Open season on education

Everyone seems to have been joining in the knocking of education over the past couple of weeks. Is this really fair? What is going on?
Tesco CEO Sir Terry Leahy attacked “woefully low” standards in Britain’s education system, blaming government for a surplus of quangos and guideline overkill. Biff!

Then the Cambridge Primary Review, led by Professor Robin Alexander, was published and concluded that the “apparatus of targets, testing, performance tables, national strategies and inspection is believed to distort children’s primary schooling for questionable returns.” It also noted: “the questionable evidence on which some key educational policies have been based; the disenfranchising of local voice; the rise of unelected and unaccountable groups taking key decisions behind closed doors; the ‘empty rituals’ of consultation; the authoritarian mindset; and the use of myth and derision to underwrite exaggerated accounts of progress and discredit alternative views.” Thwack!

And finally, to top it all, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, said: “We have in the past few decades created an extraordinarily anxious and in many ways oppressive climate in education at every level in the search for proper accountability. This search is laudable in itself, but its outworkings have been unhappy: an inspection regime that is experienced by many teachers as undermining, not supportive, an obsession with testing children from the earliest stages, and in general an atmosphere in most institutions of frantic concern to comply with a multitude of directives ...We are in danger of reintroducing by the back door the damaging categorising of children at an early age as successes and failures.” Krunch!

Of course many of us would agree with the sentiments about assessment as well as central interference and control. But I believe there is more to it.

Charles Handy used to talk about the s-curve and how if you didn’t want to go backwards you needed to set off on a new cycle of development before you reached the point of diminishing returns on the current one. Well I believe the current approach to education has already plateaued, and we have missed the point where we should have set off on a new track. And so with diminishing educational returns the debate will get more heated and frothier. And this will continue until we gain consensus on a new approach – which of course must be ‘many talents, many paths to success’ ... and all the consequent implications for curriculum, and pedagogy, and facilities, and employer engagement, and careers advice, and student voice. Sadly I do not see any political party yet grasping the bigger picture.