Schools without boundaries
Filed under: Public policy, Social brain, The RSA, Uncategorized
I have made three education speeches this week. I am never quite sure what I believe until I try to articulate an idea and then 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 theme running through my speech. But a couple of days later, when I tried it out, it fell flat so I had to rethink.
Anyway, there have been two ideas which have gone down well this week and that I want to explore further. The first is the radicalism of Michael Gove’s plans for the curriculum. I have identified seven distinct ways in which the Shadow Education Secretary wants to reverse current trends, from reinstating the classical canon of liberal knowledge against the pursuit of ‘relevance‘ in the curriculum, to freeing schools to concentrate on education and not have to get involved in the wider (excuse the jargon) ‘Every Child Matters agenda’. It is clear that few in the education world are aware of Michael’s views and intentions. So, taking up an offer Michael accepted when he was here recently, I plan to write a post next week asking him to confirm or clarify the key aspects of his policy.
The second theme has been around our idea of ‘schools without boundaries’ . This comes, in part, from our work on the Manchester Curriculum and will form the subject of an RSA report later this month. The idea in essence is that we should make the work of schools, and the wider project of developing the next generation, the task of the whole community and not just parents and schools.
This is not only about opening up what happens in schools to the outside world nor just about mobilising the resources of public sector, cultural, sporting, civic and business organisations to support the work of schools, important though this is. The idea is also based on an insight derived from sociological and behavioural research.
It would be wrong to say that schools can do nothing to raise the aspirations and attainment of disadvantaged young people, but it is equally unreasonable to expect schools alone to counter the effects of inequality and exclusion. The key independent variable concerns attitudes to learning. Studies of fast developing countries, of the relative progress of ethnic minority cohorts in the UK, and of parental influence show that positive attitudes to children’s learning amongst their family, peer group and wider community can be more important than simple socio-economic factors.
Taking into account holidays and weekends, school pupils spend 80% of their time out of school. If there is little in that 80% that values and reinforces learning at school, it is unlikely that children will be receptive in the other 20%. Emotional receptivity is vital to the brain’s ability to learn. This is why inculcating a commitment to young people’s development in the wider community is so vital to the success of schools and why it is worth schools making the effort, and taking the risks, to open up what they do and seek to make education a whole community endeavour.
Why did I have to be so Frank?
I need a holiday. I keep making mistakes. I did it again today.
Michael Gove spoke here this morning. In a typically robust and engaging performance he repeated his scepticism about competence based curricula like our own Opening Minds. Gove is highly rated by just about everyone and is very likely to be running our schools this time next year. I need to keep on the right side of him to try to persuade him and his team to be a bit more open minded about Opening Minds. So, this morning I politely asked Michael if he would have an on-line debate with me so we could go into the issues in more depth than was possible in a ten minute Q and A session. He kindly agreed.
So far so good. But then this afternoon I was at a Conservative Home conference organised to brief various public affairs types on the Tory Party as it prepares for power.
In response to a question about whether the Conservatives could have a positive message for the next election I contrasted Conservative health spokesman Andrew Lansley (who was here last night) with Michael Gove.
I recalled the difference between Labour’s education strategy pre-1997 and their health strategy. In the former case, David Blunkett battled with his own Party to make clear he would keep most of the framework created by Kenneth Baker in the 1988 Education Reform Bill but with some changes at the margins, acceleration of elements like the literacy strategy and also using money from abolishing assisted places to reduce primary class sizes. In health, by contrast, Labour said the Tories were totally wrong and pledged to dismantle the Conservative internal market, which they subsequently did, only to later rebuild it under Alan Milburn at huge cost.
Approaching the next election Lansley is in the Blunkett position, broadly endorsing Labour’s approach but emphasising areas he would change, things he would stop and new offers he would make. But Gove sounds more like Labour on health in 1997 suggesting that the whole school system is in a mess and that only the practice he likes from the very best schools is worth emulating. Gove is also arguing for some profound changes in funding and structure. Indeed his agenda was described by Tim Montgomerie of Conservative Home as ‘a school revolution’.
The contrast was underlined in the audience reaction to the speeches. Both got warm applause, with many people clearly agreeing. But while no one seemed to want to disagree loudly with Lansley, with Michael Gove I have never known an event where so many people came up to me at the end to express concern about what they had heard, including two head teachers. (Not that this will worry Michael too much as cocking a snook at the educational establishment is, I suspect, part of his strategy)
Not everyone will agree with me so far, but it’s not that which is the problem. You see, the minister in charge of health policy for Labour in 1997 was Frank Dobson and so, in front of lots and lots of Conservatives, I said ‘in his tendency to condemn the schools system wholesale Michael Gove reminds me a bit of Frank Dobson’.
It is a toss up which of these two eminent politicians of different generations would be most appalled by my comparison. But when Michael is told – which he most certainly will be – that could be our bridges burnt.
I suppose it’s too late to say sorry?
The end of an education era?
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.
A new school politics?
On 7 July, I am giving the annual lecture to the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust. With the General Election looming and the likelihood of schools policy being one of the areas with clear dividing lines between the parties (as we can see this morning in relation to Michael Gove’s new proposals to move SATS tests from the final year of primary to first year of secondary schooling), I have opted to make ‘the politics of education’ my focus. I wanted to try out some of the ideas today. If the wonderful thread about ‘compare the meerkats’ is anything to go by, I will get some very interesting responses.
Ostensibly, it should be a good thing that schools policy will be centre stage over the coming months, but many in the education world will dread it. This reflects three problems with the way we talk about schools’ policy. Hoping that puns – however weak – may make the point more memorable, I describe these as ‘the school Atlas problem’, the ‘school uniform problem’ and ‘the school team problem’.
The school Atlas problem
This is the idea that schools can and should take on to their shoulders all the problems and aspirations of the world.
The school uniform policy
This is the tendency for people who take one position or another to insist that this position is wholly correct at all times. For example, those who claim schools policy is ‘dumbing down’ take any statistics showing improvements in attainment as evidence of their thesis. Similarly, those who favour progressive education will tend to dismiss any evidence of the virtues of more traditional approaches.
The school team problem
The way we talk about schools policy tends to assume that head teachers, teachers, parents, local authorities and pupils all have different agendas. The way certain interest groups behave reinforces this. Thus, for example, we assume that teachers are opposed to any form of performance accountability while parents are only interested in getting their own pupil into the best local school.
As this implies I am calling for a different type of discourse. How would it be if the background to the debate included the following assumptions:
• On balance, what goes on in schools is more a reflection of the kind of society we have chosen rather than what happens in society being primarily the responsibility of schools.
• We live in a fast changing world so we should be very careful before comparing today to the past.
• Good schooling of one style will nearly always be better than poor schooling of another style.
• Teachers have a major interest in having good systems of performance management and accountability, and parents have a huge interest in a system that works for all children and not just their own.
So, questions for my readers: is there anything to my argument? Does it matter? Is it naïve to think we might fashion a more honest and constructive politics of schooling?
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.
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