3 Comments on Milburn’s report means schools should look outwards

Joe Nutt on Mon, 20th Jul 2009 4:50 pm


I think you have successfully isolated a really key difference in ideology in this paragraph, “But while I suspect Michael’s response to this is to emphasise the boundary between the responsibilities of schools – to transfer knowledge – and the community, ours is to bridge that boundary, encouraging schools to explore how they can foster a culture of learning in the wider community.”

The reason I think Michael is right and the last decade of educational initiatives have been wrong, is because he starts from the belief that there is such a thing as a good school.

One educational policy after another over the decade of “education, education, education” has been premised on the utilitarian credo that schools are an outdated, “19th century” paradigm, and that the “information age” needs entirely new models. I could point you to dozens and dozens of manifestations of this crass attempt to seem innovative. If you look, you will usually find they are produced by individuals who have themselves had a very poor and often negative experience of schooling.

One of the most influential figures in the UK world of new school design has been the Australian Dr Kenn Fisher. Anyone who hears Dr Fisher speak will find out quite quickly that his own experience of secondary schooling was not an especially positive one, something he makes no bones about and which is enshrined in the title of his PhD thesis, “School as Prison.”

Is it really wise to seek advice on education from people who nurse a barely hidden anti-schools agenda? Dr Fisher isn’t the only one by any means. I’m sure others will have also noticed how often Lord Puttnam has appeared on educational platforms of one kind or another. Again someone with a deep-rooted hatred of schooling he is never too coy to voice, because school failed him so badly.

Yet in the UK we have some of the finest schools in the world, which draw parents from every country imaginable. Many are highly traditional boarding schools, housed in buildings that are often centuries old, with traditions outsiders view as arcane but which nonetheless deliver the very best in twenty first education, technology and all. And what does the Labour party led Charity Commission do? Find any means they can to attack and undermine them.

As Ralph Tabberer, the ex Director of the Teacher Development Agency recently pointed out, there is a rather ugly strain of inverted snobbery running directly from government down through so many educational organisations, which refuses to seek advice or guidance from these successful schools and their staff.

Isn’t the wiser course to seek guidance from those schools and individuals who not only understand what a good school is, but admire and value it as an institution and a tool for educating children, instead of listening those who are either overtly, or covertly determined to undermine the whole concept of schooling?

And one of the most powerful ideas great schools embody is an understanding that far from forming any kind of bridge with the local community, they are communities of a very special kind themselves. When individuals join them, they know very quickly they are joining a community, something which I imagine Matthew, happened to you when you joined your own grammar school. It turned out you didn’t like the community, its ideals or principles. You made the point yourself in a recent comment to your open letter to Michael. Most children and staff do become part of their school community, and the school’s values and ideals stay with them for life.

isn’t that a more educationally valuable model to follow than trying to dissolve the notion of school as a special kind of community, into just another kind of leisure centre?

matthewtaylor on Mon, 20th Jul 2009 6:20 pm


Hi Joe.

Quite a lot here to chew on but let me pick up one point. When I talk about schools engaging with the wider community this is because i think the support of that community is important to the schools’ success. The successful boarding schools you mention have pupils whose parents and wider cultural background reinforces the importance of learning at every turn.

How would our great public schools do if most of their pupils came from backgrounds which did little or nothing to reinforce learning and how would they do if most of their pupils arrived having already had lots of messages that they were not the kind likely to make it at school?

So my aim is not to make schools do more just for the sake of it it is to get schools to use their status and resources to try to ensure that their job is possible. If this all sounds a bit abstract let me give you the example I heard when I made this point recently. Liam Byrne (you don’t have to like him to listen to the story) told me of a badly underperforming school he had visited in a majority Bangladeshi area. They had tried lots of school improvement strategies but the thing that finally and dramatically worked had been when they made a systematic effort to engage the pupils’ parents, including offering them help in supporting their children’s learning.

Far from hating schools I think they are under used as institutions that can shape wider attitudes.

Joe Nutt on Mon, 20th Jul 2009 8:03 pm


I don’t disagree at all in essence Matthew. It is the execution of the ideal I struggle with. I’ve sat through so many meetings where “extending the school community” is an agreed objective, with local authorities, heads, architects and builders, and in the end it all boils down to… a glorified leisure centre. For all the talk of innovation and “transformation” a word used in every possible paragraph of anything drafted by Partnerships for Schools, there is a a shocking failure to understand what good schools do, and instead, to chase after novelty hiding behind innovation.

Here’s just one anecdote to juxtapose with Liam’s, the accuracy of which I don’t doubt for a second. Sometime ago a young architect I was working with told me about a school in South London he had come across, which had developed a radical new way of engaging disaffected black boys that worked brilliantly, “They do sport every afternoon!” he said. I hadn’t the heart to disillusion him.

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