FAITH AND EDUCATION

Not faith schools, but faith in the people in schools: in pupils, students, teachers, and even governors.

Tyrrell Burgess [1931-2009] was both a humanist and a man of faith. He believed passionately in people’s innate ability to shape their own learning and measure their own progress. He promoted records of achievement for pupils to record the progress they made towards self-set goals. At the University of East London he encouraged students to devise their own study programmes, rigorously assessed by distinguished outsiders. He devised teachers’ own records to help them measure their own progress. He founded the National Association of Governors and Managers [NAG’M] to stimulate informed support for each school and prod the authorities charged with maintaining them. 

Of course he’s not alone in having faith. The government, for instance, have unbounded faith. They put their trust in regulatory systems: in, for example, a prescriptive curriculum to which they add new elements almost daily. Not so long ago citizenship was added. Then came careers education and competitive games. Then healthy eating. This week it’s first aid. Only the dedicated can find their way through the jungle of Statutory Subjects with a Statutory Content, Statutory Subjects with a non-statutory content, and non-statutory subjects.

And Burgess would surely be horrified to know that the Law for Governors now runs to almost 240 pages, and that his beloved governors, volunteers all, may be subject to legal action if they fail in any of their 26 statutory duties.

This ridiculous aggregation of controls would confirm Burgess’s trust in Karl Popper. In The Open Society and its Enemies, Popper argued that the most undesirable societies are those where centralized planning is imposed and dissent disallowed. Open discussion is the best way to ensure that social policies are improved before they are implemented. The most desirable form of government is one in which bad or incompetent rulers cannot do much harm.

As things stand, for all the rhetoric about autonomy for schools, a detailed control system has been created, and could fall into the hands of a wilful Minister. The present political imbroglio offers just a glimmer of hope. Could a new Savonarola rise to inspire a huge bonfire of the stifling administrative vanities of the last twenty years? Tyrrell would love a tribute like that.

AN OPEN LETTER TO MR MICHAEL GOVE MP

Dear Michael

You are so often in my living room with your fellow News Night Review panellists I feel we are old friends. It’s always fun to hear the sparky late night chat about books, theatre and the arts.

So I hope you won’t mind my mentioning another matter you seem to take an interest in, the future of our nation’s schools. You are reported as saying you would like schools to be free to determine their own curriculum and their own budgets, answerable to parents not the local council.

Some of what you suggest is well within the main tradition of English education. In the nineteenth century it was the state which determined the curriculum, not local school boards. For most of the twentieth century central government and the exam boards influenced the curriculum through their regulations and teachers were free to choose their own methods. A few local authorities developed what might be called specialist schools, but curriculum and teaching methods were pretty well no go areas for local councils. At the same time, councils like Cambridgeshire, Sheffield and Inner London allowed their schools discretion to spend funds as they chose. Ken Baker seized on these examples and mandated local financial management for all schools. 

At the same time he took control of the curriculum. Only since his day has the Orwellian term “state school” come into common use. But like Thurber’s man who fell over backwards in trying to avoid falling forwards, you make a great mistake in supposing that parental power is the antidote to state power.  The recent brouhaha in Woking shows what can happen when a strident faction comes to dominate a parent body or a governing body. Facing similar problems many schools have enjoyed disinterested support from their local authority. Serving the whole community in their area the local council have a broader and more permanent interest in creating successful schools than the ephemeral group of parents who happen to have children at a school at any time.

I’m sorry to write at length, but with your Scottish independent school background and your heavy commitments to News Night, I thought you might appreciate a quick resume on England’s maintained schools.

DIOGENES

AN INNOCENT ABROAD

Poor Ken Boston. Forced to resign, and traduced, he believes, by Ministers. After a distinguished career in Australia Ken Boston came full of hope to head the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. He did not know about Powell’s Law. Here in England public service lives tend to end in failure, as Enoch Powell said of political lives, unless by chance they are cut off mid-stream at a happy juncture.

If only Boston had searched the files. Consider what has happened since the government decided it ought to know what was going on in ‘the secret garden’ of the school curriculum. In the beginning the Minister created a Curriculum Study Group. Within a couple of years this Group joined the long standing Secondary Schools Examinations Council to form the Schools Council. Soon after a major government inspired reform, Ministers scuttled the Schools Council and split its responsibilities between a Schools Curriculum Advisory Committee and a Secondary Examinations Council. 

After many days these begat a National Curriculum Council and a Secondary Examinations and Assessment Council. And NCC and SEAC begat the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority. And SCAA knew the National Council for Vocational Qualifications and they begat the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. And its chief priests Nick Tait and David Hargeaves sojourned  only a short while in the tents of the QCA, and its mighty ruler Sir William Stubbs was summarily dismissed by the Chief Minister.

We hardly need to know how often Ministers urged Ken Boston to stir himself, or if they ever did. What is clear is that Education Ministers and their officers have no regard for what was one of the great glories of England’s unwritten constitution, the arms length relationship between government and public bodies.  The moment Ministers take office they contract a pathological itch to interfere.

If only Ken Boston had exercised ‘due diligence’ he might have chosen a quieter, well respected role at home. And if only Government were transparent we would all know how much they have poured down the drain in redundancy payments, early retirements, legal fees, and out of court settlements.

DIOGENES

Double-decker Prophet

The proponent of the Gaia image, James Lovelock, has battled his way against initial scepticism to presenting a full picture of the dire condition of our planet, through acceptance of his insistence on total synthesis of sciences, observations. and geohistory. Until recently stiffly opposed, he places the origin of this “largely with scientists in the 19thC. who for their own aggrandisement seized and declared independent the territories of physics, chemistry, Earth and life sciences. This conflict over turf “, he says, “ still goes on”.

Doesn’t he offer a major epitome for the prevailing conception, still, of our school curriculum in general? The parallels can be read straight over into secondary education. Consider its compartmented, subject-based, specialised, top-down knowledge model, split into small chunks, with little or no inter-relation, a drip-fed process ending in an incoherent experience for all too many pupils. It is founded on ancient practices in their attempt to link knowledge to comprehension – practices far more ancient than Lovelock’s 19th Century (more on that another time!) – with scarcely a glimmer of thought on the real learning capacity of the young mind. 

It assumes that specialism must begin at an early age, without regard to any idea that concentration of knowledge can be distilled in later stages. And then the whole unanalysed assumption is built into an examination industry dominated by higher academic needs and ideals, that industry then again exploited as a convenience by central government for the satisfaction of its Gradgrindian mindset. To government it is facts that matter, not understanding.

No wonder a large body of youngsters is turned off by what is handed out to it at school and want to leave it at the earliest age allowed. Bring on Marcus de Sautoy et al. sim. to take over Soft Furnishings!

Juvenile