That was the rallying cry of New Labour; you could say the one thing on which they must be judged; after all, it would be simply unfair to judge them on their transport performance as Prescott was in charge. No, education was firmly what it was all about – build the future through the education of young people: that way, runs the implicit argument, people get happier, businesses get the skills they need, and Government gets its growing tax take.
All the more striking, then, that we should continue to get stories like Katharine Birbalsingh’s, addressing the Tories in Birmingham at the invitation of Michael Gove, the Education Secretary. The underachievement, the disruption, the problems were all, she claimed, the fault of the system itself. Her blogs – soon to be published by Penguin books – catalogue the violence, inanity and despair that constitutes many of our modern classrooms.
There is little point in denying this; I live in a leafy area of Bournemouth but took my son out of school five years ago and with my wife home educated him up to GCSE standard because the nearest local school was – to use a technical term – sh**e.
The problem is systemic, but unfortunately it is even deeper than systemic: it’s philosophically and pedagogically all wrong. And until that’s corrected there can be no system cure. The system can only be built around the underlying philosophy and pedagogy – tamper with it without changing the latter and you move the deck chairs on the Titanic.
What do I mean, then, by the philosophy (to focus on one point)? Well, here unfortunately I have to blame not the Labour Party, but the Conservatives. They, unbeknown even to themselves, did untold damage to British education at the very point at which they were doing untold good. I mean of course the Education Reform Act of 1988.
In so far as this Act enabled schools to act autonomously and free them from local Authority control, all well and good. But contained also within it was the worst possible thing: the foundations for the National Curriculum, a curriculum which at a stroke dis-empowered teachers and their professionalism, at a stroke led to education for the test and all education being examination led. But even that wasn’t the worst of it.
Oh no. The worst of it was that without noticing they had done it, the Conservatives betrayed their own long standing principles, or philosophy. It was the subtle change in wording on which all depended. The 1944 Education Act was set up in order to enable schools to educate children according to their ‘age, aptitude and ability’. This meant that children had to strive to be educated at all – they had to demonstrate ‘aptitude’ and with that develop their ability. The 1988 Reform Act, by contrast, now painted education as an ‘Entitlement’ – they were entitled to it whatever their aptitude or ability.
This all sounds trivial, doesn’t it? But that is precisely what it is not – now parents could start suing schools because moron Jonny hadn’t got his entitlement education, and apathetic Annie hadn’t got her certificates. And everybody now had to be equal because if some pupils did better than others then that wasn’t fair … and … and … so the cult of total mediocrity took hold. One of the later things of infamy done by the Labour Government in the spirit of this philosophy was the extension of FREE Further Education to 25 year olds! Jeezus – how many times are we paying for these retakes? But then again, Labour, foxes that they are, weren’t really investing in education here, anyway, were they? Simply buying the public sector vote to keep them in office – what FE lecturer is going to vote Tory with this gravy-train running and running?
So Michael Gove in highlighting Katherine Birbalsingh is doing a good thing. But he needs to do more: he needs to address the root philosophical problem at the heart of our educational failure. Then remedy it. And surprise, surprise: this poison root it will be found is exactly the same as the one blighting our families and businesses today. The country needs a wake-up call and an overhaul if it is going to have any chance of competing on the international stage.
The Mapping Motivation Series 