A new school politics?

June 15, 2009 by · 17 Comments
Filed under: Public policy 

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?

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Schools debate – must do better

May 5, 2009 by · 3 Comments
Filed under: Public policy 

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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