17 Comments on A new school politics?

Sam Holmes on Mon, 15th Jun 2009 1:50 pm


The school team problem is key. More of the following in schools would make a positive contribution to society for starters: a ‘for the greater good’ mindset, common vision, understanding of and motivation towards the common vision, focus on what’s going well, not problems (AI), cohesive and inclusive culture which includes teachers, students and parents/carers.

Ian McGimpsey on Mon, 15th Jun 2009 2:16 pm


More honesty about what we can expect schools to achieve in the face of entrenched social problems would be welcome.

Maybe it is worth pointing out that Sir Cyril Taylor (Chair of SSAT until recently) in his book ‘A Good School for Every Child’ makes a similar point with reference to the branding of 638 secondary schools as ‘failing’, many of which work in disadvantaged communities. He argues that it is more accurate to see them as low performing. That gives us the room to do what is really important – to distinguish between those that add value (ie students attending those schools perform better than we might expect based on their performance in primary school) or that are already improving rapidly in terms of GCSE results, and those that don’t add value and aren’t improving. He calculates that some 301 schools got labelled as failing despite the fact that they ‘add value’.

I get the feeling that the people working in, learning in and leading those schools wouldn’t be afraid of accountability if it was, as you say, more honest.

Emily Mather on Mon, 15th Jun 2009 7:30 pm


Some random things:

1) Specialist? Does that include ‘special’ schools? I noticed in the Autism Bill debate an MP stated that local authority implementation of the right to a place in a mainstream school for disabled pupils had been interpreted as the denial of the right to choose a special school place. Choice is a sad joke for many parents with disabled children. Just as many are battling for a mainstream place as are battling for the opposite. Seems for some parents and children ‘choice’ is not given on the same terms as everyone else. Note the battle going on over the Ewing School in Manchester.

The same is true of post-19 provision for disabled students…at 18 other students can choose wherever they want to go -so long as they fulfil the entry requirements- they can choose any academic institution which specialises/has a good record in their particular field of interest -the Uk, the world is their oyster. Not so for disabled students -they must go to their local college. Choice is curtailed in the name of inclusion -this ideological/radical inclusionism is wrong-headed and perpetrates the injustices it set out to remedy. Children are no longer routinely institutionalised and most live at home and are deeply rooted within their families and communities …the education inclusion debate needs to take heed of these changes or risk damaging children.

2) When I was at state primary school in the 1970s I was one of the abler pupils in my classes. At one stage I was used by the teacher to hear/enable reading practice of some of the slower, struggling readers. Who knows whether this gave me an awareness of the less able and struggling and a sense of social justice.

My mother was ambitious for me and I went to grammar school where I floundered terribly -maybe on account of the poor and instable family background I came from. I came away with a clutch (7) of ‘o’ levels but never did very well in terms of job prospects.

It was only many years later as a mature student (age 27), I went to university and finally found my feet educationally.

Unfortunately, severe disability in the family has meant I have been unable to take full/any advantage of my ability or education.

Life chances are a complicated thing!

…and policymakers would do well to note these complexities.

(this may not quite or at all speak to the issue at hand but thought I would share it anyway on account of it being vaguely about education and grounded in experience)

Louise Macdonald on Mon, 15th Jun 2009 8:28 pm


It’s also worth thinking about how schools are sometimes seen as “islands”, rather than as part of a community. From all the work, consultations and conversations I’ve been pirvileged to have with young people through my work, it seems to me the real key is that link – so I’m really interested in work that is currently going on in Scotland just now around linking youth workers and teachers more closely, with parity of esteem.

There is some fantastic practice going on but it just doesn’t get the exposure it deserves, or it dismissed because people don’t take youth work seriously as a profession. Really dominating my mind right now is the work we have done with young people who disengage from school, or who are at risk of poorer outcomes. So many of their insights relate to their second year at secondary school – S2 in Scotland – are the point where things started to unravel for them, where their need for extra support was either un-noticed or unmet. Youth work approaches have a lot to teach us here – pardon the pun..

Joe Nutt on Mon, 15th Jun 2009 9:58 pm


As Sam Holmes intuits, good schools have a positive impact on their staff, children and hence society at large because they are model societies themselves. One of the best heads I have ever worked for used to say that if education wasn’t about changing people then he did not know what it was about. Yet for many teachers education is about something much more invidiously selfish, politics. I take the view that no one has the right to foist their political agenda on someone else’s children, yet that is almost a norm these days. As I think I was once castigated for on your blog for commenting in the past, good schools are meaningful communities and great schools are unique communities. But sadly it follows that poor or weak schools, are poor or failing communities. It is no accident that people trying to describe their experience of these use the expression “anti-social behaviour” because it is exactly that, anti-society.

As Frank Furedi exposes in a recent essay in “From Two Cultures to No Culture,” the fast changing world myth is one of the principle sticks that policy makers have used to beat schools and teachers with for the last decade or more. It is based on a crudely utilitarian view of education that regards children as the state’s property to train and deploy as the state sees fit. Good schools and teachers tend to ignore or directly challenge it.

Good schooling is a great phrase because the technology-led trend of the last decade has been quite markedly anti-school, to the point now where the idea of children assessing each others “digital literacy” seriously, has become accepted policy. They may barely be able to draft a text message, the literary equivalent of a spray painted tag, but why should that stop them assessing each other’s work? I’m not sure “style” is a word that can be applied usefully to education. When education is subject to fashion, is exactly when children suffer because their time spent in school is so brief.

Teaching is a much more complex and subtle skill than any kind of assessment I’m aware of or have been responsible for, acknowledges. The entire business of Ofsted inspections is largely a sham with schools and individual teachers bending over backwards to complete paperwork they normally never even look at, and preparing lessons they never normally teach, just to meet the requirements of that one day when someone enters their classroom. In my 20 year teaching career I never once altered a single thing I did for an inspection and witnessed only weak teachers (and even heads) who did.

I’m afraid I don’t buy into the valued added strategy either. Even children see through it and quickly abandon responsibility for their own learning and achievements. Not long ago I visited one of the 638 failing schools with a research colleague of mine. The school is in a smart, regenerated housing estate all pastel pinks and blues which looks like it was designed by some Parisian architect. There was no graffiti, no sign of drugs, or violence and all the children I met were polite and reasonable. When I spoke to a senior member of staff they confirmed that was the case. This school gains 18% A-C’s GCSEs and of that figure, virtually all are girls. if you are a boy and you attend that school, you can expect…nothing. My colleague’s comment was the children were just like the Eloi from Well’s “Time Machine.” Like so many, they have been intellectually neutered by the interference of people who describe themselves as teachers but who mistake politics for education. The two are synonymous only in Fascist or Marxist states.

TimHood on Tue, 16th Jun 2009 7:14 am


The School Dinner Problem?

The path of least resistance-trying to give successive groups of people what they want- leads to the curricular and methodological equivalent of the Turkey Twizzler: easy to sell, instantly satisfying but ultimately, an unhealthy mixture of reprocessed waste.

Hmmm…not sure, but I had to get Turkey Twizzlers in there somehow. Here’s what I think I mean:

Parents want to send their children to the best resourced local school? Simple, but the kids will end up in a town with a sink school- and their cousins and younger siblings might end up there.

Parents and performance obsessed policy makers want lots of stats and targets? Easily done, but teachers will spend more time ticking boxes than planning inspiring lessons.

Kids and other progressive policy makers want ‘fun lessons full of discovery’? Fine, teachers can sit them down for 50 minutes of unsupervised, input free chaos (because they are too busy ticking boxes to plan properly).

Traditionalists want back to basics? Easy- let’s sit them down in rows and tell them stuff and make them write it down (while the teacher ticks boxes) till their little eyes water with boredom…

So we end up with the Turkey Twizzler: an oily mix of bad community policy, bad school management, bad child psychology and bad learning theory.

Emily Mather on Tue, 16th Jun 2009 8:58 am


…meant unstable above and not instable …

it was bad but not so bad that we lived in a barn!

was a typo not a mis-spell

sorry.

matthewtaylor on Tue, 16th Jun 2009 5:48 pm


Ah – I guessed as much. Mind you it must be quite snug in a stable

matthewtaylor on Tue, 16th Jun 2009 5:52 pm


Well said Tim. I link some of this to the school atlas problem – schools are expected to meet every need in every way

phil h on Tue, 16th Jun 2009 9:24 pm


Teacher-performance management

This bit is difficult.

In 17 years practising employment law, I have yet to have a sacked (or compromised out) teacher as a client.

My assessment is that producer interests reign supreme. Poor, under-performing teachers just carry on without any effective performance management. The sad thing is that poor teaching is left within the system, blighting pupils’ chances.

My son’s comprehensive has very low standards. I have had incomplete school reports come home. In the 5 years he has been there I can’t remember one report for english lit and lang. Also he has been referred to as Jack on the report, when his name is Joe.

Further there does seem to be an inherent sexism tolerated in the system. The use of a gender stereotype at parent’s evening is commonplace. “oh he’ s a boy”etc . The school/parent engagement is non existent at the comp. They don’t even use emails.

The comp was so bad and so deaf to complaints, that my other two have gone to grammar schools, and the commitment to excellence and high standards at them is a joy to hold.

I don’t know what this says other than excellence can exist side by side with mediocrity.

Arthur Mark on Tue, 16th Jun 2009 11:02 pm


It continues to surprise old educators like me that the vocabulary of school improvement continues to avoid considering the child’s role in determining the curriculum.
Apparently, most of those who want to “fix” the schools see the child as an inanimate object….a specimin to be worked on and over. It’s the old saw of is the child to be hammered into the procustean bed of the curriculum instead of meeting the developmental needs and interests of the child. It doesn’t have to be ” either, or” with a well trained, committed teacher. Both are important, but the specialness of each child must rule.
What society wants has always been what leads the development of school curriculum. Educators see school excellence, especially in the early years, differently:
Children learn best through an interesting curriculum and a good teacher will find
a way to promote interest in their studies by helping them to connect in a meaningful way to what they’re learning.
The key and the message here is that good teaching results in good teaching. An excellent teacher training program with talented people will deliver ultimately what
society needs. Perhaps society is too wound up in old wars and not enough in what
children may know or intuit that we don’t. Children are of the future.

Jay Allnutt on Wed, 17th Jun 2009 11:32 am


What is the point of education?
Richard Rorty wrote that the point of High School Education was socialisation whilst that of Higher Education is individualisation.
But the issue is far from clear for British classrooms.
Perhaps clarification on this issue – i.e. why do we educate children – will help us to focus answers to the three problems that you pose.
Whether compulsory education is for socialisation or individualisation or something else a clear decision will help politicians, school leaders, teachers and students to know why education is important.

matthewtaylor on Fri, 19th Jun 2009 8:30 am


Thanks jay. I like this point. The recent Nuffield review on 14-19 said the big unanswered question in policy was what kind of 19 year olds do we want?

matthewtaylor on Fri, 19th Jun 2009 8:40 am


Thanks Arthur. I agree and there is now emerging evidence that children learn better when they are involved in and understand the learning process itself.

matthewtaylor on Fri, 19th Jun 2009 8:44 am


Thanks Phil, This is an important point to make and sadly I agree that teaches as a profession seem resistant to effective performance management. There can also be an inadvertent inverted class issue. If middle class children go to challenging inner city schools they will always be seen as having lesser needs than others and when they misbehave can be subject to comments like – ‘I am surprised to see this from someone with a home like yours’ etc. My older son had to deal with lots of this in his early years in his comprehensive

AnneBailey on Fri, 26th Jun 2009 4:18 pm


The really important question is what is education for. One of the commenters mentions the utilitarian view that we educate children so that they can serve the state either by contributing economically or providing a service. I think this is a strongly held view and one that I find odd, maybe because I’m American. I first came across this view when I heard someone bad mouthing someone who’d qualified as a doctor and then decided to emigrate. There was a definite sense that she had taken our money to train and was just taking her skills somewhere else and we wouldn’t benefit at all. There’s clearly a sense that education is an investment in our future workforce. I never had that feeling growing up in the US, maybe because the vast majority of university students pay heavily for their college and graduate school so their only debt is to themselves. I remember long ago my father explaining that the public school system (state schools in the US) existed so that we could educate people to play their part in a democracy. So education was to help develop people to be active citizens, able to make decisions about what sort of government they wanted, to vote. I’m sure there’s a link to economic productivity as well but perhaps it’s more in a macro sense. Having said all that, I am all for the curriculum, teaching, and education overall evolving to prepare young people for the world we live in. But if we started by deciding we were educating people for their responsibilities as citizens rather than as fodder for some centralist plan for the economy we would definitely get different outcomes.

Drake Van Patten on Fri, 11th Sep 2009 4:33 pm


Woah, loving the points here.
I think there is a problem with team building as the structures of power in the classroom have been broken down a bit by a more individualistic liberal nature. I mean an openness to individuality has left the kids with no real boundaries which are the core of team building and camaraderie in people, especially young people.
I think also kids can see the tight rope schools are walking between teaching in depth about one topic and then suddenly stopping short of another, like sex-education. They can see that teachers are very wary of crossing boundaries but i think this gets all muddled up into a perception that schools have no real clear aim, in students’ eyes. Although political correctness and rights groups are umming and ahhing about the depth of the state’s intervention into the private sphere when it comes to stuff like sex education, i feel that if it was implemented more definitely the effect would be a a wider minimum standard of education if you like. Perhaps it wont cure the obvious troubles of inequalities in schooling as different catchment areas offer different pupils but it is irrefutable that it will downgrade the importance of performance led choosing.
This wholesale education stance might seem a tad monopolistic but think of it this way, if teachers were allowed to be open and discuss everything then they would be projecting an image of leadership.

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