The Schools Manifesto, some thoughts

Today’s announcement by the Conservatives has been trailed as the publication of their draft manifesto on education, but it is actually an announcement of their plans for schools. Further and Higher education and the recent decimation of the Higher Education budget hasn’t been mentioned.

What is contained is interesting though. Coverage of it began with leaking that the policies contained with the manifesto would be “brazenly elitist”. Queue much complaining from the  left, and taking issue with that word. This has led to Creative Tory pointing out that there’s nothing wrong with saying something will be elitist and pulling out a great west Wing Quote to explain it:

“Elite is a good word, it means well above average. I’d ask them what their problem is with excellence.” – Jed Bartlet

What the conservative’s are really trying to say is that teaching should become elite, teachers should be the elite, they should be the best people around, such as is found in countries like Sweden and Finland , where a quarter of all people see it as the profession of choice.

This is right but a challenge to do, the way they want to do it is to say that only the academically strongest (a 2:1 or higher at degree level) will be able to enter the profession and that if you have a 2:1 or a first  in maths or sciences then you will have your student loan paid off.

Setting academic entry standards for a profession is a slightly questionable approach as being academically good enough to obtain a higher level degree doesn’t translate you to being able to teach very well? What matters is that teacher training becomes more relevant to teaching and not more academic. By all means use academic standards as a way to select the best and brightest but don’t require the education to continue to be overly academic. The government has recently moved to make all teacher training masters level, which is totally irellevant to teaching children and just means that teaching students must write 3 essays to a master’s level on teaching theory. I do hope that Conservative plans will resolve this, although I don’t believe it’s mentioned in the manifesto.

Ultimately though this approach to improving teaching standards is very different to that taken by the government. The last decade has been about decreasing class sizes and increasing teacher (or teaching assistant) numbers. Ultimately with the belief that the better the teacher student ratio the better the output.

The problem is that if we want to make teaching the elite then there has to be a scarcity of teachers, by it’s very nature there is not an endless pool of elite candidates. A transformation of the teaching profession along a similar vein has happened in Finland and has actually led to higher class sizes, because there just aren’t enough high quality teachers to go around. However this hasn’t affected teaching quality or student attainment at all.

Ultimately larger class sizes are only an issue if you have poorer quality teachers but in a middle England that is almost as obssessed with little Jimmy’s class size as they are with the price of their house would this be acceptable?

Update: Don't forget that you can ask David Cameron a question and vote for hte questions he will be asked at http://j.mp/8egAhR

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Education

I spent yesterday at Slough Borough Council delivering a training session to their apprentices. The SBC apprentice programme is a fantastic programme that takes school leavers and puts them through what is effectively an apprenticeship for office administration. Every year in September the council takes on about 20 apprentices who are then attached to various departments throughout the organisation, they do real work and also receive lessons on english, maths and various other developments, ultimately obtaining qualifications as well.

Now I'm not going to lie to you, I found yesterday's training session one of the toughest to deliver in a long time, their attention spans were low and also their behavior wasn't the best (I think being sat around tables like they were in a classroom defaulted them to classroom like behaviour, talking whilst other people were talking, not paying attention etc), certainly not what you would expect from employees, but they are young and new to the world of work so you can forgive them.

Effectively "teaching" them for the day though did make me think about the current state of education. Their ability to discuss abstract concepts and in fact to just discuss what they thought of something was severely limited, however when I gave them what was in effect a worksheet and they had to answer some clearly worded questions they had no issues.

All of these young people had finished at least basic education (GCSE's) although I don't think there is a hard and fast grade requirement to get onto the programme. However hardly any of them seemed to have critical thinking skills, or the ability to articulate their view on a subject and debate it with others. I should have thought that these were basic skills that should come about in education, however their ability to answer questions in written form when they were presented straight to them, I think tells us the problems with this government's approach to education.

For the last decade the solution to continued underperformance of schools and the education system has been to either target schools and pupils more thoroughly, leading to teaching to the test and the key being getting the right answer, or to suggest that young people need to be in formal academic education for longer. Either starting school earlier or finishing it later.

In the type of training I generally deliver the important thing isn't getting the answer, it is talking through with other people, engaging with others to hear their views and debating with them. The realisation moments are what's important, when someone challenges your opinion and you see things with a different set of eyes. When I was at school quite a lot of focus was put on showing your workings, that getting there was just as important as the result. At the time I thought this was stupid, if you got the wrong answer who cared if you got it by the right method, but now I see that this is actually very important.

In a modern world our complex problems can only be solved by complex solutions that involve creativity, and shared development. The issues of tomorrow and indeed today be they related to energy, technology, the internet or human interaction won't be solved by one person working through a work sheet answering clearly defined questions with clearly defined answers. They will be solved by teams collaborating, challenging each other searching for a solution to a problem that is ill defined and indistinct.

Sadly it seems that isn't how our education system prepares people, we read constantly of organisation's complaining that school leavers lack the basics and are not ready for the world of work, our universities complain about the lack of critical thinking in their intake students. In education the current goverenment has become obsessed with the idea that what you can measure is important and anything else is unimportant, they have forgotten or perhaps never heard Esinstein saying "“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts”.

So what is the solution, education needs to be looked at thoroughly and with a new set of eyes, yes concentration on the basics is important, science, maths, english. These are vital skills fo the economy of tomorrow and not one of those in my training yesterday knew for example why ice floats, but they are not the only thing we need to concentrate on. Schools need to train students to think critically and to be able to debate and discuss ideas, not just come up with answers, and alongside this the obsessions with making everything academic needs to be dropped. Not all careers need to be academic, there is nothing stopping someone following academic study in a subject if they want to, but to make it compulsory for nurses to be degree level qualified or teachers to be educated to a master's level misses the point of education and what it is about.

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