Don’t force children to play the Government’s war-games

nick cowen, 31 October 2007

More powers, new targets, less tolerance for failure, a boost to several central government run schemes (Teach First and Teach Next), are the only discernible content of Brown’s latest speech on education. The tone of the speech makes it sound as if the government, having annexed and occupied the education system decades ago, still finds itself combating a never-ending insurgency of ‘failure’. These forces of failure cannot be tolerated and must be eradicated.

Unfortunately, government can do very little directly other than tackle any issue as if it were siege warfare. Gazing over the system as if it were some gigantic chessboard, the central planner moves a hundred million here, takes away a few million there and dispatches more manpower into areas to try and prevent the battle line breaking. There are a series of never ending crises, and only the planners that caused them have the power to relieve them.
The problem is that the enemy of this particular campaign is a phantom. The ‘failure’ that the government has declared war on is not the very real failure that is actually out there harming children’s life chances, but the one defined in Whitehall. This definition says failure has been eradicated when pupils score 5 or more A* to C grades at GCSE. Never mind that what that qualification actually means for a child changes from year to year, making the qualifications near useless for employers and colleges to use as a real measure. Until, that is, the imaginary target is ‘hit’. Then when education is still not producing the right outcomes, the government is forced to invent a new, equally meaningless, target: a new fortification to storm and a new place to direct centrally teachers’ efforts and taxpayers’ money.
And while Brown plays his games with statistics, promising an end to failure yet again, he forgets that it is not the top-down view of the education system that really matters, but the experience of each and every child that is forced through his baroque system. So far as many children today are concerned, Brown has already lost his battle with failure. Ever rising exam results don’t mean a thing to those that have been put through the system and gained little or nothing. The best have left school having wasted much of their time playing politicians’ games. The worst off have left turned off from education altogether and with their life chances severely reduced. So perhaps it is time that we let families have their children back and left the politicians to play these games with themselves, rather than with young people’s lives. There is an alternative.