave children back their childhood and got adults to behave like adults’.
There was also a reassuring recognition of past mistakes
‘This is relatively new territory for the Conservative Party. In the past we’ve been guilty of giving the impression that to build a responsible society, all we needed was freedom for the individual plus a strong rule of law from the state. We didn’t talk enough about what happened in between.’
There were also elements which showed that the modern Conservative Party is willing to support policies previous Tories might have ruled out on principle. For example:
• Extra spending commitments: Sure Start, Health Visitors, a National Citizen Service for Young People, and the implicit cost of delivering on the pledge to let head teachers expel pupils unilaterally (Referral Units are very expensive).
• Criticism of the media: ‘The media needs to show some restraint as well. The premature sexualisation of our children has already gone way too far. There is way too much arbitrary violence in the lives of children too young to understand irony or fantasy. Businesses have got to understand that parents don’t like it and want it to stop’
• And a willingness to regulate when it is needed even where this adds burdens to business:
‘we’ll introduce Flexible Parental Leave, meaning both parents can share the responsibilities of caring for a new baby’
‘we’ll extend the right to request flexible working to all parents with a child under eighteen’
The speech also put meat on the bones of the Tory approach to decentralisation. On the one hand, Mr Cameron argues, both for schools and for Sure Start, that there are some practices that clearly work better than others, that services must be held to account for their effectiveness and that there should be more use of payment by results. On the other hand, he argues for more diverse provision (particularly more use of the not for profit sector) in running schools and Sure Start services.
This underlines a model which decentralises governance and ownership (so local services are not part of national or local bureaucracies) but, arguably, increases central prescription over the content of the service provided. Assuming they win power, it will be interesting to see whether the Conservatives can pull off this balancing act.
I was less convinced by the section of the speech on the foundations of good character. Mr Cameron is clearly very excited by the idea that it is parenting not class that matters:
‘I believe that this research produced recently by Demos is truly ground-breaking. It shows that the differences in child outcomes between a child born in poverty and a child born in wealth are no longer statistically significant when both have been raised by “confident and able” parents.
For those who care about fairness and inequality, this is one of the most important findings in a generation. It would be over the top to say that it is to social science what E=MC2 was to physics, but I think it is a real ’sit up and think’ moment. That discovery defined the laws of relativity; this one is the new law for social mobility:
What matters most to a child’s life chances is not the wealth of their upbringing but the warmth of their parenting’.
Wow – Richard Reeves as Einstein (not that I’m jealous, of course!). High praise indeed. The problem, I think, is that the evidence doesn’t quite make the point being argued by the Conservative leader. This is because his final rhetorical flourish conflates two arguments:
- If you have a good upbringing it can largely cancel out the effects of poverty
- You are much more likely to have a good upbringing if your family does not live in poverty.
The policy question is not whether Government should encourage good parenting (of course it should, and, to be fair, the current Labour Government has massively expanded parenting provision) it is, first, whether policy can significantly increase the proportion of poor families who parent successfully, and, second, whether this is a more effective strategy than simply trying to reduce the number of families in poverty.
Mr Cameron appears to acknowledge this when he says a few paragraphs later:
‘Successful parenting style in wealthier families occurs not because these people are intrinsically better, or that they love their children more. It is because with poverty can come a host of other problems that make parenting more difficult. Worse schools, higher crime, bad housing. Unemployment. Problems with alcohol and drugs. Mental health conditions. The wearying grind of worry about debt. Higher crime, bad housing. Unemployment. Problems with alcohol and drugs. Mental health conditions’
But this paragraph is hard to reconcile with the earlier statement (which is worth repeating):
‘What matters most to a child’s life chances is not the wealth of their upbringing but the warmth of their parenting’
This I suspect is the take-out line, the one that shows the core philosophy and reassures the Party activist, rather than the more nuanced elaboration a few paragraphs later.
This impression is underlined by two further points. First, I hear (perhaps someone can confirm) that in questioning Mr Cameron rejected the idea that Government should see reducing statistical inequality as an objective of policy (which directly contradicts something I heard David Willetts say at a Bow Group meeting we both addressed last year). And the fact that Mr Cameron repeatedly praises the Demos work while pointedly ignoring its most uncomfortable finding for the Conservatives, which is that marital status does not seem to be a significant variable in successful parenting.
So this is a powerful, interesting and at times incisive speech (how often can we say that about political offerings?). It also confirms the impression that as more policy clarity is demanded and as the public spending sums get harder, the Cameron blend of progressive and traditional Conservative ideas may be gradually tilting towards the latter.
Discuss …
A question of character?
The long awaited Demos pamphlet on character is causing much debate. The think tank’s argument is that parenting, through the way it shapes character, is the most important determinant of a child’s life chances. The parenting style which Demos characterises as ‘tough love’ is the one most associated with good life outcomes, while both ‘authoritarian’ and ‘disengaged’ styles are much less successful.
When it comes to policy recommendations, Demos argues for greater clarity, investment and evaluation in relation to parenting and early years services. In particular, the authors argue for services to target resources at the psychologically vulnerable children who, research shows, would benefit most from the right form of parenting.
This is interesting stuff and it is hard to disagree with the findings. Those on the left will like the recognition that socialisation is vital to shaping life chances, which justifies investment and intervention in family life. On the right there will be enthusiasm for the idea that it is parental responsibility not just socio-economics that shapes children’s outcomes (although the Conservatives will not be pleased to see the pamphlet rejecting the suggestion that the marital status of parents is an important independent variable).
While welcoming the report and the debate it has opened, I have some reservations.
I am not sure how useful is the concept of ‘character’. It implies, first, that all the good personality attributes the pamphlet links to successful outcomes always go together in a single bundle: you’ve either got it or you haven’t. Second, while correctly highlighting the importance of our psychological predispositions and early-years socialisation, it is not clear to me whether character is an attribute of our programming or our decision making. If you are born happy, have great parenting and then go on to live a life of self interested middle class complacency, do you have better or worse character than the deeply troubled and disadvantaged individual who manages to survive or even to use their own experiences to help others? As my grandmother used to say to me ‘only cowards can be truly brave’.
No one can deny the importance of parenting and the early years; indeed over its twelve years in office Labour has dramatically increased investment in this stage of life. But we mustn’t move from this to a kind of individualistic determinism in which each person’s life chances are seen as laid down for ever by the combination of their psychological inheritance and experience of parenting.
In my annual lecture I quoted American scientists Nicholas A. Christakis and James Fowler, authors of ‘Connected – The Surprising Power of Social Networks’:
‘ social influence does not end with the people we know. If we affect our friends, and they affect their friends, then our actions can potentially affect people we have never met. We discovered that if your friend’s friend’s friend gained weight, you gained weight. We discovered that if your friend’s friend’s friend stopped smoking, you stopped smoking. And we discovered that if your friend’s friend’s friend became happy, you became happy’.
Just as research on the impact of the early years builds up, so does evidence of the importance of social networks and norms in shaping behaviour.
Perhaps the most interesting question, and one only touched on so far by Demos’ work, is how can social networks support parents in doing a better job? This takes us into some difficult issues about cultural norms. Effective intervention will be as much about community development as public service provision. But unless we are to have an incredibly intrusive state, communities themselves will need to find better ways of encouraging and supporting good parenting.
Will the middle class ever commit to social mobility?
Alan Milburn’s report on social mobility will lead to lots of hand wringing about how hard it is to break down privilege. But will anything change?
On Sunday I went to see Reginald D Hunter perform on the South Bank. His mixture of superficial social commentary and utter obscenity was pretty hit or miss. But there was one point he made that struck a chord. His father has defended himself from attack saying that he only carried some or other sexual misdemeanour ‘for the sake of the family’. As Hunter says this is the ‘universal father defence’; almost any action however crass, cruel or greedy can be justified on the grounds that it was taken in the interests of the family.
So it is with the middle classes, particularly in the pursuit of a place in a ‘good school’. Even though the evidence suggests that it is better aggregately for society to have mixed intake schools, and even though other evidence shows that 80 – 90% of a child’s performance is down to home influences, still the middle classes do everything they can to monopolise these ‘good’ schools. Presumably the most sought are among the ‘top 100 schools’ that the Conservative front bench say every school should be expected to copy.
But research published by the ESRC puts into question the whole idea of ‘good’ schools. Using value added data, Professor Harvey Goldstein and George Leckie show that there is little or no correlation between the past performance and the future prospects of a school. Indeed basing your school choice on past results is about as clever as basing your investments on the past performance of an investment fund (not that it stops people doing it.
The dynamic of a school becoming sought after is more to do with property than performance. A school may start off with an advantage such as being in a largely middle class area or having a good head. As soon as the school gets a good name, middle class people start moving into the area (the ESRC research shows there is a much stronger correlation between past school performance and property prices than with future school performance). As a consequence the intake to the school becomes more privileged, driving up further its raw league table results (which is what parents tend to look at) and so it goes on.
As I have said in the past, the barrier to social mobility in the UK is less about the lack of desire of the poor to move up and more about the utter tenacity of the upper middle classes in making sure their offspring never move down. And as the hostility people show to any tax on inheritance underlines, the vast majority of the well off are determined to make sure they pass on privilege down the generations.
Milburn’s report deserves serious debate. I am sure most of his 80 recommendations make sense. But unless the middle classes are willing to let their children stand or fall on their merit, or voters are willing to countenance a more profound redistribution of income and assets, it is difficult to see the UK becoming a more socially mobile country.
Sen and Sensibility
Some of my friends think it amusing that I ask readers to help me write articles and speeches. The implication is that it is either cheeky or feeble minded, or perhaps a bit of both. I don’t care a jot. Last week, for example, the contributions I received ahead of my speech on public scrutiny gave me useful material and helped me feel more confident that my core argument held water. So today I am at it again.
This evening I have the great honour of chairing an event with a man who certainly ranks among the world’s leading public intellectuals, Amartya Sen. The event is being co-hosted by the RSA and the charity BookPower of which the Professor is a patron. Our distinguished guest won’t be making a speech but will be in conversation with me for 30-40 minutes and then with the audience of what is, unsurprisingly, an over-subscribed event.
So I have been mulling over what questions to ask, and in particularly whether I have the nerve to focus the questions around my own argument for 21st century enlightenment. My worries about this as a strategy were not assuaged when RSA colleagues suggested this was like interviewing Ronaldo and starting with the question;
‘I can do twenty five keepy-uppies – what do you think of that, Christiano?’
Here are the six question areas I have planned:
For those here who have not had the benefit of reading your work or hearing you speak, could you outline the core features of your capabilities approach to the idea of justice.
In unveiling our new strapline 21CE, I suggested that it might be useful to return to some core enlightenment values and explore how those values might be renewed or developed in light of today’s knowledge and tomorrow’s challenges. The first was the value of autonomy. In relation to this I suggested we needed to urge a more self aware and socially embedded idea of autonomy against the narrow possessive individualism with which we often associated the idea of freedom. I am interested in your view of how we should think of autonomy.
In relation to universalism I suggested that as well as exploring – as you have done so brilliantly – the content of universalism – we should examine the sentiment that drives the impulse toward universalism – namely empathy. What is it that enhances or diminishes human empathy and how is inter personal and inter communal empathy related to empathy for the other or global scale empathy?
In relation to humanism – that our affairs should be organised to maximise human welfare – I argued that this throws up inherently ethical questions and that we need to make it easier to explore the ethical dilemmas of deciding what kind of progress we want. Given your own work on exploring alternatives ways of measuring progress to GDP I was interested…….
Running through the argument we have made for 21CE is an interest in the insights provided by behavioural sciences ranging from neuroscience to social psychology or behavioural economies, I wonder how important you think these insights into human nature are to our understanding of justice and its foundations
A thoughtful criticism of the 21CE thesis made by a number of people was this it focussed exclusively on the Enlightenment as an historical episode in the history of the West and not as the more spiritual concept that it is taken to mean in the East. Given that one of the fascinations of your writing is this bringing together of Western and Eastern philosophical traditions do you think it is useful to compare and contrast these different ideas of enlightenment?
Well, then dear readers. What do you think? Is it impudent to talk to the great man about the RSA’s strapline? Are these good questions, and if they are not what would be?
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