Tortoise out of the Box
Tortoise out of the Box
Tortoise out of the Box
My monthly column for the East Anglian Daily Times.
So I gather that Labour has an education policy.
When I learnt this I experienced a flash of unexpected nostalgia. A scene from my 1970s boyhood flickered across the frontal lobe of my brain.
It was that annual moment from Blue Peter, to be precise – the edition when Peter Purves, John Noakes, Valerie Singleton or Lesley Judd would announce that it was time to lift the Blue Peter tortoise out of its box.
There followed a clatter of cardboard, an arm extended into the depths of the carton, a nail-biting pause, and then, trailing whisks of straw, a bemused tortoise would be lifted high, blinking confusedly towards the studio brightness. I imagined the applause of our nation's grateful children.
And, on a lesser scale, that’s what it feels like with the Labour announcement.
Because, after three-and-a-half years in the Coalition box, we see the first glimpse of a potential alternative in education policy.
The proposal was presented in the newspapers as a licence to teach. Teachers, like doctors, lawyers and (presumably) martial arts instructors are going to have to pass an initial teaching qualification (as most do now) and then be re-tested after five years or so.
This proposal appears to have drawn some unexpected acceptance from some unexpected quarters – namely, the teacher unions. Previously, when former Education Secretary Ed Balls suggested something similar, it was shot down faster than a clay pigeon over Sandringham.
Now, it seems, there’s an appetite to accept that perhaps an even stronger emphasis on teacher accountability might be needed. The idea presumably is to have a filtering device so that after five years those who can’t hack it in the classroom are elbowed unceremoniously out of the profession.
The devil, as so often, will lurk in the small print. And my guess is that at the moment the only print – large or small - is on the back of a fresh-faced education adviser’s envelope. Quite how it will work we shall have to wait for.
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The fact that there’s a proposal at all says something about Michael Gove’s likely legacy, and has particular relevance for those of us working in Suffolk.
My guess is that for all the initiatives and pronouncements, we will look back and regard Mr Gove’s tenure as Secretary of State as strong on windy rhetoric and weak on impact – if, by impact, you agree that a Secretary of State’s main role ought to be to improve the quality of teaching.
Labour could learn from Gove’s early months in office which demonstrated that policy needs quick enactment. There’s no time for dithering over direction: stuff needs to be done decisively.
This is just what Team Gove did. By the end of the first week of the Coalition Government, the Department for Education’s website had a strong gaudy sense of being ‘under new management’. A volley of announcements was then unleashed at whirlwind speed.
The trouble is that most of these were about structures – academies, free schools, teaching schools, the curriculum, plus a long splint used to torch a bonfire of quangos.
But, from where I sit in West Suffolk, none of this work, and certainly not its accompanying tone of sneering at the profession, has made it any easier to recruit teachers or to develop better teachers.
And here in Suffolk it’s never been more important to recruit great graduates to join us as part of the mission to make Suffolk’s education great again.
So that’s why Tristram Hunt’s idea may just contain the seeds of a helpful policy. It may not be flashy or crowd-pleasing. But it may be a recognition of a mantra that we need to hear more of – that education will only get better as teaching gets better.
And that won’t result from tweaking structures or sniping at the teaching profession. It’s about recruitment, training, development and professional pride.
Whether the Tristram Hunt wheeze is precisely what’s needed to raise our game is not yet certain. But at least, in education terms, the tortoise is out of the box.
Sixth Form joke:
I’ve been teaching hobbits how to play cricket. Bilbo's good at catching, but he can't really Frodo.
Published 15 January 2014
Wednesday, 15 January 2014