Rollercoaster
Rollercoaster
Rollercoaster
My column in the East Anglian Daily Times, 19 December 2012:
It’s been a giddying rollercoaster of a year in education. Some pundits are hailing Michael Gove as the hero of the Coalition Government for the pace at which he is changing everything. This, they say, is the mark of the true reformer.
Personally, I’m a bit more cautious. I subscribe to Ernest Hemingway’s view that we should "never mistake motion for action." Change for the sake of change is not what education needs: we need innovation that makes an impact on the quality of teaching and learning, on helping to make our schools better, not a swathe of initiatives that may distract us from our core purpose.
That’s the risk of the Govean zeal – simultaneously changing school structures, rearranging the way teacher training is done, introducing new professional standards, launching reviews on a range of matters, proposing big changes to qualifications, the curriculum and to teachers’ pay and conditions. If headteachers are spending all their energy on these matters, and in fending off an increasingly aggressive Ofsted, then we shan’t be addressing what we know matters most – the quality of what happens every day in every classroom.
The year started with the appointment of a new Chief Inspector for Schools. Sir Michael Wilshaw gained huge credibility for his transformation of a failing school in Hackney into the genuinely outstanding Mossbourne Academy.
But right from the start of his tenure, you started to wonder whether he assumed he could make outspoken remarks on various issues as if still in the safe confines of his own staffroom. He later distanced himself from comments like this one: “If anyone says to you that ‘staff morale is at an all-time low’ you will know you are doing something right”. But it does suggest a man adjusting to the realities of stepping onto on the public stage.
And we all know that the tone set at the top of an organisation can too easily be emulated down below. There’s anecdotal evidence that inspectors are using Sir Michael’s zero-tolerance approach to make waspish judgements designed too often, it seems, simply to catch teachers out.
As I wrote in a pamphlet earlier this year, ‘Shouldn’t Ofsted be helping us to improve our schools?’ Too often it feels like they relish tripping us up.
Then there was the summer’s GCSE fiasco. Regular readers will know that this issue has continued to resonate in the news. That’s because so many young people were penalised for the failure of the examination boards and Ofqual to regulate standards earlier in the year.
This week the matter has reached the High Court and at our school we are proud to be one of more than 200 professional bodies, associations, schools and students who are a signatory to the legal case.
Meanwhile the plans for a revised curriculum are in disarray whilst a back-of-a-fag-packet wheeze was thought up to replace GCSEs with a new qualification called, excruciatingly, the English Baccalaureate Certificate.
All those countries whose standards we are supposed to be aspiring to do things differently: they develop a curriculum which they expect all schools to teach; they invest in the quality of teachers; they talk positively about their schools; and they have an assessment system which grows out of what has been taught. Why don’t we do that?
So that’s what education has felt like this year – a time of giddying changes which don’t always have the feeling of being quite thought through.
But in school it has felt quite different, and my guess is that teachers and others who work in schools will agree. The best bit of our job is that we work, day in and day out, with pupils and students. The future belongs to them. They remind us endlessly of how impressive so many of our young people are, and they exude curiosity about life and bristle with optimism.
That’s the greatest part of being in schools: away from the political nonsense, we can retreat into the sanctuary of our classrooms and enjoy the challenge, the energy, the sheer fun, of simply learning stuff. When it works, there’s nothing quite like it.
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Sixth form joke:
War Horse walks into a bar. The barman says: ‘Why the long film?’
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Geoff Barton
21 December 2012
23:05
Friday, 21 December 2012