BFP 1
BFP 1
BFP 1
My article for the September 2012 education supplement in the Bury Free Press:
There’s a little-known secret about our education system. You won’t have seen it on the news or read it in any newspaper headlines. It’s so secret that no one ever mentions it.
Here it is: many people in many overseas countries look on with envy at our schools, colleges and universities. Yes, they wish their schools were more like ours.
It’s why so many people from the UK are involved in setting up and running schools across, say, the Middle East, and why so many visitors from abroad come to look at what we are doing in England and in Suffolk.
This isn’t so newsworthy as all those headlines about standards falling, teachers threatening strike action, young people being illiterate, and so on. But it is worth reminding ourselves - as the Olympics and Paralympic Games did this summer – that maybe we are rather better at some things in this country than we let ourselves believe.
For example, we take for granted that in our best schools we aren’t just the examination factors of so many schools across Asia. In Singapore and China they find it fascinating that we believe school should be about developing character, that we have something called tutor time and – in the best schools – a rich programme of extra-curricular sport, music and drama. They look on enviously at activities like the Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme.
Our school is linked with a top-performing school in Shanghai, and Shanghai itself is the most successful education system on the planet. We’ve taken our seventeen year olds and watched the shock on their faces when the eleven year old Chinese children were working on the same maths problems that we leave until A-level.
So we know that the standards those countries achieve is exceptional. But we also know that they look to us for something they feel they don’t yet teach – creativity and leadership. And it’s why education officials in China and Singapore are trying to move away from their production line approach to education, and to do what our A-level qualification does so brilliantly: teach problem-solving, analysis and independent thinking.
I’m not saying here that our education system is good enough. It isn’t. But nor is it the disaster zone that some people keep telling us.
And since the job of teachers is essentially to motivate young people to want to learn, that’s easier if we and our exam system aren’t constantly under fire.
We also know that whilst a good school will give children the skills, knowledge and values they will need in later life, teachers will never be as influential as parents. Right up to the age of eighteen, the impact of good parenting is far greater than we realise.
That’s why the most important things we can do with our children are simple: eating together, talking together, showing how to overcome problems through resilience and perseverance and – crucially – reading.
Get those things right at home, it seems, and for most young people success at school and in wider life will follow.
And that’s not a secret.
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September 2012
Friday, 19 October 2012