Estelle Morris should be congratulated. Education is seen by many as the government s big success story. Large increases in spending are delivering results. Under this government, we have witnessed an unprecedented rise in the standards of literacy and numeracy in primary schools and in the quality of teaching across the board. Internationally, comparisons show that our education system is one of the most successful in the world. The government has put significant extra money into schools, especially those in poorer areas, and has increased the number of teachers and how much they can earn.
Yet the more successful the school system, the more dissatisfied the public and politicians have become with the status quo. The history of the welfare state has taught us that improving people s life chances raises their expectations beyond what it has traditionally been possible to deliver. It is in this sense that the education system is failing. In order to meet a new set of demands, the system itself needs to change. For there to be a big leap forward in the quality of teaching and learning, we must produce innovative new ways of reorganising and restructuring schools.
One reason for the rise in the public s expectations is the increase in the amount of published information concerning the performance of schools. No other school system in the world has more data to prove its accountability than ours. The more the overall success of the school system becomes generally apparent, the more people become acutely aware of the varying levels of success between schools. The current demand for universal high performance can only be met by embedding professional and organisational learning into the structure of schools.
To achieve this, impermeable boundaries both within and between schools need to be broken down and re-formed. The professional knowledge of head teachers and teachers can then be tapped and shared in ways which will further help children s education. The greatest impermeable boundary of all is the way we currently organise time and space within schools. At present, a teacher rarely gets the opportunity to learn first-hand from the teacher in the neighbouring classroom, let alone from a teacher in a neighbouring school. Enabling teachers to communicate with the outside world is essential. To their credit, the government has already invested massively in computers for schools; yet most teachers are still grateful if they get their own phone, let alone their own laptop.
The structure and organisation of schools is defining the way children learn, rather than the other way around. Our current system encourages the idea that children learn best if they are taught in groups of 30, in separate classrooms, by individual teachers. This merely perpetuates the status quo, by inhibiting collaboration between teachers and pupils. Schools need to create many more opportunities for groups of teachers to engage in intensive collaborative work with colleagues from other departments and other schools. This may mean that, in the future, teaching assistants will lead classes, deal with pastoral issues, or meet with parents. It may even result in a longer school day or abandoning the current anachronistic pattern of school holidays.
However, new ideas about re-organising schools need to come from within the classroom, not from Whitehall or a think-tank. They need to be tested in practice rather than conjured up in the abstract. Government s role is to create the conditions for these ideas to emerge, enabling one teacher and one part of the education system to learn from another. Breaking the mould that created the school is crucial if we are to transform the potential for children s learning. The concern is that schools and teachers work harder every year at the things they have always done. Now, instead of trying to do things better, they need to start doing better things.