Schools debate – must do better
With teachers’ organisations committed to boycotting next year’s SATS for eleven year olds and Gordon Brown making a speech about parent power, schools policy is back in the spotlight. The debate is bound to be emotive. Society will never be perfect and schools are always a likely culprit for perceived social ills. Discussion about how to educate is weighed down by ideological baggage, and, as good traditional teaching is better than weak progressive teaching (and vice versa), there’s enough evidence to reinforce any prejudice.
Teachers may hate SATS but they provide a framework for school accountability and for feedback about a child’s progress and for these reasons parents tend to favour them. A few weeks ago I attacked spurious and reactionary research from the ATL which claimed to prove that parents were becoming more irresponsible and hostile. Today, Gordon Brown will promise to make it easier for parents to demand action if their children’s school is below par. This is in part an attempt to counter Conservative plans for parents to be able to set up their own state funded schools.
All in all, a depressingly adversarial picture is being painted. Yet, what we need is a more ambitious and collaborative relationship between schools and parents. We know, for example, that parental engagement in their child’s education is the single biggest determinant – more important even than family income – of that child’s success at school. If schools saw parents not as trouble makers or difficult customers but as partners they might take more seriously the slow and difficult process of developing a strong set of mutual expectations and norms to frame that partnership.
Over the coming years of public sector austerity schools face making difficult choices. If parents have been kept at arms length they will make these choices more difficult and controversial. But if parents are genuine partners they are more likely to appreciate the pressures and try to find concrete ways of helping the school to cope.
Some schools are taking parental engagement seriously. They must find the national discourse wholly unhelpful, contrasting the shallow posturing of ministers and teachers’ ‘representatives’ with the patient and subtle work of re framing local relationships.
And, as Labour MPs debate the merits of a wholly publicly owned Post Office, they might want to reflect on why, in a service as significant to society as schooling, the relationship between public service professionals and the public is such a confused and antagonistic terrain.
Why the ATL (and The Observer) should be ashamed of themselves
I said yesterday that the ATL’s methodology for its attack on parents and children couldn’t possibly be as dodgy as the one I used for the NASUWT twenty five years ago. This morning David Aaronovitch confirms that it was! The ATL (usually a serious and thoughtful union) should be ashamed of itself. I wonder whether there are any maths or statistic teachers at their conference and if so whether they would teach their GCSE pupils to rely on a self-selecting, unrepresentative, deliberately skewed sample in order to legitimise a major attack on the behaviour of large sections of British society. As for The Observer – which dedicated four pages to this tendentious nonsense- well that’s the last time I’ll be parting with £2.
Are parents and kids really that bad?
In a strange editorial decision, The Observer decided yesterday to dedicate its front page splash and nearly three full internal pages to research by the ATL (Association of Teachers and Lecturers) which claimed to show that children and their parents are not only vicious and nasty but getting worse. The Today programme featured the same survey this morning. For the media to report the ATL’s claims so uncritically is lazy and reactionary.
Twenty five years ago, when working for the teachers’ union NASUWT, I undertook a survey about pupil violence. We sent a questionnaire to every one of the 150,000 or so members and then analysed the responses. Of course, this is a completely unreliable method. Teachers who had experienced violence were much more likely to return the questionnaire than those who hadn’t. Not that this stopped us sending out press releases claiming ‘one in three’ teachers has been the subject of some kind of assault. The media lapped it up. I remember being in London and seeing lurid billboard headlines about classroom violence being out of control and only later realising it was my research that had justified the claims.
I’m sure the ATL research was somewhat more rigorous than mine – although there is no information about methodology on either union or media websites. But I still find the story highly suspect. Asking people whether they think things are ‘getting worse’ and asking them to give examples of bad experiences is a pretty hopeless way of getting a valid picture of reality. It is interesting that none of the coverage seems to feature statistics on actual reported incidents of assault or exclusion. I am pretty sure that data shows a gradual improvement in discipline.
As there is no powerful voice for parents or pupils there is no one to respond to the sweeping assertion that teachers are the victims of a tide of abuse and violence. There is no one to ask, for example, why it is that so many schools are still completely useless (neither interested nor effective) at engaging parents. There are no children to account for the times when hopelessly immature teachers make inappropriate and snide comments to pupils. There is equally no one to explain how powerless parents are when their child is being taught by a clearly incompetent or uncaring teacher.
The survey takes quite a low threshold for parental abuse so maybe I should hold up my own. My older son loves sport so when he had endured two years of virtually no organised activity at his inner city secondary school, I finally rounded on his head of PE about how his lack of commitment and imagination was denying kids the chance to do the one thing that gave many of them a sense of self esteem.
Which is not to say that there is a growing tide of incompetent, child-hating teachers. If anything, my sense is that teachers are getting better, parents are getting more useful feedback on their children’s progress and more schools are taking parental engagement seriously. Not that this would be the picture I would necessarily get if I asked parents to offer random examples of bad teaching or invited them in a questionnaire focussed on school failings to confirm ‘things are getting worse’.
Getting school discipline and relations with parents and guardians right is a challenge. Although some schools work in very difficult areas, the more schools put into positive parental engagement the more they get back. The ATL research tells us nothing except that there continues to be a strong seam of antipathy to children and parents in teachers’ organisations and that that the media will print anything as long as it reinforces the thesis which they are convinced sells their increasingly threadbare offering; namely, that society is falling apart because people like ‘them‘ (not us) are out of control.
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