Reinventing Schools, Reforming Teaching

From Political Visions to Classroom Reality

John Bangs,John Macbeath,Maurice Galton

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136890925
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Bildung
• Thema: Bildung Allgemein

What lessons can we learn from the relationship between policy-makers and schools over the life of the 'New' Labour and its predecessor Conservative government? What happened to 'Education, Education, Education' as it travelled from political vision to classroom practice? What are the lasting legacies of 13 years of a reforming Labour government? And what are the key messages for a coalition government?

These are the questions addressed to the architects of educational reform, their critics and the prophets of better things to come. The 37 interviewees include ministers past and present, journalists, union officials, members of lobby groups and think tanks. Reinventing Schools, Reforming Teaching considers the impact of educational policies on those who have to translate political priorities into the day to day work of schools and classrooms. The authors argue that an evidence-informed view of policy-making has yet to be realised, graphically illustrating how many recent political decisions in education can be explained by the personal experiences, predilections and short-term needs of key decision-makers.

The interviews, which explore the dynamics behind the creation of education policies, cover a wide range of themes and issues, including:

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• policy-makers' attitudes to schools, the staff who work in them and the communities they serve

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• the drivers of politicians' reform agendas and the constraints on radical reform

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• the shaping and reshaping of curriculum and assessment

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• the search for a more effective marriage between inspection and school self evaluation

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• the relationship of academic research to policy making

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• how a vision for teaching and teachers might be constructed for the 21st century

Contributions from leading figures including; David Puttnam, Kenneth Baker, Estelle Morris, Gillian Shepherd, Jim Knight, Pauline Perry, Michael Barber, Peter Mortimore, Judy Sebba, Paul Black, Mary James, Kevan Collins, David Hargreaves, Mike Tomlinson, David Berliner, Andreas Schleicher, Tim Brighouse, Conor Ryan, Keith Bartley, Michael Gove and Philippa Cordingley are woven in with the insights of teachers and headteachers such as Alasdair MacDonald and William Atkinson.

The book's findings and proposals will be of interest not only to professional educators and those with an interest in the current and future state of education but to those interested in the process of policy-making itself.

1
Architects, critics and prophets

How did schools come to assume their present form and function? How recognisable would schools for the twentieth century be to that ubiquitous time traveller? Who were the ideological architects who bequeathed us forms of curriculum and assessment which have been largely impervious to their critics and often sceptical of the prophets? Can schools be fundamentally re-designed when it is only in opposition that governments seem to offer radical solutions and visionary promise? Is there scope for something completely different in the face of public expectations and media pressures which push elected government relentlessly back to safer, shallower waters?

It is engrained in the fabric of recent history that on a momentous day in 1997 all would be different. On the first of May 1997 education came alive as the top priority for a new government. Without ‘Education, Education, Education’, the recent history of education policy would have been very different and the impact on the day to day lives of teachers and young people an imponderable. All through the Labour Party’s 13 year tenure of office education was to remain a top priority and many of the accomplishments under Blair and Brown were not disputed by Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. However, unlike the United States, education is not a bipartisan issue so that it is often difficult to perceive where the real and enduring successes lie and what the alternatives might have been.

With media’s penchant for the dramatic, one of Labour’s greatest success slipped under the radar. Raising funding levels for education to the OECD average may seem too unspectacular to report or celebrate but it signalled an intent to realise the promise of the three educations. Indeed one of Gordon Brown’s last acts as chancellor in his 2007 Mansion House speech was to call for the funding of each pupil in state schools to rise to £8000 a year to match the current spending for pupils in private schools. In the fragile financial climate at the time such a commitment now seems hugely ambitious, although one of the Brown government’s last acts was to legislate targets for ending child poverty. As a result no future government will find it easy to compromise on the priority given by the Labour government to education.

We live in a global community in which education is widely accepted as the medium for economic success. Understanding the processes of education reform is vital in how we evaluate of the triumphs and failures of governments. Even more vital is an understanding of the relationship between those entrusted by governments to provide education – teachers and support staff on the one hand and policy makers on the other.

This book is about that relationship. At its centre are a set of interviews with key people who were, and are, responsible for education policies and educational reform. We are grateful to those interviewees for their honesty and insights, some of which unfortunately we have had to omit both in order to protect the innocent, and the guilty. For every interview, there could have been many more but we hope that those who appear in this book are a reasonably representative cross section of current opinion and historical memory. Their views are complemented by evidence from research, including four studies of primary, secondary and special schools between 2002 and 2009, carried out by two authors of this book, John MacBeath and Maurice Galton, and commissioned by John Bangs for the National Union of Teachers, the book’s third author.

The evidence from our interviewees provides a complex mosaic of views, reflecting differing ideological, political and pragmatic standpoints, from inside and outside the ‘big tent’. They bring into sharp relief tensions and paradoxes that connect, or fail to connect, the world of classrooms and the world of policy makers. We have sought to be faithful to the emerging narratives and what we believe they imply for school life and learning under an incoming government.

If there are areas of debate, such as governance and funding that do not figure large in this account, it reflects perhaps the issues to which our witnesses gave most emphasis, or perhaps the nature of the questions we asked. We hope that the issues to which we have given priority are those that reflect the common aspiration for ‘a world class education system’ and why that dream is so often frustrated.

A spring of hope

The book was written in the months running up to the general election. It was a time of reflection sharpened by the worst economic crisis since the 1930s. Our interviews took place in that climate and we were privileged to catch that moment.

The election of Margaret Thatcher as prime minister in 1979 and that of Tony Blair in 1997 had raised expectations for something completely different. Both governments, elected with substantial majorities, enough to give confidence that they would retain power at the following general election, allowed the possibility of thinking long-term and of developing policies designed to restructure the education system so as to meet the needs of the twenty-first century.

The legacy of ‘first past the post’ system of parliamentary democracy, and the need to seek re-election within five years of taking office, has tended to focus policy making on the short term with short life initiatives outnumbering strategic approaches. In education, as in other areas of government, the apparent lack of coherence and continuity in policy making is often attributed to a need for political parties to emphasise their differences, to be adversarial rather than consensual. The drive by parties to create clear blue political water between themselves tends therefore to be more important than embedding practical and effective education policies. However, the promise of at least a two term government, for both Thatcher and Blair, offered an opportunity to build on the best of what had gone before and think radically about the rest.

Coherence and continuity: a focus on curriculum

In 1979, Mrs Thatcher was unimpressed by the school curriculum her government had inherited. Education was not, for her, off limits. By the early 1980s incipient disquiet had grown to a serious concern about the extent to which pupils in different schools were being offered similar curriculum provision. Surveys by Bassey (1978) and Bennett et al. (1980) had shown, for example, that in primary schools the amount of time devoted to the teaching of English ranged from a minimum of four to a maximum of twelve hours. For mathematics the range was only slightly less. Among academic architects and critics there was an ongoing dialogue about the purposes of reforming the curriculum. Some tended to focus on learning as a social activity whereby, as argued by Bruner and Haste (1987), children attempted to reconstruct their world as social beings rather than as ‘lone scientists’ where a seemingly ordinary occurrence, such as an apple falling off a tree, can trigger a flight of the imagination leading to a theory of gravity. A broad and balanced curriculum was therefore required; one based on social democratic ideals which should include aspects of citizenship and community education as well as traditional academic subjects (Lawton, 1975).

These views, however, were in marked contrast to those of the ‘New Right’ which had set the agenda for the incoming Conservative government (Tomlinson, 1992). In their view society was merely reflected in the uncoordinated actions of its individual members and there was thus no collective responsibility of the community as a whole, to nurture its weakest individuals. A common curriculum designed to empower the underprivileged, such as argued for by Lawton (1975), was therefore no longer in step with contemporary political orthodoxy. The main rationale for curriculum reform was economic; to allow the next generation of workers to compete effectively in the marketplace of the future (Lawlor, 1988).

The coming of the National Curriculum

By 1988 the Educational Reform Act was in place with the result that a system which for the previous 35 years,

Had been run through broad legislative objectives, convention and consensus had been replaced by one based on contract and management…. The aim was to make an irreversible change in the public education system to that already achieved in other aspects of economic policy, such as trade union legislation, the sale of council houses and the privatisation of the nationalised industries.

(Tomlinson, 1992: 48)

In some ways the Act represented a compromise between those arguing for a free market approach and those wanting a greater degree of central control of education. Schools were encouraged to break away from local authorities either in the form of ‘grant maintained’ or ‘city technology colleges’. In addition more assisted places at independent schools were provided. At the same time schools remaining within the Local Authority framework were given delegated budgets and were free to enrol as many pupils as they felt able to cope with by recruiting from outside their designated catchment areas. Since the size of the budget depended on the number of enrolments, neighbouring schools were now in direct competition with each other for the available resources.

In a totally free market, however, schools would also have been permitted to design their own curriculum, as in the private sector. This would have left parents with the task of choosing a school whose offerings best matched what they judged to be their children’s needs or abilities. The eventual compromise between the ‘free marketers’ and those wanting centralised control of the curriculum was that a testing regime should be put in place with the results made available to the general public so that parents could take an informed decision as to which school constituted the ‘best buy’.

Criticisms of the pace of change were largely ignored or viewed as ideological rather than genuine expressions of practical concern. Ministers were determined not to be ‘in thrall to the prejudices of academics’ (Baker, 1993:198). Within two years of the Reform Act a statutory primary curriculum had been introduced in primary schools, assessment at seven plus was in place and trials at 11+ were underway. New agencies were established for determining the initial teacher training curriculum and establishing teachers’ conditions of service. By 1993 it was clear that teachers were faced with a massive curriculum overload, particularly at Key Stage 1 where time for teaching reading had to be reduced in order to meet statutory requirements (Campbell, 1993). Also the testing arrangements accompanying the National Curriculum had become a nightmare. Although excessive workload created by tests was ostensibly the trigger, the 1993 boycott of the Key Stages 1–3 tests by the NUT (National Union of Teachers), NASUWT (National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers) and ATL (Association of Teachers and Lecturers) was motivated also by the tests’ high stakes nature. The National Curriculum which had been a dream at conception had according to Professor Campbell become a nightmare at delivery.

Then there were three wise men

The move of Kenneth Baker to the Home Office and his replacement by Kenneth Clarke did little to improve matters although concerns began to shift towards the quality of current classroom practice. Among a number of scare stories was the 1990 equivalent of the William Tyndale affair (Auld, 1976) at Culloden Primary School which was singled out for strong criticism in an HMI (Her Majesty’s Inspectorate) report for its over-reliance on ‘progressive practices,’ particularly the use of ‘real books’ to teach reading (see Alexander, 1997: 187). The chief executive of the National Curriculum Council, Duncan Graham, came under increasing criticism from ministers for making the National Curriculum too complicated and for failing to ‘sort out the way that teachers teach’ (Graham, 1993: 111). On resigning, Graham was replaced by an existing member of the NCC team, Chris Woodhead, who was relatively unknown within the larger educational community but to ‘insiders’ was seen as a likely replacement given his willingness ‘to work with increasingly right wing councils,’ (Watkins, 1993: 66). There followed the setting up of the so-called team of ‘three wise men’ consisting of Woodhead, the chief inspector of primary education, Jim Rose, and Professor Robin Alexander charged with reviewing:

Available evidence about the delivery of education in primary schools and to make recommendations about curriculum organisation, teaching methods and classroom practice appropriate for the successful implementation of the National Curriculum, particularly at Key Stage 2.

From the start, according to Alexander (1997), Kenneth Clarke appeared to anticipate the conclusions of the review when, announcing the membership of the team, the next day’s newspaper headlines described him as backing ‘the return to formal lessons’ and shutting ‘the door on 25 years of trendy teaching’. Indeed support for this assertion comes from Alexander’s (1997: 245) account of the final drafting process where many of his original versions were changed to give a positive spin in favour of whole class teaching.

And then a reign of terror

One of Kenneth Clarke’s last tasks as education secretary was to privatise the inspection process. HMI was abolished and the resources used by LEAs (Local Education Authorities) when conducting local inspections transferred to a specially created Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted). Clarke’s successor, John Patten, stayed for under two years at the Department of Education. His resignation coincided with the appointment of Chris Woodhead as Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector (HMCI) and the first full time and head of Ofsted on the recommendation of the then prime minister, John Major. According to Mike Tomlinson (Woodhead’s eventual successor) one minister at least particularly admired the way Woodhead had ‘put real grit into the mission’ while head of the then School Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (SCAA) and had urged the appointment as HMCI on the grounds that he would do a similar job in sorting out schools and teachers, Woodhead’s regime has been described as a ‘reign of terror’ by Tim Brighouse (1997:106) who later became vice chair of the New Labour Task Force on Raising Educational Standards.

This was not an isolated view. Writing in the Guardian (12 March 1997) the former deputy leader of the Labour Party, Roy [now Lord] Hattersley, argued that the chief inspector was ‘the apostle of improvement by confrontation’ and accused him of rewriting reports to exclude passages of support for struggling schools and LEAs, and of misinterpreting research in pursuit of his own point of view. According to the chief inspector himself pupils were badly taught in half of all our schools, too many teachers saw themselves as facilitators rather than moral authorities, were apt to...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Architects, critics and prophets
• 2 In the beginning was euphoria
• 3 Can schools do it all?
• 4 In the end, teachers are on their own
• 5 Inventing and reinventing the curriculum
• 6 Assessment
• 7 Promoting and delivering value for money?
• 8 Going global
• 9 There’s nothing rational about decision-making
• 10 And now for something completely different?
• And now? A postscript
• Notes
• Interviewees
• Bibliography
• Index