My Blog
My Blog
East Anglian 2
My column for the East Anglian Daily Times, 28 March 2012:
Last weekend I had a really interesting time in Birmingham. Now there’s a sentence you don’t often see.
The reason I was in our glorious second city, marooned in a sprawling hotel on the margins of the National Exhibition Centre, was to attend the annual conference of the Association of School and College Leaders.
This is always a major event. It pulls together more than a thousand of the UK’s secondary headteachers and then – like those gladiatorial arenas of ancient Rome – invites big names in education to come and address us.
This year, amongst others, we had the Secretary of State, Michael Gove, and the new Head of Ofsted, Michael Wilshaw. Mr Gove told us that the pace of the Government’s reforms need to get quicker, with more change in schools.
Mr Wilshaw told us that teachers need to see themselves as surrogate parents,
Meanwhile, 120 miles south, London mayor Boris Johnson was proclaiming that last summer’s riots were caused in part by poor schools and poor teachers.
So the weekend in Birmingham reminds us that education is always a political issue, a topic on which everyone has their views.
As teachers, we should probably just accept this. But it is a bit galling when it seems as if every frustration in society – from poor reading skills to the London riots – are made the fault of teachers.
Certainly the places with the education standards we are most expected to aspire to – Finland, Sweden, Shanghai – see teachers essentially as the people who will instruct their children, adding to rather than compensating for what the parents have already done.
In these places they regard good parenting as the key to establishing the basics – personal hygiene, courtesy, being able to listen, and starting to read independently – and the teacher’s responsibility is then to develop the learning. These countries would be amazed at the idea that teachers were stand-in social workers.
They would also be startled at the way we talk about choice in education, as if choosing the school for your child is like deciding which supermarket to shop at. In Finland, for example, a country with astonishing results and where being a teacher is the highest status profession, parents expect their child to go to the local school.
After all, as Barry Schwartz reminds us in his book The Paradox of Choice, we tend to assume that having choices is a good thing. But in reality choice can leave us feeling stressed. In the old days I’d head into a clothes shop for a pair of jeans and my only choice might be classic blue or stonewashed. That was it.
Nowadays, after deciding on whether to go for slimfit, bootcut, rinse wash, tapered, demi-curve and loose fit, you’re likely to leave the store fretting about whether you made the right choice.
So there’s three ideas for education we could learn from overseas: parents getting the basics embedded, teachers concentrating on teaching, and great local schools in every neighbourhood.
How radical is that?
Curriculum tinkering
The Government has put an expert panel together to come up with a new national curriculum. It’s at least four years since this last happened. Nowhere else in the world changes their curriculum as often as we do in England. We seem to reinvent ourselves more often than Madonna.
The risk in constantly rewriting what we teach is that teacher are distracted from their core business – how they teach. After all, a great teacher can take a topic we don’t know much about – say, hydrogen or Shakespeare’s tragedies – and make us feel inspired to learn more. It’s how they teach that counts.
Great teachers aren’t made by an army of bureaucrats drawing up a masterplan in some Whitehall bunker. They develop when they are given the freedom, space and trust to focus on the things that matter – how we teach, rather than simply what we teach.
Spelling matters
My special interest is literacy. It’s striking how many people feel that being insecure about spelling suggests you’re not clever. In reality, one of the little-known secrets is how some of us use tricks and memory devices to make ourselves seem more accurate spellers than we really are.
Personally I remember how to spell ‘believe’ by saying ‘never believe a lie’: believe has the word lie at its heart. I spell accommodation by thinking that it could be “massive mansions or cosy cottages’ (two ms, two cs). And I still remember necessary by using the daft jingle that my old English teacher Roy Samson taught me when I was eleven: ‘never eat chips eat sausage sandwiches and raspberry yoghurt’. Vegetarians may wish to substitute sausages for salad! Spelling, you see, isn’t about intelligence.
Friday, 20 April 2012