U-turn if you have to

This old bird, always keen to garner crumbs of comfort, cannot resist hoping to share with any who may not have seen it the text of a letter by Averil Lewin of Ely in The Guardian (29.06.09). She says:

“What a good idea for education to be less centralised. What we really need are organisations which could advise schools on current best practice; give ongoing support and guidance to schools which they really knew well; oversee admission policies to be fair to all; and be accountable to the local community. What would be a good name for these? Local, dealing with Education, and with some Authority. Let me think  . . . ”

The famous Thatcher word above (slightly adapted), used when the lady desired to show a certain steely determination, comes home to roost on Master Balls’s patch. There could be a number of causes of his change of heart – and we could be cynical about some – but if one of them is the realisation that a clanking state bureaucracy cannot ever find the the power let alone the wit to manage ‘the life of the mind’ as exemplified among the values that should inspire public education for a population of sixty million, well – hallelujah!

On the day the Vatican claim to have found the true burial place of St Paul it may be fitting for us to celebrate another minor damascoid revelation. Just a crying pity that the powers that be took the wrong road twenty or more years ago and so missed the right vision.

Juvenile

Matter v. Antimatter

Reporting recently in the Education Guardian, Polly Curtis
interviewed the egregious former SCI, Chris Woodenhead, on his
forthcoming book and says “there are few giants in education as big
as him” (a Jack and the Beanstalk specimen, does she mean?). Amid a
scattering of contumely for which nobody will sue him now, poor man,
he is quoted as saying of his deputy in office, Mike Tomlinson,”I was
never sure whether he knew what he thought about anything”. We can
perhaps guess at reasons for reticence in MT at the time.

He was boldly articulate, however, in a lecture he gave at
Northumbria University the other day, on the theme of vocational
education. He, now Sir Mike and the begetter of the 14-19 Special
Diploma programme, saying – again – how vocationalism in English
education was still culturally misunderstood and ever underrated,’
told how a vocational focus could be designed into a rounded
educational experience, and he enumerated the design principles; how
without a widening of opportunities for achievement at 16+ the
government target of achieving a 50% entry into higher education
could never be met; said that there was no coherence, only obstacles,
to progress for young people along the vocational line – contrasting
us with France, where in their Baccalaureate system there are 3
academic, 8 Technical and 48 Vocational streams, a system escaping
the ‘parity of esteem’ problem that has dogged us ever since the ‘44
Education Act introduced universal secondary education.

That problem (my gloss follows) put the emphasis in the wrong place –
at the academic end of the learning spectrum, so skewng the whole of
our education provision, and thus student opportunity and choice of
course, careers counselling, parental influence, the shape and
character of the school teaching profession and its basic
philosophies. The list of perversity goes on and on.

In the end and above all, the Tomlinson message was a moral one. The
hidebound concepts that govern our whole system have given rise to
constant neglect of untapped intelligences in a broad band of our
young population – to their personal detriment and to a self-imposed
social and economic penalty that we should have avoided in the past
and cannot afford in the future.

Woodenhead’s book is to be titled ‘A Desolation of Learning’ and if
his interview is anything to go by, it will be full of the
traditionalist platitudes we have heard from him ever since he
trimmed his sails to match the ideology of the centralising
politicians who placed him in office to play their tune.

One’s experience at Newcastle made it pretty clear why there could be
no meeting of minds at the top during the Woodenhead regime – and who
was going to be the man for the 21st Century.

Juvenile

Myths and Mindsets

Fiona Millar writes in the Education Guardian (14.4.09) of her altercation on the radio with a former Tory politician (unnamed but obviouly true to type) who had nothing to say on public education but it was cynical. “Failing state schools “, with the implication that they were all like that, was the central mantra.

It is constantly astonishing how a combination of bat-witted ignorance and largely southern, class-ridden attachment to an unquestioning belief in the superiority of private education can close its eyes to the long, steady advance of public education over the years – the  eloquently titled ‘Long Revolution’ of the social philosopher Raymond Williams. Distortions and half-truths persistently fostered by coteries of the bourgeoisie self-isolated in their mentally gated enclosures, detached from the real life of the nation, through endless repetition have become pronounced by them as facts – when they are merely artificial ‘factoids, the neat term coined by Norman Mailer.

And why did ‘county and voluntary schools schools’ in the old days of local education authorities – technically and in law ‘maintained schools’ – come to be known in the middle class parlance as ‘state schools’, the sub-text being that these were by nature inferior to private schools?  The so-called ‘public schools’ and the ‘independents’ were never besmirched, were they, as a form of parasite institution, sponging on the state – and so on the backs of ordinary, honest citizens – through charitable, tax-evading status.  The estimable AH (Chelly) Halsey, once Professor of Sociology at Oxford, never referred to them but as ‘commercial schools’. Pity the moniker never took on. Too near the bone of mercantile sharp practice?

The other unending faslehood is of ‘local authority control of schools’, as though the LEAs fettered the minds and activities of their schools – so far from the truth it’s laughable. In the days pre-’88 the teaching profession, burgeoning as it was in the universal system promoted by the noble 1944 Education Act, enjoyed as much freedom as the general culture, defined for schools mainly by its examination industry, allowed them.  Never before in the whole of history did so many teachers enjoy so much freedom from interference upon their vocation, as they carried forward all manner of curriculum developments along with advances in the analysis and exploitation of learning processes. 

All this achievement, of course, was halted in its tracks when it was ignored by the really giant myth, the one that justified the pernicious 1988 Education Act through unsubstantiated claims of school system underperformance.  That myth is all that still holds the walls of the Edukremlin together, as its denizens try to hold to the mindset that continues living the lie that the ‘88 Act was necessary; they do so with less and less power of conviction, in the ofir yet unspoken acceptance that their shallow ligitimation has been rumbled.  The ‘Reform’ of the Baker-Thatcherites was a big ideological con-trick.  Their present successors in government know this, and they know that you and I know it, and you and I know that legions of commonsense parents, closer to their local schools than the Edukremlin can ever be, know it too.

An end to the smoke screens of myth and the trickery of myth makers! Their presence over the last twenty years has tried educationists to the limit.  Prospect of another generation of such nonsense must be intolerable.

Juvenile

Verb. sap.

Not my lines below but those of Baroness Shirley Williams, Secretary of State for Education 1976-9 closing an article in the Education Guardian, 3.3.09 .

“In all sorts of ways, including promises of new buildings, pressure is being brought on community schools to opt out of local authority control. The declared emphasis of the government is on “driving up standards” but the evidence that these do that is at best mixed. Teachers have been compelled to conform to a ceaseless flow of directives, regulations and notes of guidance. Not only has their professional autonomy been undermined; their morale, attested to by the annual inspectors’ reports, is persistently low.

What may trouble the department more is the evidence that the UK is slipping in respected international league tables, that its educational standing is only a little above the average, and that the improvement in standards has slowed down. Perhaps the time has come to ask whether the pendulum, swinging towards intense regulation and control from the centre ever since 1988, has swung too far?”

Any words of mine would have had more acid, but level-headed judgment from a mild-mannered lady, the more pointed for its moderate tone, will be seen clearly to be on target. No doubt, though, that the apparatchiki in the Edukremlin will be calling for the flak-jackets – and as usual for the earplugs, while stocks last.

Juvenile.