EADT Column
EADT Column
EADT Column: Teaching Quality
My column in the East Anglian Daily Times today:
Last week the Government made several announcements about education.
This is not unusual. In fact, it happens most weeks. Hardly a Sunday goes by without those of us working in education reading in the newspapers what we’re not doing well enough and what the Education Secretary and his team propose to do about it.
It’s as if the thrill of the exclusive and the lure of the deadline are hardwired deep into Michael Gove’s journalistic psyche.
Thus a new slimmed-down national curriculum was published. A school food plan was announced. A new incarnation of the existing league tables – to expose so-called ‘coasting’ schools - was trailed. Changes to primary admissions were quietly proposed.
All of this in the space of a week – a succession of announcements designed, supposedly, to give an impression of giddy momentum and to jolt the education system out of its torpor.
The trouble is, as the author of a wise book called ‘How to Improve 5000 Schools’ points out, there’s a difference between changing things and improving things.
A former Deputy Director of Education in high-performing Ontario, Ben Levin writes:
‘One of the challenges in education is that the pizzazz is around having the seemingly new idea, whereas the real work is in making it happen … Having a great new idea is less important to success than getting ordinary things done correctly and efficiently.’
Pace of change may play well as a theme in a world of headline-hunting, but my experience tells me it’s better to get things right rather than hurtle headlong from one reform to the next.
Take the new national curriculum. It was announced with much chutzpah last Monday and most readers will probably think that it’s a good idea – a curriculum for England’s schools that sets out the essentials of what each child should be able to know and do.
Except that this isn’t a national curriculum like that. It’s a curriculum, but it’s not exactly national.
Kenneth Baker’s original 1988 concept – overcomplicated yet well-intentioned – was that a child moving from one school to another would experience the same core curriculum, what we might call ‘the best that has been thought and said’.
The Govean national curriculum, on the other hand, is optional. Academies and free schools - which now form the majority of secondary schools – will only have to offer the curriculum if they want to. It’s up to them.
And the anecdotal evidence so far is that they’ll give it a miss because there’s so much else to deal with.
And that’s my real criticism of the proposals and their head-spinning haste. They distract us from the main task in schools which is to keep improving the quality of teaching. All teachers – however established we are – can keep improving what we do: it’s the beauty of teaching that you keep learning how to do things better.
So requiring teachers to spend their time implementing an entirely new curriculum will take us away from what matters most – the quality of teaching. After all, we have all been taught Shakespeare by a teach who renders it lifeless and alienating, whereas another teacher can weave a kind of magic. It’s all how we teach, not what we teach.
David Laws is the education minister who has gleefully announced the latest changes in performance tables. Yet I remember listening to him before the 2010 election when he was shadow education spokesperson for the Liberal Democrats. He was speaking to a headteachers’ conference and told us that politicians meddling in the curriculum had to stop. It was inappropriate, he said. Therefore, he declared, under a Lib Dem government there would be a moratorium on further changes to the curriculum.
The crazy cycle of endless tinkering would cease.
I think that’s what we need now – a curriculum which is lifted out of the hands of politicians, overseen by an independent body, and a promise that once the curriculum has been agreed, it will not change for a period of, say, ten years, irrespective of who is in power.
That way we can do more things right rather than just doing more things.
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Sixth Form Science joke:
A photon checks into a hotel and the porter asks him if he has any luggage. The photon replies: “No, I’m travelling light”
Geoff Barton
Suffolk
17 July 2013, 18:50
Wednesday, 17 July 2013