EADT Column
EADT Column
EADT Column
Last week I threw my toys out of the proverbial pram.
It was after reading Ofsted’s report that comprehensive schools weren’t challenging our most academically able students. I agree. But the implication was that everyone else is and that those of us who have deliberately and determinedly devoted our careers to working in state schools are somehow locked in a mentality of mediocrity.
The media coverage, taking its tone from Ofsted’s chief Sir Michael Wilshaw, portrayed us as complacent and complicit in England’s failure to compete with the international big boys.
So: cards on the table time. I’m not arguing that all comprehensives stretch and challenge all of their most able students all the time. But nor, I suspect, do most selective schools.
And that’s why I lost my rag live on Sky News on Thursday lunchtime. The pundit they put up against me lamented the fact that the majority of young people getting places at Oxford and Cambridge Univrsities come from England’s four most selective schools.
In other words, he lambasted comprehensives for not achieving the same outcomes as schools whose entry requirements include a battery of selection tests and parental fees of up to £30,000 a year.
I was fuming because, as headteacher of a genuinely comprehensive school, I would have thought we should be admired for having helped twelve of our students in the past two years to gain Oxbridge places. That is a remarkable achievement, which doesn’t smack of complacency or low expectations.
I have to say that I also despise the snobbery at the heart of all of this. Oxbridge education is ideally suited for some students but it would be woefully inappropriate for others.
The great thing about our twelve Oxbridge students is that day-by-day they mix with other students following other paths. They aren’t the product of some compartmentalized hothouse that makes them think that they are an elite who will inherit the keys to power: they are part of society as it really is, sitting alongside students who will go to other universities, to colleges, and into work.
A true comprehensive school doesn’t, in other words, have to dumb down the talents of our most able; it can raise the aspirations of young people who, in a selective system, would be told at the age of eleven that they were failures and be told to know their place.
It’s a system I could never be part of.
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The other problem with that Ofsted report is its very mechanistic view of education. Readers of a certain age may remember Maggie Smith’s majestic screen portrayal of charismatic and controversial schoolmistress Miss Jean Brodie.
She declares: “The word "education" comes from the root e from ex, out, and duco, I lead. It means a leading out. To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul.”
Real education, in other words, isn’t a conveyor belt of schemes of work and tests and robotically-delivered lessons.
Real learning should be hard, and messy, and unpredictable.
And this is where Ofsted could have done us a service. They could have said that all schools – whether state schools in Suffolk or fee-paying colleges in leafy London enclaves – should challenge our young people more. We should do less spoon-feeding. We should stop giving an impression that real learning is easy, that you don’t have to make mistakes and know how not to give up.
Real learning should be supported not by more after-school lessons or by compulsory homework clubs. Instead character should be built through a rich programme of extra-curricular activities, through playing competitive sport, playing a musical instrument, joining a debating society, doing drama, and so on.
For me, that’s what our best comprehensive schools do. We realise what the traditional old public schools of England knew centuries ago – that success in the examination hall runs hand-in-hand with success on the playing field or in the debating chamber or in the concert hall.
Of course we need to challenge all our young people more. The big lie of this week was that those of us in state comprehensives don’t know it and don’t do it.
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Sixth Form joke:
Keep Britain Tidy: eat a pigeon
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Geoff Barton
19 June 2013
Wednesday, 19 June 2013