The next directive

Anastasia De Waal, 31 October 2008

‘Schools hit by more “ministerial fiddling” than any other public sector’ reports the Times Educational Supplement (TES) today. Reporting the findings of a recent parliamentary committee, the TES reveals that in just a single year, schools were on the receiving end of 135 new curriculum regulations.

The committee, the House of Lords Merits of Statutory Instruments Committee, looked into the last legislative session, 2006-07, and found that the Department for Education and Skills (pre ‘Department for Children Schools and Families’ (DCSF) days) compared very badly to other departments when it came to regulatory burden. Not only were schools inundated but the time-frame within which they were to implement directives was extremely short:
‘We were concerned by the volume of statutory instruments laid by the DCSF in August 2007, required to be put into effect by the time the new term started,’ the committee’s preliminary report states.
One of the major concerns about constant new regulation is the amount of paperwork it entails. In an environment where the main activity is, theoretically, teaching, bureaucratic inundation is an especially unwelcome distraction. When the time-scale is narrow, this makes the bureaucratic burden even more difficult for schools to negotiate.
The other problem of course with constant changes in regulation is that they so often, in education at least, involved getting rid of previous arrangements. Many a teacher has been highly frustrated by not only having to incorporate something new, and with little time to do so, in their already over-crowded schedule, but also having to get rid of an existing strategy or make a total u-turn. Clearly this is highly problematic for pupils, where continuity is key and inconsistency is potential disastrous. Whilst teaching I remember that this would happen regularly, from having to introduce a new teaching strategy to a new vital form of documenting teaching activity. One small but typical example, was when the deputy head stuck his head around the door of my Year 2 classroom one morning: ‘Oh, apparently we’re not supposed to write ‘WILF’ (What I’m Looking For’, a key learning points guide for pupils) on the board anymore, you’d better get rid of it.’ And that was that, despite the fact that it was a strategy which worked very well for my class. (It’s worth noting that why doing the ‘right’ thing by Whitehall mattered particularly that day was because local authority school improvement advisers were coming in.)
We know very well, from academic research, teacher surveys and just visiting classrooms that a huge hamper to teaching, negatively affecting not just teacher morale but whether they actually stick around or not, is the endless raft of ever-changing directives. So a ‘WILF’ for the DCSF: a reduction in the regulation flow – of about 99 per cent.