CASEnotes

[This text was originally publishes in CASEnotes #100] In March of this year, the shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson said that school pupils must “learn to challenge” media narratives. Speaking at the annual conference of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), Phillipson said, “Our young people need, more than ever before, to be questioning, critical, discerning.” Besides cultivating a mature citizenry, critical thinking skills become even more important in the modern economy, one which continues to shift away from manufacturing and manual labour and towards services and tech. Indeed, it is a familiar truism that schools must educate their learners for jobs that do not yet exist. Still, I cannot fathom many teachers today would claim that they are teaching critical thinking skills effectively. How could they, when teachers themselves are no longer active agents in the content that they are “delivering”? With the expansion of academisation and the centralisation of educational resources away from individual schools and towards corporatist “independent public bodies,” such as the Oak National Academy, the answer to the question, “what should today’s lesson be?” is likely to be decided by a “Curriculum Lead” rather than an individual teacher. In Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs) especially, the trend is towards “curriculum packs” that structure the short, middle, and long-term teaching across “units of learning,” with pre-prepared classroom content, as well as homework, revision sheets, and end-of-term assessments. The rationale for these developments is certainly well-intentioned. Given that teachers in England work longer hours than their European counterparts, any opportunity to reduce workload is warmly welcomed. However, this becomes problematic when educational resources become educational prescriptions. Many teachers today are not, I believe, active agents in what they teach. They cannot choose either what they are delivering, or how to deliver it. The consensus in academic research is that the schoolteacher today is less “educator” and more “craftsperson.” Teachers are “deliverers,” “technicians,” of education, not public-facing intellectuals. It seems that the ideal teacher, at least in the current paradigm, is a classroom manager. They passively take the “content” - discrete objects of “knowledge” - and regurgitate it to likewise 4 passive students. Along with being boring and patronising, the problem of having the what and how withheld from teachers, is that the why is lost along with them. This way, you are prone to find a scene that I have witnessed many times in my short teaching career: Student: “Why are we learning this?” Teacher: “Because it’s on the syllabus.” This is very far from Ms Phillipson's “questioning, critical and discerning.” Besides failing our learners, I would wager that this teaching model is more implicated in the present staffing crisis than is generally recognised. Together with inadequate pay, the gradual erosion of teacher autonomy is deeply associated with the overall de-valuation and deprofessionalisation of what once was a respected career. After all, what aspiring teacher, propelled by a sincere desire to inspire young people and “make a difference,” looks forward to nothing more than doing what they are told? Certainly, I am not proposing a world in which each teacher is a king and each classroom their kingdom. This has already been settled by the “Great Debate,” launched all the way in 1976, partly in response to the William Tyndale affair where a radical child-centred ethos hindered children’s learning and resulted in serious disciplinary problems. But the present “I say, you do” chain of command running from Executive Head Teachers and Senior Leadership Teams, down to teachers, then subsequently hammered into students cannot be “delivering” critical learners. Surely if we want students who think, their teachers must have the freedom to do so first.

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.

Place  planning is a statutory duty of local authorities. Quite simply it means managing the number of school places within its area, both ensuring that there are sufficient for the number of children locally, and reducing them as populations change. Since the 2012 Education Act this has become considerably harder as responsibility for opening schools now sits with Regional Commissioners, and these can only be free schools or academies, no more local authority maintained schools. Similarly, councils can’t close academies. Only the Department for Education can, through Regional Commissioners. Councils have responsibilities without the powers to fulfil them. In December last year Hackney council decided to close or merge six of its primary schools due to falling rolls, even though not all of these schools were in the places most affected by falling numbers. They just couldn’t touch the academies, even though they too were affected. And in August this year Islington Council lost a judicial review of an academy order imposed after an ‘inadequate’ Ofsted inspection. Within the borough the school, Pooles Park, is the one most affected by falling rolls, so is logically the one that needs to close. However, because the academy order cannot be overturned it will now stay open, and another one – a local authority maintained school - will have to close. Despite every other primary school locally being judged either ‘Good,’ or ‘Outstanding.’ Whilst this judgement seems anomalous, there are plenty of instances of schools choosing to academise in order to protect themselves from closure, with Schools Week reporting in February that the Diocese of Westminster was encouraging Catholic schools to do so in order to protect themselves. The upshot of all this is that local authorities have a responsibility they are severely restricted in fulfilling by regulations designed to limit their control of schools and to expand the academies sector. Schools that are not needed stay open. Schools that fulfil an essential purpose in a neighbourhood are forced to close. Or academise to prevent closure. Meaning another school has to be closed. Or choose to academise. And so on. These are regulations blatantly designed to promote a stalled political project. The academies system is wasteful, unaccountable to local people, and ideologically driven. A first step to ending this situation would be for the government to return to local authorities the rights necessary to fulfil their place planning responsibilities and effectively manage the resources their residents need. It would also mean that Regional Commissioners could be got rid of. And schools could no longer game the system. #place planning, #local authority