More ambition required for next Thursday’s Child
pete quentin, 30 May 2008
The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), New Labour’s most relied-on think tank, has proposed that the ‘long’ summer holidays (shorter than in most of Europe) be abolished in a bid to curb what has been referred to as the ‘summer learning loss’ amongst pupils from deprived backgrounds. The report, ‘Thursday’s Child’, co-authored by Sonya Sodha and Julia Margo, argues that a new system of – essentially – school holiday dispersed through the year, needs to be introduced. Their proposal entails shortening the summer holidays to just four weeks.
IPPR’s aim of lessening the learning loss amongst pupils from deprived backgrounds relates to a very real problem. A solid body of research evidence shows that children from advantaged backgrounds consolidate what they have learnt at school during the long vacation with their parents whilst without either consolidation at home or school lessons leaning often ebbs away for disadvantaged children. As a result, the achievement gap between children from affluent backgrounds and those from poor ones widens over the summer break.
However surely it is not the holidays which need addressing so much as the root cause of the problem: the home-life disadvantage. Although reorganising the holidays may mitigate this issue for some less well-off children, shortening the periods spent at home is at best a sticking plaster – and at worst, the acceptance of inequality.
The striking thing about IPPR’s proposal is the way in which it seeks to, in effect (albeit inadvertent), institutionalise home-life disadvantage by organising schooling around it. Quite the reverse of the New Labour mantra of not accepting disadvantage as a reason for underachievement. Whilst it is vital to devise strategies which alleviate disadvantage in the short term, it seems alarmingly defeatist to incorporate ‘damage control’ into long-term planning, whilst failing to address the causes of damage.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, one of the main problems with New Labour’s education agenda is that it is overly ambitious. Not educationally, but socially. Whilst New Labour is quite right in seeing education as central to life chances, even the best schooling cannot be a panacea. By no coincidence has research from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that just 14 per cent of the achievement gap between pupils is attributable to variances in school quality.
In the same way that Sure Start initially appeared to be about removing children from their disadvantaged context rather than actually addressing why that was necessary by addressing the context itself, many policies within the current education system (breakfast and after school clubs in many cases, for example) treat difficult home-lives as given realities. Yet whilst disadvantage is indeed a reality which those working in education must seek to overcome today and tomorrow, for policymakers it ought to be a challenge to be tackled (through better employment records amongst school leavers, for example) not simply a problem incorporated into future planning.
With regard to the question of “learning loss”, it appears that having an advantage with regard to your educational abilities may actually prove a disadvantage when it comes to the educational system.
I was what is referred to as a “gifted child” – IQ in the top 1% of the population. However, although my Senior School was aware of this, from some tests I took at the end of my time in Junior School, they never bothered to tell me, allowing me to believe that my failure to fit in was due to my failure to reach the school’s standards, instead of the other way around.
When I discovered the truth some years later, passing my Mensa entrance exams, and attempted to take the matter further with my LEA, I was told that, as a gifted child, I wasn’t legally recognised as having any special needs. I have since discovered that my experiences were/are all too common, many teachers regarding the concept of giftedness as “elitist” and “divisive”.
The educational writer, Dr John Rae, in his book, “Letters to Parents”, writes that, durin his time in the state system, he had seen so many gifted children end up, in a “Kafkaeques twist” labelled as suffering from “learning difficulties”, that it reminded him of the way in which Soviet dissidents ended up in mental hospitals.
In October 1999, the Sunday Telegraph published an article based on an interview with the then Chief Inspector of Prisons, Sir David Ramsbotham. In the course of his duties, Sir David had had to visit all of the Young Offender Institutions in this country, being struck by the large number of “particularly bright” teenagers he found in them – victims of an educational system which was not required to meet their needs, leaving them bored and frustrated, all too apt to turn to anti-social behaviour.
A year or so later, the government set up NAGTY – the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth – designed to provide an appropriate education for the brightest students.
At the beginning of 2007, there was a report suggesting that the government was worried about NAGTY’s future, due to the large number of teachers refusing to co-operate with it, on ideological grounds.
It would appear that either my parents gave me an “unfair” inheritance in terms of an innate intelligence level, or they gave me an “unfair” advantage in terms of providing me with a “literate” environment (I could read before starting school), or both, many “educationalists”(!) regarding this with the same hostility as they might my receiving a large financial inheritance.
A survey of comprehensive schools some months back indicated that 25% of pupils complained that their lessons failed to “stretch” them.
As one parent put it, if your child does badly at school, due to their being of substantially below average intelligence, and you do what you can to help them, you will be praised. However, if your child does badly at school, due to their being of substantially above average intelligence, and you try to do what you can to help them, you will be criticised.
One of the founders of Mensa, Victor Serebriakoff, compared the British educational system to the “Bed of Procrustes”, in the Greek myth, with all those using it being forced to fit, no matter how painful or damaging the process.
I really don’t feel that allowing such people greater freedom to express their dislikes and prejudices will do very much for the children under their control.
You may have seen a film called “Hamilton Bergeron”, based on a story by Kurt Vonnegut, based in a future America, where, in the interests of “stability” and “fairness”, the state can take steps, up to and including brain surgery, in order to suppress “excessive” intelligence amongst its citizens.
I believe that Mr Vonnegut intended this as a satire, although some people seem to regard it as more of a guide.
To misquote: “Equality, what crimes are committed in your name!”