EADT 5
EADT 5
EADT 5
In my job the pantomime seasons starts early. Whilst it doesn’t usually involve grown men dressing up as women, it does involve the same kind of laughably predictable script.
This pantomime usually begins around the third week of August. Here in the news-free hollow of the summer break it is often a fairly quiet time in the media. Parliament isn’t sitting and our political masters have decamped to Tuscany. It provides perfect timing for an annual round of knockabout, which goes as follows.
Someone – sometimes a business leader, but nowadays just as likely to be a member of the Cabinet – chooses the week that A-level results are published to lament falling standards, to proclaim that examinations have got easier, to decry the spoon-feeding of pupils by their teachers and to call for an inquiry into education.
Then cue the teachers’ leaders with their ‘Oh no they haven’t’ responses, and collective booing.
So – year in, year out, it seems – the educational pantomime of mid-August gets under way.
Students meanwhile prepare to head anxiously into school to collect their results against this squalid backdrop of carping and sneering. Instead we should be celebrating their successes. And it’s too often the same in the following week as the GCSE results come out.
That annual spectacle of people outside education choosing just the worst moment to have a go has always struck me as unfair. I accept that there’s lots that is wrong with our examination system. For example, I agree with the complaint that our young people are over-examined and undereducated. I agree that the modular nature of exams has made A-levels very different from when I sat them. And there’s no doubt that schools have little choice but to teach narrowly to exams, because the stakes have never been higher either for them or their students.
But let’s have that debate at a time which isn’t just about grabbing the day’s news agenda. Let’s have it in the cold light of term-time. And let’s allow the examination results of our young people be unsullied by a distracting backdrop of corrosive cynicism.
This year, let’s make the results season different. Let’s make it panto-free.
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Last week Suffolk looked itself in the eye and said ‘it’s time to do something to raise educational standards’.
Unlike my criticism of the media-grabbing timing of results day critics, this was a cold-light-of-day conference of people with a real interest in seeing Suffolk perform better as a local authority. Currently the County doesn’t do well - coming around 120th out of some 150 authorities. Given that we aren’t a hotbed of deprivation or inner city turmoil, we know that we should be doing better.
Last week’s event wasn’t just an occasion for collective hand-wringing. What made the ‘Raising the Bar’ conference feel different was that it wasn’t just about schools and teachers. It brought together people from various education sectors plus, crucially, employers and representatives from business.
Together, we agreed that it is time to aim for excellence. Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, is helping to shape the new vision.
It will mean doing some things differently in our classrooms, but there’s a wider cultural need too. Here’s the test of it. The question ‘What have you learned today?’ should become one of our most frequently-used phrases, and it should apply to everyone – from a four-year-old in pre-school to a pensioner in a bridge class.
That’s the new ambition for Suffolk: to become a ‘learning county’, a place in which learning – not just tests and exams, mind – is at the heart of our community.
The aim is a bold one – for learning to become as much a part of our psychological landscape as the Southwold lighthouse and Bury St Edmunds Cathedral are key features of our physical world.
Which means creating communities which see learning as something that we are all engaged in, not just in the formal setting of school, college and university.
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Who says no one teaches grammar any more? Here’s a joke one of my Sixth Form students told me:
Teacher: Sam, give an example of two pronouns.
Pupil: Who, me?
Teacher: Well done.
Wednesday, 20 June 2012