Teacher Education, the University and the Schools

Papers for Harry Judge

David Phillips

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317989363
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Using the highly successful Oxford model of teacher training and the widely respected work in teacher education of Harry Judge, a number of prominent educationists from around the world contribute chapters on a range of topics relating to the interface between the university and the schools in the complex processes involved in the initial training of teachers.

The book covers discussion of aspects of teacher education in the UK, the United States, and France, as well as in the developing country context of Pakistan. Policy issues are described by William Taylor, Tim Brighouse, and Stuart Maclure. And Jerome Bruner and David Cohen write about the processes involved in learning and thinking about what teachers need to know in their training.

This book was published as a special issue of the Oxford Review of Education.

Part One

Introduction

Making a difference: Harry Judge, teacher education, the university, and the schools

David Phillips

University of Oxford, UK

This special issue of the Oxford Review of Education is devoted to teacher education and celebrates the work of Harry Judge, whose eightieth birthday falls on 1 August 2008. The themes covered all relate in some way to his contribution throughout a long career to improvements in the education of teachers within a collaborative intellectual context involving the university and the schools and to his related writing and research.

The introductory paper by Professor A. H. Halsey sketches Harry Judge’s career in the context of reflections on the University of Oxford and its colleges. Born in Wales in 1928, he attended a grammar school in Cardiff and proceeded to Oxford, where he read History at Brasenose College and later studied Theology with the intention of entering the Church. He decided, however, —and for this educationists must be thankful—to become a schoolteacher, taking a post at a prestigious London grammar school in 1954 and later gaining experience in administration as Director of Studies at Cumberland Lodge, Windsor.

In 1962 he became headmaster of Banbury Grammar School which in 1967 was to be developed under his leadership (now as Principal) into what was then the largest comprehensive school in the country, Banbury School. It was during his time in this important post that he became established as a significant national figure in education. He served on the important Public Schools Commission in the late 1960s, on the James Committee of Inquiry into Teacher Training (1971–72), and on the UGC’s education sub-committee, and he chaired at various times the School Broadcasting Council and the Royal College of Nursing’s Commission on Education.

In 1973 he succeeded Alec Peterson as Director of the University of Oxford Department of Educational Studies and was elected to a Fellowship of Brasenose College. He began then the process of developing teaching and research which was to transform the Department from a state of sleepy old-fashioned respectability to a position of authority and world-wide recognition for its innovative approach to teacher education.¹ The ‘internship’ model of teacher education he initiated in the 1980s involved close co-operation with local schools and with the local education authority, whose chief education officer, Tim Brighouse, was instrumental in achieving a proper partnership between the University and the schools that resulted in a PGCE course that quickly found considerable and sustained favour with Ofsted and that has since been much emulated elsewhere. Tim Brighouse writes in this issue of ORE of the rationale behind the Oxford initiative.

Sir William Taylor contributes an account of the James Committee on Teacher Training and the significant role Harry Judge played in it. As a successful teacher and administrator, and now with the experience of serving on a second national commission, he was ideally placed to understand and attempt to deal with the perennial problems afflicting small departments of education in universities. How might the demanding task of training teachers in a short (one-year) postgraduate course ‘fit’ in a university with high expectations of its academic staff to undertake research of excellent quality? How might the university-based parts of the course integrate with practical experience in schools? How might teachers become involved in the work of the university and university teachers contribute to the schools?

The Oxford Department moved steadily towards a concentration on comprehensive (rather than selective) schools and on placements for the school-based components of the PGCE course within the local education authority. Local head teachers gave their support to initiatives which recognised the expertise that they and their teaching staffs had to offer student teachers, soon to be known as ‘interns’. In his Postscript to this issue, Stuart Maclure describes the political background to what became required of university departments of education in England in the 1980s. Events nationally—in particular with the setting-up of the Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (CATE)—meant that PGCE courses would have to change if they were to be officially recognised, and over a period of intense planning and negotiation a new course was created in Oxford that depended on close collaboration between the schools and the University, between teachers and lecturers, in which the trainees would spend most of their time in the schools to which they were attached and in which they were encouraged by all involved to become reflective practitioners in a context of learning by doing. The Oxford PGCE course remains one of the most highly regarded in the country.

Within a short time following his appointment, and with the active participation of Jerome Bruner (then Watts Professor of Experimental Psychology in Oxford), Harry Judge established the Oxford Educational Research Group (OERG): the spirit of his thinking at this time is recalled in a short note by Professor Bruner included in this issue. And he was instrumental in the founding of the Oxford Review of Education, the aim of which was to bring together educationists and prominent figures in Oxford from a range of other disciplines who had a committed interest in education at all levels.² Thus, in addition to Chelly Halsey and Jerome Bruner, Oxford academics of the calibre of Richard Hare and the Lords Bullock and Redcliffe-Maud joined the editorial board and became involved in the discussion of a wide range of educational themes, while the OERG was successful in attracting research money for various school-based projects.

Through visiting professorships in the United States (at MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, the University of Virginia, Pennsylvania State, Michigan State), Harry had an engagement with problems relating to teacher education across the Atlantic. Those privileged to read the lengthy ‘Chronicle’ he wrote as he visited graduate schools of education throughout the United States would wonder how he would make use of the rich material he accumulated from conversations with a huge array of people involved in the work of the graduate schools. The result was American Graduate Schools of Education: A View from Abroad, an elegantly written account in the best tradition of the scholarly essay which encapsulated the problems he had identified in his analyses of two hypothetical institutions, ‘Waterend’ (private) and ‘Highside’ (state).³ What is more, he neatly concluded the study with a ‘Letter from America’ written by the fictitious ‘Benedict Rosencrantz’ and cleverly anticipating the criticisms which might be levelled against his own conclusions. This study, still firmly established in the canon of literature on teacher education in the United States, found wide acclaim. As Patricia Albjerg Graham reports in this issue, Harry Judge was ‘prescient in recognising the shifting priorities’ in the graduate schools of US research universities. In his contribution David Cohen recognises that it was Harry’s thinking that initiated ‘a period of increasing scholarly attention to teaching and teacher education’ in the United States.

A further comparative account, this time of teacher education in three countries, appeared in 1994, the result of collaboration with Michel Lemosse (who describes how the project was conceived and furthered in his contribution to this issue) and with Lynn Paine and Michael Sedlak.⁴ As with a later book on faith schools,⁵ the text is elegantly written and the arguments are formulated in an original and highly readable style, as was that of his earlier book, A Generation of Schooling.⁶

A feature throughout Harry Judge’s work in education has been his desire to make things happen, to initiate processes which move things on, which make a difference. From running a multi-site school on federal lines to inspirational membership of commissions and committees; from facilitating the research of others to undertaking original research of his own; from developing innovative approaches to the education and training of teachers to helping (as a one-time Tutor for Admissions at Brasenose) to reform admission procedures at Oxford; from assisting the nascent Institute for Educational Development of the Aga Khan University (on which Richard Pring writes in this issue) to an in-depth engagement with education in France and the United States, the driving force behind his efforts is apparent in a wish to see things develop differently. In this he has been especially successful in terms of the contribution he has made to thinking about teacher education. The papers in this special issue of ORE have been written to record and celebrate that success as well as to form a contribution to the literature of teacher education.

Notes

1. For an account of the early stages of the Oxford Department’s internship programme, see Peter Benton (Ed.) The Oxford internship scheme, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 1990.

2. The early years of the Oxford Review of Education are described in the introduction to: David Phillips & Geoffrey Walford (Eds) Tracing education policy. Selections from the Oxford Review of Education, London, Routledge, 2006.

3. Ford Foundation, 1982.

4. Harry Judge, Michel Lemosse, Lynn Paine & Michael Sedlak, The university and the teachers. France, the United States, England, Wallingford, Triangle Books, 1994.

5. Harry Judge, Faith-based schools and the state. Catholics in America, France and England, Wallingford, Symposium Books, 2002.

6. Harry Judge, A generation of schooling: English secondary schools since 1944, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1984.

Harry Judge and Oxford: college and university

A. H. Halsey

University of Oxford

Has Harry Judge’s career reproduced in a lifetime the centuries-old history of Brasenose College and the University of Oxford? His biography and the history of his college in relation to Christian belief and modern university reform are briefly recapitulated. All tell a story of adaptation and modernisation, the man short, the college long, the university in ceaseless change from a clerical foundation through an association of colleges as finishing schools for the Establishment to a collegiate university aspiring to place itself in the ‘world league’ of research centres.

Introduction

Harry Judge had a contemporary, Harry Rée, who was converted to community education by his mentor at Cambridge, Henry Morris. Rée later wrote a book about Morris describing him as an Educator Extraordinary.¹ Judge similarly deserves that title. He entered Oxford first as an undergraduate exhibitioner at Brasenose and later returned as the University’s director of educational studies after a distinguished career in school teaching, and with a fellowship in the same college. At the end of his undergraduate studies in history he intended to prepare for ordination in the Church of England and completed a second degree in theology, but found himself unable—as had so many of his predecessors—honestly to accept the dogmas that he would be required to proclaim. So he left Brasenose to become a history master in a grammar school.

How far has Harry Judge in a single lifetime echoed the history of his college, Brasenose, over five centuries? It seems apposite, as a contribution to this celebratory set of essays, to trace the history of the ancient colleges in relation to religion and to the university in order to answer the question.

The European medieval college, which began in Paris in the 12th century, was originally and essentially the invention of an age steeped in and inexplicable without religious belief and religious practice. To modernise, to escape from Christendom and to prosper in the secular post-Christian age has been the challenge faced by the Oxford colleges and, in miniature and ad personam by Harry Judge. So the main theme of this essay is to compare the long sweep of the College down the subsequent centuries from the 13th to the 21st century with the account given by Judge of his own 20th-century career in English secondary schools as recorded in his A Generation of Schooling² and his subsequent experience of Oxford, of Brasenose, and of retirement. We can then look at the modern relation of the University to the College in the light of the experience of a university man admitted to fellowship in his old college—an aspect of the traditional challenge to the claim of Oxford to be a collegiate university.

The Man

Harry Judge began life in Cardiff in 1928 just before Europe and America were plunged into a devastating slump as, luckily for him, the child of a lower-middle class family. His father had been born in Kidlington in Oxfordshire and had become a Welsh railway official which guaranteed a life-long occupation with a decent if modest income while other families endured the poverty of endless unemployment. Harry was a bright boy, took the ‘scholarship’ examination in 1939 and was offered a ‘special place’³ at Cardiff High School for Boys. His parents took the offer, conscious of his father’s success as a scholarship holder at Thame Grammar School in Oxfordshire and of the opportunities for extended schooling and for jobs thereby provided in a severely hierarchical society. Harry enjoyed his grammar schooling, admired its teaching and curriculum, and saw it as an upbringing which ought to be made universal. He was a war-time pupil, a privileged learner in a provincial secondary school. He worked happily and industriously through the School Certificate and Higher School Certificate years, emerging with an exhibition to Brasenose in 1946 before being called up to the then compulsory National Service, in his case in the RAF. Trained first as a radar mechanic, he ended his service as an education sergeant before entering Brasenose to read history for three years.

The ebbing of his faith led him to abandon clerical ambition and instead to join the staff of Emanuel School—a London endowed grammar school—before serving for four years as head of the history department at Wallington County Grammar School. Teaching in and near the capital, he found time to complete a thesis for a London doctorate before moving sideways, so to say, into the directorship of studies at Cumberland Lodge⁴ in Windsor Great Park, thereby widening his educational horizons and making an extended range of contacts among educationists and politicians. Then in 1968 he was offered the Headmastership of Banbury School—a grammar school which had (1967) amalgamated with other secondary schools to form a comprehensive—the headship of which he found satisfying as well as challenging. He made a success of it, was invited to take part in the James Commission on Teacher Education and Training⁵ and then to become the director of educational studies to succeed Alec Peterson (of International Baccalaureate fame) at the Oxford department in Norham Gardens. Not only was that an unprecedented promotion for the head of a comprehensive school, but he was also invited to a professorial fellowship at his old college—Bra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Part One
• Part Two
• Index