Schools without boundaries

July 10, 2009 by · 40 Comments
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.

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Wish me luck

July 7, 2009 by · 1 Comment
Filed under: Uncategorized 

Apologies for no post today, and only cursory responses to the comments.

I have been working on the annual lecture of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, which I am due to deliver in 25 minutes. I am very nervous  and genuinely fear it may be a lead balloon. It’s partly because I don’t really think anyone has the right to pontificate about schools who doesn’t actually spend time every day trying to teach real children.

The good news is that we have just had the most violent thunder storm I can ever remember, so maybe I’ll be speaking to an audience comprising the event organisers and my ever loyal PA Barbara.

Was it Wittgenstein who said ’we know the sound of two hands clapping, but what is the sound of one hand clapping’. I may be able to answer this question in an hour or so.

I will report back tomorrow along, I hope, with an update on the climate change cultural theory quiz (thanks for a great response) and some exciting news about the Bloggers’ Circle idea I floated a few weeks ago.

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The end of an education era?

June 26, 2009 by · 4 Comments
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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