'Wrecking Education in the UK' blog.topic  

Wrecking Education in the UK

This tale of folly, arrogance and betrayal was in the Guardian today.  The catastrophe stems ultimately from the Command and Control mindset that permeates every level of education, politics and government.

Politicians wreck our kids' education
The result of rigid, centralised control of the curriculum has been inadequate schooling for a generation of children
Francis Beckett
Friday February 20 2009
guardian.co.uk


I once asked Professor Marie Clay of Auckland University (she developed Reading Recovery, the only system yet designed which cures dyslexia in young children) why New Zealand schools had a much better record for teaching literacy than British ones.

She said it was because in Britain, the teaching of reading had become a political battleground. There were advocates of phonics, and advocates of real books, and they snarled at each other across an abyss. New Zealand teachers knew that you had to use both phonics and real books.

She was right, and it went way beyond the teaching of reading. The reason we have made such a mess of our children's education for the past quarter century (and we have, as the Cambridge review of primary education makes graphically clear) is because everything in it has become a political battleground, and for the past 25 years the authoritarian right has been in the ascendancy, under both Conservative and New Labour governments. If you question them, they do not offer an educational answer -  "this is how children learn, this is how we can help them"  - they offer a political answer of the sort that is designed to flatten opponents at prime ministers' question time: "Unlike woolly 60s liberals, we actually care about standards."

I first realised just how stultifying this was a decade or so ago. The government had introduced a literacy strategy, requiring primary schools to have a literacy hour, and I went to observe one. Every minute of that hour was laid down in the manual, what passage was to be read, how often it was to be read, what questions were to be asked by the teacher, exactly how many minutes were to be allowed on that section before the teacher moved the class on.

I happened to know that I was watching a talented teacher who knew how to get the best from children. But anyone could have conducted that hour as well as she did. I could have done it myself, and I have neither the talent nor the training to teach young children.

Ironically, this rigid uniformity imposed from the centre went along with rhetoric about how schools ought to be different. Those same politicians who were demanding that the lesson should be identical from Lands End to John O'Groats were also managing to sneer at what they called "one size fits all" solutions and parading themselves as champions of diversity.

What they meant by diversity was having different structures of ownership and management of schools: academies, trust schools and all the rest of them , and different intakes, so that some secondary schools could select all their intake at the age of 11, some only part of their intake, and some had to take those pupils whom the other schools did not want to teach.

The result of their rigid, centralised control of the curriculum has been an inadequate, Gradgrind education for a generation of children, who grew up without being taught literature properly, without encouragement for their imagination. It has not even achieved its avowed purpose of ensuring universal literacy and numeracy.

I shall never forget my son bringing home a Shakespeare play I knew and loved, which he had been asked to study. I started to talk, but he told me it did not help: he needed to know where to tick the boxes. I asked the teacher if he was telling me the truth. He was.

He is now 23 and his sister is 19. The politicians wrecked their education. This review has provided an opportunity to stop them wrecking the education of yet another generation.

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Some emphasis added by me.

 

 

 

 

This article adds more weight to the original post.

Target culture fails ethnic groups and poor

Article | Published in The TES on 30 May, 2008 | By: David Marley

The target-driven culture in schools is stopping struggling children from closing the attainment gap, according to research by Manchester University

The target-driven culture in schools is stopping struggling children from closing the attainment gap, according to research by Manchester University. The needs of children from poor working-class homes and different ethnic groups are overlooked as schools focus on securing good positions in exam league tables. The report, published today, provides a damning verdict on some of the Government's highest-profile initiatives to create a more level playing field for all pupils. Academies, designed to turn around entrenched underachievement in traditionally working-class areas, come in for harsh criticism for failing to work with other schools.

Report co-author Alan Dyson, professor of education and co-director of the Centre for Equity in Education at Manchester University, says targets have made it difficult for schools to look at what is having an impact on children. He is calling for schools to work together and carry out detailed analysis of the problems their areas are facing. Targets can be used to identify issues, but are not solutions, he said.

"We have a lopsided view of equity issues in education because we assume they can be attributed to poor leadership and teaching in schools. But for schools in disadvantaged areas, the solutions lie beyond the school gates," he said.

"There are interactions between race, gender and class issues. You have to look at the whole picture and help partnerships analyse what's going on to have a real impact."

The report, Equity in Education: Responding to Context, was co-written by Mel Ainscow, who is in charge of the Greater Manchester Challenge - an extension of the London Challenge - which seeks to raise standards in poor schools.

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