This text was authored by Michael Pyke and can be found in its entirety in CASEnotes 100. Eighty years on from the great 1944 Education Act and with an election imminent, it seems appropriate for this hundredth edition of CASEnotes to begin by taking stock of our education system. What has changed for the better since 1944? What has changed for the worse? What has not changed at all? Here are just a few things that come to mind. No doubt readers will be able to think of more...
LITTLE OR NO CHANGE
The social structure of the education system continues to reflect and reinforce the existing social hierarchy. The rich still educate their children separately from those of everyone else in a system that focuses lavish resources upon the already advantaged and promotes them through a powerful network of social contacts into elite positions in society. Meanwhile the marketisation of state schooling leads to the children of the most disadvantaged being concentrated in “failing” schools.
The educational narrative continues to be the one derived from the setting up of the current private school system in the 1860s: the purpose of education is not seen as the fostering of the common good but as a means of promoting the interests of individual children. Within the state system parents feel forced into competing for scarce resources for their children, inevitably at the expense of other peoples' children.
School teaching in state schools continues to be seen as not so much a profession as a craft skill to be learned “on the job”. In the private sector a model of the “gifted amateur” is promoted by the former pupils who dominate public life.
Academic achievement continues to be seen as the pinnacle of success at school, with practical and creative subjects seen as leading to occupations for “other people's children”. Vocational education continues to be subjected to ineffectual tinkering while nothing is done to raise its status.
BETTER
The class based selective system has been replaced, if only partially, by a system of comprehensive secondary schooling and schooling no longer ends at 14.
Access to university has been greatly expanded (although the idea is under frequent attack from privately educated editors).
WORSE
Ill-judged government interference in the content and management of the curriculum has become endemic, resulting in its having been stripped back to a “Gradgrindian” model in which practical and creative subjects, along with modern foreign languages, are in danger of disappearing.
Further education has become seriously underfunded and neglected.
Narrow and outdated forms of assessment along with inappropriate and largely hostile systems of inspection have come to dominate school life to the detriment of both pupil and teacher well-being.
The administration of state education through local government has been undermined by an “academy” system, whose governance is secretive, expensive and democratically unaccountable.
Real terms underfunding for almost a decade and a half has led to a serious crisis of resources from school buildings to teacher recruitment and retention.
No political party seems to have recognised the scale of the challenge that will face the new government, let alone have any policies to tackle it.