The good news is that I don't intend to speak for long, since I know that education is a subject that arouses strong opinions and I'm sure there will be many people here who are eager to make their own contributions. What I would like to do is offer some observations and remarks that I hope will serve as a basis for debate and discussion. For the sake of brevity I also intend to limit my comments to primary and secondary education. If my analysis of current educational developments strays a little too far into politics, that may be because politics has strayed a little too far into education and also because I don't believe that it is possible to ask what education is for, without asking other questions such as who is education for? What is the dominant political and intellectual climate? What kind of society are children being educated to participate in?
During much of the nineteenth century, for example, working class pupils were not expected to
learn anything more than the ability to read and write, and even those skills were considered by
some to be dangerously subversive. We have certainly come some way since a government
schools inquiry commission declared that there was no need to encourage ' indiscriminate
gratuitous instruction ' amongst the poor and recommended taking over free schools into
institutions for the extension of middle-class education. At that time the ruling elite in this
country was almost entirely drawn from public schools steeped in obsolete classical traditions,
where the quality of the academic education received was less important than the fact that the
pupils had attended certain schools in the first place and imbibed the broader social values that
went with them. It was the emerging middle classes that began to transform these schools into
genuinely meritocratic institutions and forced them to change the curriculum to fit the needs of a
mercantile capitalist society where something more than simply being a ' good chap ' was
necessary for leadership. This ' raising of standards' in the public schools was also helped by the
creation of grammar schools which later became the bete noir of social democrats like Richard
Crossman. What little education the poor and working classes received was generally restricted
to religious instruction and the three Rs. What else was necessary, since most of them were not
expected to go into higher education or indeed achieve any higher position in society than skilled
manual workers?
Almost every country has multi-tiered education system that vary in quality according to the
different social groups they are aimed at, but in Britain the correlation between the type of
education received and the opportunities that flowed from it has almost amounted to a form of
class segregation. Here money has always bought a quality education for a small section of
society while the lack of money has denied it to the broad majority. The concept of universal
state education came slowly, as a by-product of political changes such as the extension of the
vote and the growing political influence of socialism and social democracy.
For some social democrats the reform of the educational system was seen as the key to the
longterm eradication of Britain's class differentials. Change the education system and ensure that
all children receive the same quality of schooling regardless of their background, it was believed,
and society would gradually change too. With the coming to power of the Labour Party after the
war, the chance came to put these democratic principles into practice. While leaving the public
school system intact, successive governments instigated the abolition of grammar schools and the
establishment of the comprehensive system, in which pupils from different social backgrounds and
levels of attainment were to be educated, shaken and stirred in the same institutions.
The egalitarian aims behind these reforms may have been admirable in many ways, but they have
largely failed to achieve the desired results. If anything the gulf between the private schools and
the state sector has grown wider in the last twenty years, in terms of educational quality and
academic achievement. A few statistics can help to bear this out: in 1996 there were nearly nine
million pupils in state secondary schools and 610,000 in private fee-paying schools. The average
yearly expenditure on state school pupils was £2,250 pounds, whereas in private schools it ranged
from £3,600 pounds to £8,000 for day school pupils alone. Of the total A level results with A
grades for that year 59% were scored by state school pupils while 41% were scored by private
school pupils. This is a staggering contrast if we consider the different student numbers involved.
The same enormous disparities are reflected in almost every sphere we care to mention, whether
in resources, sports facilities, expenditure on school buildings and class sizes. In London one in
five seven year olds in state schools scores zero in reading tests. In some state schools less than
15 per cent of pupils score five or more GCESE grades A-C. Judged by almost any criteria the
social democratic dream of bridging the educational divide in Britain has failed. While public
schools have transformed their antiquated educational priorities and re-invented themselves as
high-achieving academies to match grammar schools, the state sector has lagged further behind.
There are many different reasons for this state of affairs, but the crucial factor remains the same as
always - money, money to pay for decent schools, money to train and pay for more teachers,
money to buy books and materials, money to repair and upgrade school buildings. While
expenditure on state education has remained below the level of most European countries, fee-paying schools continue to command vast resources and offer conditions that the under-funded
state sector cannot hope to emulate. The gulf became particularly dramatic under the 18 years
of Tory governments, as funding for the state sector stagnated, as thousands of teachers were laid
off and class sizes actually grew from an average of nineteen in 1979 to the present figure of
around thirty. As the state sector declined, a sense of panic set in amongst the middle classes,
often fueled as much by outright snobbery as it was by disillusionment with the education system.
Under the guise of offering parental choice, successive governments began to bring back de facto
selection by removing schools from local authority control while those who could afford it
engaged in selection by mortgage and bought houses in catchment areas as far removed from the
emerging underclass as possible. Abandoned by parents and written off as centres of low
achievement, many inner city schools were allowed to languish or decline further, fighting a
desperate battle to provide an education to communities devastated by poverty and
unemployment and all their attendant social problems.
It was not surprising that a government which had done so much to bring this situation about was
not going to take any responsibility for it. By the early nineties a new consensus had been arrived
by politicians, rightwing educationalists and media pundits. The real reason that so many state
schools were doing badly had nothing to do with its historic underfunding - it was the fault of
teachers. According to the Daily Mail view of education, the state school system had been
systematically undermined from the nineteen sixties onwards by a generation of leftwing teachers
more intent on promoting homosexuality, revisionist concepts of history and vague chimeras like '
pupil self-esteem ' than in teaching children basic skills like reading and writing. In their
determination not to make any child feel a failure, achievement went unrewarded as these
ideologically-motivated teachers created a ' culture of failure' in which bright children were not
allowed to prosper and less able children were not encouraged to do better. The same culprits
had turned primary schools into chaotic structure-less laboratories where children spent all their
time painting and sticking eggboxes together or looking at flowers instead of learning to read
write and count.
The fact that learning through play has a long and honourable intellectual tradition, that many of
these apparently useless activities did have a pedagogic function was dismissed as liberal mumbo
jumbo. Nor was it any use suggesting that other factors might have had an impact on scholastic
achievement, such as poverty and social problems, large class sizes, inadequate school buildings,
the cultural, linguistic and class background of many inner city schools. These were just alibis
invented by teachers to justify their own inadequacies and excuse their failures. The solution was
to return to the past, to a time before the disease had set in, when pupils were taught by
traditional methods and ' learned something useful ' at school instead of playing. Others pointed
to the use of these traditional methods in Japan and the southeast Asian Tiger economies, and
claimed that they were partly responsible for these countries economic success. And there was
also a more contemporary ideological twist: for too long schools had been unaccountable, closed
institutions, when they should be made to function like any other company or business. Just as
state-owned utilities had been opened to the winds of competition, so should schools be forced to
compete with each other and their productivity and efficiency inproved. Schools needed to be
better managed and made more cost-effective. Since the exact 'product' that most schools are
offering was often difficult to quantify, it was necessary to find ways of quantifying how much
education pupils were taking away with them. A new, common sense definition of the goal of
education had been reached - to ' raise standards' and teach basic skills. Everything else was
considered to be superfluous or irrelevant.
Out of this consensus came the creation of Ofsted and the horrendous jargon which dominates
education in this country - the world of SATs and league tables, naming and shaming, fast-tracking, fresh start, 'encouraging excellence' and ' no excuse for failure. ' To the
disappointment of many of its supporters, the present government has gone even further than its
predecessors in subordinating all educational goals to that of raising standards. The result has
been the imposition of an apparently endless series of tests, with new ones appearing every few
months. Beginning with baseline assessments at the age of four and five, schoolchildren in this
country can now be expected to be tested at the age of seven, eleven and fourteen, followed by
GCSEs and A levels. Further plans are being mooted to introduce tests at age twelve and
thirteen, and special 'world class' tests for brighter pupils at the age of nine and thirteen. In
primary schools the timetable is dominated by the supposedly optional numeracy and literacy
hours, reducing the time available for project work and other subjects. Even nurseries and play
schools are expected to conform to the desirable outcomes promoted by Ofsted and prepare
toddlers to jump through the government's latest educational hoops.
All this, claim the politicians and educators in favor of it, is the bitter medicine the education
system needs in order to reverse Britain's functional illiteracy rate of twenty-two per cent, the
highest in the Western world after the United States. In New Labour's reprise of the old social
democratic dream, education is seen as the answer to what is now called social exclusion and the
problem of the underclass. Teach kids to read and write and they will not hang around the streets
and turn to crime or teenage pregnancy. Get them into school and get their heads down over a
good meaty test and they will grow up wanting to be good citizens and Internet millionaires. All
this, it has been decided, can only be achieved by a return the tried and trusted methods that were
inexplicably abandoned a generation ago. The fact that the country with the lowest rate of
illiteracy in Europe is Sweden, with 7%, a country that does not even begin formal education until
the age of seven, is apparently not considered worthy of attention or research. How has Sweden
achieved these results, if those early years are supposedly being wasted? What about research
emanating from the United States suggesting that premature exposure to formal learning can have
a long term impact on children's emotional well-being and academic achievement and can even
put them off education for life? These questions are neither asked nor answered. The
government and its appointees know what they want - the same thing that the Daily Mail wants;
rigidly structured and quantifiable learning, a national curriculum and national expectations, whole
class teaching instead of small groups ambling along at their own pace, above all tests, tests, tests
whose results are measured against centrally-determined targets. Schools that fail to achieve
these targets, regardless of their differences in catchment areas or the ability of their pupils, must
be publically humiliated and if necessary closed down altogether to be taken over by those private
companies favoured by the government. In the latest scheme proposed by the Dfee, schools
whose pupils that fail to score 20% of GCSEs will face closure. That this figure includes the
famous Phoenix School that was ' turned around' only a few years ago does not seem to bother
the Secretary of State or the Chief Inspector, any more than the resignation of three heads in a
year at one of its flagship 'fresh start ' schools. Even so-called 'coasting 'schools that do not do
as well as Ofsted has decided they should, will not escape the relentless pressure to produce more
exam passes or risk being named and shamed.
The result of all this pressure is that 'standards' are rising, or so we are told by the politicians
anxious to take credit for it. The evidence for this tends to be based on SAT scores, rather than
teacher assessment, since teachers can no longer be trusted to assess their own pupils, even
though most of them can predict the results of their pupils SAT scores in advance. Yet when
more pupils seem to be passing A levels and GSCEs we are then told that the exams are too easy
and need to be made harder. One would have thought that a government as obsessed with
quantifiable statistics as this one it would be pleased that more pupils are passing exams -
apparently not.
The negative impact of this relentless pressure is difficult to determine. The politicians and
government appointees responsible for the standards crusade have so far remained resolutely
immune to any criticism of their aims and methods - especially when they come from teachers.
The Secretary of State for education has famously dismissed his critics as 'miserable sneering
cynics ' and middle-class elitists, while the Chief Inspector is notoriously hostile to any kind of
educational research, perhaps because it might provide evidence to contradict his own
triumphalist rhetoric. So hostile is the present educational establishment to any deviation from its
aims and methods that Ofsted and the Dfe recently came close to closing Summerhill, a small
experimental school established by the radical educationalist AS Neil more than half a century
ago, where pupils are allowed, among other things, to decide whether to attend classes
themselves. Summerhill may not be everyone's cup of tea, but the fact that the Dfe should have
tried so hard to impose its ideology on a small private school where parents have chosen to send
their children should alarm anybody who believes that there may be other ways of educating
children other than those advocated by New Labour technocrats. For the same reason the fact
that the Dffe failed in its attempt should be a cause for minor celebration, even for those parents
who cannot afford the six thousand pounds a year school fees.
Within the state system, a radical child-centred approach like Summerhill's is unimaginable in
today's climate. For Mr Blunkett and his cohorts there is only one way of doing things and few
schools dare to criticize them openly or refuse to implement the 'optional ' prescriptions handed
down from above. Even parents who question the government's reforms tend to be dismissed as
'middle class elitists, ' such as the mother who recently refused to let her seven year old son take
SATs on the grounds that they had no educational value. Should we conclude therefore that
working class parents have no concern for their children's emotional well-being and their children
are only fit to be taught to read and write, just as they were in the nineteenth century?
At the risk of sounding like a middle class elitist I want to offer just a few opinions of my own
before turning the debate over to you. In the first place I see no evidence that the regime of
league tables and SATs has actually improved standards nationally. On the contrary it seems to
me that they may have actually accelerated the decline in some state schools by promoting SAT
results as a benchmark of quality at the expense of everything else. On occasion the league tables
can be totally misleading in terms of representing a school's real achievements. The primary
school in Oxfordshire that topped the SATs league tables early this year for instance had fifteen
pupils per class, and each class was attending by a teacher, an LSA and an average of two parents
assisting, yet still the head insisted that the high results were based on the high expectations of the
school. What school would fail to get good results in such conditions? And how many parents,
when scanning the league tables, are even going to consider why the schools at the lower end of
the table have failed to get similar results? It may be, for instance, that schools at the bottom
have a higher quotient of special needs pupils that year or that they may be offering a perfectly
adequate education in ways that can't be measured by statistics. But the bottom of the league
tables is bound to be associated in the minds of the public with academic failure, and those parents
for whom choice is an option will naturally gravitate towards the top of the league table, thus
reinforcing the position of so-called sink schools.
Take the school in Newcastle that was closed down and re-opened last year as part of the government's fresh start initiative with a different staff. Within twelve months three heads have resigned and pupil applications are nearly half their full capacity, so that the local authority is now proposing to close it. A similar process has taken place in some of the schools placed under special measures. The point is that once confidence in a school is lost it is very difficult to get it back, yet the government shows no sign of recognizing that its policy of publically disgracing schools and sending in Ofsted hit squads may be counterproductive. Instead the threats continue, not only to schools but local authorities, who are often forced, as they were in Leeds and Sheffield, to pay out large sums of money on PR to campaigns to counteract the negative propaganda emanating from the Dfe and the Chief Inspector in order to save themselves from being taken over by 'other providers. '
There is also the negative impact of the governments reforms on children themselves. What
evidence there is for this tends to be anecdotal, but that should not make it irrelevant. We hear
parents of primary school children complaining about how exhausted their children are after
school, that children as young as seven are becoming stressed out and anxious at the prospect of
having to do SATs. I was recently told of a teenage boy at Highfields who was so depressed at
the prospect of SATs that he could not even celebrate his own birthday, which coincided on the
same day. We don't know how common or widespread this is, but it seems to me that we ought
to make an attempt to find out. At a time of their lives when children's minds should be at their
most alive, receptive and open to the world, we should not be offering drudgery and boredom.
In my opinion the imposition of such a constricting and narrow educational regime on young
children constitutes an abuse of childhood and an extension of our own dreary, work-obsessed
culture into the classroom. Now there are plans to reduce the summer holidays, so that children
do not 'lose' the knowledge they have accumulated, as if learning was simply a form of factual
accumulation rather than an ongoing process.
Children are not just embryonic adults or a future national resource: they are children and individuals, for whom education should be a pleasure not a burden, who should be allowed to learn and mentally develop at their own pace. Of course I believe that children should learn to read and write, but not in a way that precludes or marginalizes all other forms of learning and makes even young children feel that there is something wrong with them because they progress more slowly and can't keep up.
Last but not least I would like to draw attention to one of the most repugnant features of the drive
to raise standards: the cynical scapegoating of teachers by politicians, educational bureaucrats and
newspaper pundits of every political persuasion. I cannot think of any profession in this country
that has been exposed to such relentless contempt and abuse by those who are supposedly in
charge of it. From the Chief Inspector, with his endless ranting about 15,000 bad teachers to
Guardian and Daily Mail editorials railing at 'clapped-out, whinging teachers, to David Puttnam's
fatuous pronouncements there seems to be an almost universal consensus that teachers are the
enemy and an obstacle to change. Even the prime minister himself, the product of one of
Scotland's most exclusive public schools, had the mind-boggling temerity to refer to state school
teachers as ' vested interests ' because the profession as a whole does not accept his
government's reforms.
No wonder teachers are leaving the profession in droves because they cannot take the paperwork,
the stress, and the joyless treadmill that their profession has become. Evidence of demoralization
and exhaustion amongst the teaching profession is so general that it has almost become a cliche.
A recent teacher help line is constantly being inundated with calls from teachers complaining of
stress and overwork. Some of you may have read about Carol Clayson, the primary head teacher
in Norwich who wrote a letter to David Blunkett in braile earlier this year listing some of these
complaints and pleading with the government to cease the constant output of initiatives and listen
to teachers instead of attacking them. Ms Clayson worked in a primary school with 60% of pupils
on the special needs register and 45% on free school meals. Many of her pupils were not even
able to hold a conversation, let alone learn to read and write. One morning she made the decision
that from then on she was going to 'take back ownership' of the school and that she and her staff
would no longer do anything that was not directly in the best interests of the children as they saw
them.
Not surprisingly her letter received no reply from the Secretary of State, but her defiance clearly
struck a chord elsewhere, because the TES received some seventy-odd letters agreeing with her,
most of them from head teachers. I would like to quote from a few of them here, to give you the
general flavour:
You are absolutely right to speak out. It is completely immoral to set school against school,
teacher against teacher and pupil against pupil. Inspiration, creativity and love are forced out
of schools and replaced with systems, tests and league tables. Don't let them grind you down.
And another:
I love my job. I take pleasure in the children's achievements, in watching the sullen,
uncommunicative, withdrawn, sad ones begin to open up to the world and respond to
encouragement and praise: in being part of their lives. And yet I find myself wondering where it
is going to end. I am exhausted, stressed, demoralised and de-professionalized by the constantly
increasing workload. I am, as you said in your article ' too tired for a life outside teaching. ' I
am getting married this autumn and taking just a five-day honeymoon. This should be the
happiest time of my life but already there is a cloud over it: when will I get my planning done for
the half-term up to Christmas? I find myself thinking that the only way I can save my sanity, my
health and my relationship with my future husband is to leave the profession. I don't know what
else I could do, having wanted to teach all my life, but I feel I am being forced out, forced to
choose between a life and teaching.
And lastly:
I am exhausted by 70 hour weeks, planning, monitoring, Investors in People, twilight sessions,
literacy and numeracy but I continued to put my tortured mind through PRP, thresholds, fast
track, Ofsted etc, until I came to your enlightened words and instantly thought ' My God, there's
a woman who is taking the words out of the mouths of 80 per cent of teachers in this this country.
But why is no one hearing?
Why indeed? The obvious answer is that those in charge of the teaching profession are either
indifferent or oblivious to the conditions that many teachers are working in and have no intention
of doing anything to improve them. It doesn't matter that teachers are expected to educate some
30-odd children and make sure that each of them passes their tests and exams. They are also
expected to be police officers, social workers, and child psychologists, instructing children in sex
education, career choices, social morality, manners and sociability, and now Civics. They are the
ones who work on the educational chalkface, yet their views are consistently ignored by a
government that seems bent on squeezing them to the last drop. Do the bureaucrats directing
education really believe that their goals can be achieved without the support and active
participation of teachers? Or that the ongoing recruitment gap will be filled by a mythical new
generation of 'graduate high-fliers ' who will choose teaching as an alternative to the city?
The fact is that teaching has never been a glamorous or financially rewarding profession and that
few people have ever gone into it for those reasons. This may be difficult to understand in a
society like ours that worships footballers and entrepreneurs and considers public service workers
to be reactionary dinosaurs. Teaching demands human qualities that cannot be bought by golden
hellos or replaced by interactive lessons on the Internet. On the one hand government campaigns
promote a sentimental image of the charismatic, inspirational teacher who no one forgets, while
on the other they are helping to create a situation in the classroom where it is almost impossible
for inspiration, spontaneity and creativity to flourish, unlike the private schools that they admire
so much. All this should be of concern to parents as much as teachers. If education is to be a
remotely positive experience for our children, it can only be when the day-to-day business of
educating them is in the hands of skilled practitioners who enjoy their work, who feel valued by
society and do not regard their profession as a tedious obstacle course. If teachers experience
their work as drudgery, how are their pupils going to see it as anything different?
This does not mean that I believe that all teachers are good teachers, or that I don't think they
should be appraised, but I see no value whatsoever in the bullying inquisitorial approach of
Ofsted. There are many different ways of being 'a bad teacher ' and God knows I have known a
few, but some of these defects might be better remedied through careful support rather than
intimidation from an organization that few teachers even respect. Not every teacher can be
Sidney Poitier or Glenn Ford, but even mediocre teachers should be valued, respected and
supported for the work they do. They certainly deserve something better than Ofsted and the
discredited and insulting tactic of performance related pay.
I have spent a lot of time condemning what I don't like about the current educational system. Before anyone accuses me of sterile negativity I'd like to close by briefly mentioning a few things that I think would improve it for children, teachers and parents. I am not proposing a return to a mythical golden age because I don't believe there ever was one, but here are a few things that I would like to send in my Christmas list to Mr Blunkett. Please can we have smaller schools with better facilities and smaller classes, less managers and more teachers, a flexible curriculum, the abolition of SATs, a less prescriptive approach to primary school education, the sacking of the Chief Inspector, the abolition of Ofsted and the creation of a more sensitive inspectoral mechanism, no more literacy campaigns sponsored by Rupert Murdoch or MacDonalds, no more education action zones that are an excuse for privatization, no further commercialization of education, no more populist manipulations carried out under the banner of parental choice, a fair wage for all teachers, less classroom time so that teachers can have time to prepare the brilliant lessons that you are in favour of, a genuine dialogue between a more humble government and the teaching profession on how to improve our education system. Perhaps then we might succeed together, parents, teachers, government and who knows even children, to create the kind of education system that we all deserve.
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