What now for schools?
Civitas, 29 June 2007
As Blair prepared his goodbyes this week, we’ve been looking at his record in schools. Our verdict? Improved results denote a decline in standards. Have a look at the full report which examines the ways in which results have been boosted, here.
Blair’s seat still warm and our new PM Gordon Brown had already stamped his mark on education. Yesterday, the former Chancellor announced that three new departments were to replace the DfES and the DTI: the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF), the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) and the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (DBERR).
Although satisfaction with the DfES’ actvities has been thin on the ground in recent years, past precedent suggests that more change will lead only to more chaos and relentless ‘innovation’. On the other hand, several of the teaching unions seem to think that the ‘enormity’ of the current education remit might best be split in order to be handled more efficiently. The other positive prediction relates to the DIUS. An intention at least, is to give special emphasis to skills by setting up the DIUS. With skills a crisis-point issue in this country, both in terms of the deficit in our economy and the 40% increase in the number of NEETs in the last ten years, a change of tack is vital. It remains to be seen, however, whether the move will amount to more than window-dressing.
But back to the Blair era. He may be gone, but his school legacy – artificial achievement – continues. Today in the Times Education Supplement (TES), we read that in a bid to boost results in academies – the schools which cost around £23 million to establish – ‘pupils in the first wave of 14 academies are doing 12 times the number of GNVQs compared with their predecessor schools’. According to an academic from Edinburgh University, Terry Wrigley, schools are steering pupils away from academic subjects and into GNVQs, due to ‘political pressure’ to increase results. Wrigley argues that academies’ use of GNVQs ‘…as a device to claim that academies are working is completely flawed’. As long as political pressure for better results continues unaccompanied by the tools to achieve them – better policies – these types of distortions will inevitably continue.
I have recently completed a ten year stint teaching in a comprehensive labelled ‘good’ by OFSTED. Pupils expected to be spoon fed – particularly difficult for an academic approach to studies, but OK if the exams get easier each year. As my tutor group agreed, most classes are also disrupted. I saw the political decision not to discipline pupils (but to appeal for them to ‘aspire’ instead) ‘explained’ to successful teachers who in the past had achieved remarkable results with year groups. In the future they would have their hands tied in dealing with low-level disruption to the detriment of the majority of hardworking conscientious pupils whgo actually wanted the disruption to be dealt with. It was strange that a school labelled ‘good’ would have so much bullying by pupils of teachers – both physical and verbal. It is about time that the direct links between the political removal of consequences for pupil’s bad behaviour in schools and teenager led violence on the streets is addressed.