Let's Start Again

‘Everyone who remembers his own education remembers teachers, not methods and techniques. The teacher is the heart of the educational system.’ Sidney Hook

‘20,000 pages of on-line guidance overwhelms Scottish teachers.’ Glasgow Herald headline, 1 December, 2016

What is wrong with our schools? What is this malaise that is affecting so many of our teachers and driving them from the profession? And furthermore, how is it, despite all our legislation and political push, we have ended up with a system that, according to PISA, still lags behind similar countries? By what process have we arrived at a system smothered in a mish-mash of requirements, wrapped up in endless policies and bespoke language that obfuscates and frustrates: in essence, a rampant bureaucracy that is slowly suffocating our schools. Why is it that so much of what schools are required to do has become unnecessarily complicated and time- consuming? Why can’t we get rid of the dross and start again?

To answer these questions, we need to strip our system back to the bones, to a simple, common-sense and pragmatic approach to education without all the meaningless debates about school types, whether we should call boys and girls ‘children (or he and she, ze as Oxford suggests). We need to get our focus back to where it should be, on the education of children (and adults, for education will need constant renewal in this brave new world).

We suspect that much of what schools are now required to do is pointless, layered over the years, adding to, but never subtracting. But how can we do it differently? How can we change what has become an ever-more complex, label-laden, bloated and anachronistic system into something that actually works?

First, we must get teachers back to spending more of their time teaching children. We need to work at reducing the excessive, time-wasting requirements placed on schools and, if that does not work, then appoint administrative support to take care of the work that does not need to sit in the teachers’ domain, ie inputting data, filing, collecting, manipulating and extrapolating information, managing parent concerns and e-mail traffic. To make best use of our greatest assets, teachers must spend more time engaging directly with children rather than sitting in front of a screen, dealing with a surfeit of administrative tasks that can be dealt with elsewhere.

To make our schools work for all, we need to bury the myth of selection. Every time selection is mentioned, there is the downside, which is what happens to the rest, those who at eight years old or eleven or thirteen cannot jump over the bar, but who will be able to in time and need to compete with those who can? What we want, surely, is rigour for all schools, where streaming and setting through a semi-permeable membrane allows for each to be taught according to their stage of readiness and need. Rigour is not the preserve of selective schools; indeed, selective schooling often dilutes rigour, softens the edges and leads to complacency on both sides of the divide. What is needed in all schools is for children to develop a sense of purpose, through self-discipline, clear goals, outstanding teaching and an appreciation of the gift of education. We need to revisit the whole rationale of inspections. Why are Heads Teachers perpetually frustrated and nervous about inspections? Why are they seen as ambushes? Why should Schools have to be subject to constantly changing, and often contradictory requirements? (I remember being told to put glass windows in dormitory doors one inspection (safety) and take them out at the next (privacy) Simplify, simplify! We all know just how spurious and petty inspections can be, with so many pointless requirements and reams of documentation that cannot possibly be managed by teaching staff – except that in small schools, without a bevy of staff members employed to deal with human resources, it actually is – and decry the waste of time and resources.

Safeguarding, Child Protection and Health and Safety have, likewise, become industries, generating work, necessitating the employment of armies of advisers, consultants, spawning inset days, conferences, articles and books. Of course, the safety of children must be a paramount concern yet, in many ways, our excesses have made children less safe. Constant tweaks, wasted days going over revisions of revisions, generic comments when there is nothing sensible to say, so much content, piled up and constantly changing does little for safety. Policies should not have to be tweaked by individual schools at ridiculous cost, often flying blind, advised by expensive outside agencies. Regulations need to be simplified so that inspections work for schools, not to justify the cost and excessive bureaucracy of an inspectorate. Ideally, the key points (and there are usually only a few KEY points in each policy, i.e. who is the LADO, what do you do when approached by a child in confidence etc) should be on flashcards that can be carried about and referenced as appropriate. Safe-guarding is too important to risk losing the focus in the detail and yet the reality is we are in danger of doing just that.  The same may be said of PREVENT which has created an industry of its own. And through it all, despite the excessive attention to detail, have we actually made our children safer: many fewer walk to school or take exercise; many are more risk adverse, have had their initiative and competitiveness stunted, are more dependent, more vulnerable, more unhappy than ever before. Somehow, we need to restore the balance. Let’s focus on areas that matter: the fact that nearly 19,000 children were admitted to hospital after self-harming last year in England and Wales – a rise of 14% over the past three years; the fact that 62% of 13 – 20 year olds have experienced cyber-bullying; or the fact that most children have begun using a mobile phone or are on-line by the age of eight. How have we protected them? How have we taught children appropriate values and behaviours so they don’t use the internet as a weapon of choice? How have we protected them from themselves?

Which leads us onto the elephant in the room, technology. Having wasted billions experimenting with anything from raspberries to whiteboards, we must revisit the place of the internet in our schools –quite distinct from the teaching of computer science and coding. Marc Goldman recently wrote ‘I am increasingly concerned about the ubiquity of computing in our lives and how our utter dependence on it is leaving us vulnerable in ways that very few of us can even begin to comprehend.’ We need to look at the whole way we teach about the internet. Here we should consider a new subject – ‘The Internet and Social Media’ or suchlike – that teaches children how to use the net, and includes such sub-topics as using social media, identifying fake news, internet safety, cyber-bullying, the dark web and how to use the net to its potential, all under-pinned by a robust, ethical framework. Without some rules, some self-regulation, we are placing our children in danger.

In teaching, we should focus on teaching and deal with the small stuff, such as handwriting, in the classroom, keeping learning support staff for those who have more significant learning difficulties. We should put more emphasis on writing, in sentences, paragraphs and essays, to learn how to reason, argue and communicate. And let’s take seriously the proposition that philosophy and ethics should be compulsory from a young age to underpin nanotechnology and science, to guard against the inducements of the internet. Teaching values and ethics, responsibility and community, is the best way to keep them safe and protected from the single allureof money, power and prestige, which is what young children are inadvertently being tempted to pursue.

We need to make education more attractive and relevant for all and raise its profile (and promote it as a life-long commodity). To do that successfully, we must engage more with parents and guardians and educate them too – to say they need help and guidance is not condescending, but a reflection of the helter-skelter world they live in, assailed on all sides by so much misguided and contrary advice from parenting sites and magazines that cannot help but make them insecure in wanting to do their best. And for their sake, let’s move children away from the centre of the universe, placed there by doting, well-meaning parents and put them back in their families, in their communities and other social groups so they learn to share, socialize and take some responsibility.

Let’s get rid of the shameful distinction between good school – bad school, in fact, let’s forget about school types and treat schools according to need. Let’s look at where we are spending our education pound, and work on training, procuring and looking after the best teachers. Let’s not get hung up on class sizes or resources and be properly cautious of all the extraneous advice offered by experts, the quality of in-service training we buy into and keep asking ourselves, ‘is this going to improve the education (or safety) of our children?” And we should celebrate those schools that demand more from their students through discipline and standards and stand up to those ‘experts’ who view such methods with opprobrium. We should look after children by helping them through each stage of development and ask ‘is anything more likely to cause mental health issues than those experts who tell us children need to know every detail of drug abuse, death, disease and sexuality before they are ‘ready’ – yes, readiness again – and nothing of the joy and adventures of life? We should prioritise Mathematics and English, but not through testing alone which determines the learning process and ignores how learning – deep learning –happens; we should stop being in such a hurry by trimming our curriculum, removing the colour and floss, or by closing doors early through selection, separating children from other children for reasons of IQ or maturation and producing the stratified society that does us such harm. We need simplified inspection frameworks; we need teachers to get back teaching; we need easily understood and simple guides to safeguarding and child protection, we need risk assessments to focus on real risks, not some meaningless compliance or box-ticking. We need to get rid of the legalese that permeates our schools, do a time and motion study and see how much time, especially teacher time, we are wasting. Let’s give inset days back to improving teaching rather than an endless succession of first-aid, fire- training, prevent and compliance courses. Let’s simplify our schools and get some rigour and pride back into the classrooms and make sure they are places that are both relevant to children’s needs and where teachers and pupils want to be. Let’s start again.