The end of an education era?

June 26, 2009 by
Filed under: Public policy 

Next month, at the RSA, I am delivering the annual lecture of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust. The speech is in draft form but it contains the observation that the framework of central prescription, repeated pupil assessment and inspection has run out of steam. So, I welcome the briefing ahead of next week’s schools white paper that the Government is moving away from the centrally prescribed literacy and numeracy strategy.

The strategies are expensive, unpopular with many teachers, and are no longer delivering any significant gains. But, even as we bury a key part of the centralising approach which has been dominant ever since the 1988 Education Reform Act, it would be wrong to conclude that the whole thing was a terrible mistake.

As I have written before, even the best designed public policy tends to end in failure. This is for three related reasons:

• The world changes. To take one example, single parent benefits which were introduced in the sixties to meet the needs of a small and disadvantaged group took on a different meaning and massively greater cost with the growth of one parent families.
• Even as policies succeed, they change incentives and generate unintended consequences. It has been alleged that in successfully meeting its four hour maximum waiting target for casualty departments, the NHS has encouraged staff to attend to the needs of people with minor problems who have been waiting three and a half hours rather than the more severe needs of patients who have only just arrived.
• But the most important reason is that if a policy succeeds, the problem it was designed to address has, by definition, diminished. In 1988, and still in 1997, there was a very long tail of terribly underperforming schools and teachers. In my own borough of Lambeth an OFSTED report in the mid 1990s not only found many pupils in higher years of primary schools unable to read or write but that teachers seemed unaware of, or impervious to, the fact. The number of profoundly failing schools is now much lower and – as a result of the changes over the last decade – we have the systems to identify failing schools and turn them round. At the same time parents have become better informed and more demanding and the quality and preparedness of teachers joining the profession has improved.

As any manager knows, tight systems of regulation are more effective at tackling under performance than they are at fostering high performance. So as the system improves the centralising approach produces diminishing returns.

Some time ago I wrote an essay about public service reform for the think tank IPPR.  Drawing on the work of Christopher Hood I offered a cultural theory (yes, back to that again!) perspective arguing that reform strategies could be broadly mapped against cultural theory’s four rationalities: the hierarchical, the egalitarian, the individuals and the fatalist. I argued that the swings between these different ways of thinking about change can explain as much of the history of public service reform as the ideologies of the Governments in charge.

Next week’s white paper will signal the end to a long wave of hierarchical management in favour of a more egalitarian emphasis on devolved control, professional values and institutional collaboration. It is the right thing to do. But one day, when this new approach has, in turn, run out of steam, there will be another new start.

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4 Comments on The end of an education era?

  1. Mike Ion on Sat, 27th Jun 2009 4:29 pm

    2. I agree with much of what you have written. Like you I feel that the move from informed prescription to informed professionalism is to be welcomed. Schools are ultimately responsible for their own improvement – not LAs and certainly not central government – and we need to be encouraging and fostering change that is rapid, systemic and sustainable. Where it is working well collaboration between educational establishments has moved beyond simply ‘sharing of ideas’ and moved to shared timetables, resources and the encouragement of coaching, modelling and mentoring. For those who have not read it can I strongly recommend the recent Ofsted publication ‘Twelve outstanding secondary schools – Excelling against the odds’ which can be accessed by clicking on the link below.

    http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/Ofsted-home/Publications-and-research/Browse-all-by/Documents-by-type/Thematic-reports/Twelve-outstanding-secondary-schools-Excelling-against-the-odds

  2. Joe Nutt on Mon, 29th Jun 2009 8:37 pm

    3. I made a similar point myself Matthew on my own blog about not having heard anyone actually say the national literacy and numeracy strategies may just have actually worked. But apart from feeling an instinctive repugnance for a word with such unpleasant historical overtones for anyone (like me) born into post war Britain, I’ve never been even slightly seduced by the collaboration agenda. It was always one born out of political desperation, not educational confidence or professionalism. It is one of the most insidious, modern myths about what constitutes good education. Great teachers don’t “collaborate.” They discuss, debate, argue, in my experience constantly and skillfully, and sometimes they may even share ideas or experience to mutual benefit, but they always have sufficient confidence in their own knowledge and experience, to think and act for themselves. Which is one reason why all children, gifted, clever, indifferent, disruptive and stupid (and yes, they exist) will all agree if you ask them the question, “Can this person teach?” They all recognise the skill when they see it.

    A great teacher is someone who is inherently skilled at conveying knowledge, and collaboration is more often a strategy designed to mask the absence of great teachers, than their presence. I’m certainly delighted to, at long last, be hearing the ice cracking under the centralisers’ feet, but replacing it with a call for homogeneity amongst schools is every bit as dull for the children deprived of knowledge as a result.

  3. phil korbel on Tue, 30th Jun 2009 3:35 pm

    4. Parts of the strategy certainly have worked. A good friend of mine is engaged in the systematic roll out of the use of synthetic phonics in early years teaching in Manchester. Not only does this approach mean that any child falling behind can be identified early, it also has raised the attainment of schools in deprived areas when compared to those in more prosperous areas. It does however mean a bit of form filling for teachers.

    So, presuming that this isn’t an isolated example of national strategy working, there might be a danger of throwing the baby [toddler?] out with the bath water…

    BTW – I have no links of any sort to Capita

  4. Schools without boundaries : Matthew Taylor’s blog on Fri, 10th Jul 2009 9:32 am

    5. [...] see if it sounds interesting and convincing. In preparation for my lecture to the SSAT I wrote a post about the divisive nature of political debate about schooling; I was planning to make this the [...]

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