It was refreshing to read the speech Stephen Twigg gave to the North of England Education Conference earlier today. Full of ideas (and possible arguments!) about the direction of our education policy, it is encouraging to see a clear outline of where we are heading.
Most strikingly, it is absolutely focused on the importance of teaching and learning and signals a decisive move away from our obsession with how schools are governed. This is encouraging given the weight of evidence that shows the impact of teaching and learning as opposed to whether a school is state, free, academy or private. There are also clear commitments to a less prescriptive approach with particular reference to the idea of visible and local school commissioners (it is not clear whether these would be elected) and a presumption that schools should be trusted to adopt and lead initiatives. These are major step-changes for Labour’s approach to schools policy.
A longer school day is the most substantial suggestion in the speech and the one that we should be making a central part of our education policy going into 2015. Britain is being out-schooled by many other European countries as well as emerging economies. While Britain has kept a largely unchanged 19th century school timetable, children in Sweden, France, and Japan have significantly more teaching. As well as being an argument about stretching children to their full and improving the quality of life for the next generation, extending the school day is an economic imperative. For British children to compete in an increasingly global world they deserve the best education we can afford and Labour should be making this case.
This links to the second key feature of Twigg’s speech. The emphasis on a more meaningful link between schools and the workplace cuts to the centre of an ongoing and outdated argument about vocational versus academic learning. Schools continue to be dogged by ideas of students suited to vocational routes and governments of all shades that have perpetuated a system that puts children into false categories in their early teens. In fact, the last Labour government was more to blame for this drift than any other. The explosion of BTECs and other vocational courses as a way of increasing school league tables held thousands of students back and fuelled the idea of a dumbing-down in the education system. I’ve had first-hand experience telling devastated 16-year-olds they can’t take subjects they love at A-level because the school forced them into a BTEC course when they were 14. Stephen’s reference to the ‘inequality of esteem’ is a welcome acknowledgment of where Labour went wrong with vocational qualifications and where the coalition is going wrong with its return to historic academic teaching.
This speech probably won’t be the topic of conversation around the staffroom photocopier tomorrow morning. But it should be the start of an important discussion in the Labour party about how we build the best school system in the world.
There is still space to make the bigger argument and its not too late to make it. We need to be clear about what success looks like in education. This should force us to ask difficult questions about school league tables, attainment versus progress measures and the need to educate students by style and approach rather than age. In these times of austerity the encouraging thing about this speech and these ideas is that they are about radical reform instead of pouring money into the system. This speech should be a signal to the Labour party that there is an important education debate to be had and ideas to be heard.
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Josh MacAlister is a member of Progress and has also written in favour of a longer teaching day
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I totally agree that we have to move on from structures and management models and concentrate on teaching, but my main issue is that we should be concentrating more on confidence and social skills rather than paper qualifications. This does appear in the Ofsted criteria as a sub-heading but it should be much more prominent in our whole approach.
The same goes for schools. They should develop a culture and ethos rather than a new management model.
key is teaching students by style and approach rather than age. Attainment versus progress measures is a vital discussion. Money isnt the main point. Quality, flexible teaching in a radically reformed sysytem is but change is achieveable given the importance of Education for all throughout peoples lives. DOUG JAMES
Did not someone not too far away, say back in the 90’s – standards not structures? Labour verved away from this mantra due to pressure from the right wing press, pushy parents and those in the party obsessed with the so called middle ground constituency (most of whom are well catered for educationally anyway). League tables and the school market concept is another major issue that needs tackling. Some interesting points from Twigg but once Labour is back in power will not the same thought process and pressure take over?
Whatever we might want to see in terms of structures as and when Labour win back power (and my preferred model is the co-operative school: http://www.party.coop/2011/10/24/new-schools-should-be-co-operative-schools/ ) children only get one chance at education regardless of who is in office at the time and the structures imposed. Whatever our views on free schools or academies we must fight for the best education for children now, as well as debating and putting in place policies that would better serve future generations of pupils.
One point, Warren: I’ve worked at Lancaster Adult College and seen many adults (age 19 upwards) benefit from the different environment of adult education, so rebuilding adult education (whose funding has been severely cut over the past ~3 years) is worthwhile for giving people ANOTHER chance at education. Britain’s cultic regard for grammar schools reinforces permanent labelling at 11; whatever the case for or against the ‘sheep and goats’ attitude, our increasingly diverse and complex lives render it inappropriate now.
Sweden, France and Japan have longer hours but curiously no mention of Finland – in terms of PISA scores far more successful than these three countries. Here’s what Dr Pasi Sahlberg of Finland’s Education Department has to say about longer teaching hours:
“There’s no evidence globally that doing more of the same [instructionally] will improve results. An equally relevant argument would be, let’s try to do less. Increasing time comes from the old industrial mindset. The important thing is ensuring school is a place where students can discover who they are and what they can do. It’s not about the amount of teaching and learning.”
I wonder who knows more Stephen Twigg or Dr Sahlberg…
What Sahlberg is saying is more nuanced than what you believe he’s saying: “more of the same (instructionally)”. Sahlberg is saying that children shouldn’t be put on a treadmill.
Stephen isn’t arguing that children should repeat the same lessons over and over, but he is suggesting that more time within the school boundaries would create more opportunities for learning.
I agree with Dan here. The article I wrote last year on this made the point that “a longer school day or year would give schools an exciting opportunity to improve what happens in the classroom. It would give teachersmore flexibility over the curriculum and it would hopefully reduce ‘teach-to-test’ pressures. It would give students and teachers a chance to cover subjects that are inspiring and socially valuable but that don’t necessarily fit into the national curriculum and GCSE courses.”
Thanks for posting the quote Ron. Interesting to see.
One thought: in my experience some of those most driven by governance structures are those opposed to academies and free schools.
As interesting is how yet again all the discussion seems to focus on a secondary specific debate. I’d be interested in knowing how this would shape up in a primary environment or is the flexibility and longer day also encompassing the primary sector? On a personal note some schools are operating more flexible days and experimenting with the curriculum and how it’s structured, delivered and taught with, as ever, a key factor being that children learn differently and one appraoch will not suit everyone so building more flexibility into any system will eb a really interesting debate. Only Labour can lead such a debate as the Tory led coalition have no idea of what the state sector is about.
However, before anyone in a classroom, PTA meeting or Governing body fully trusts Labour on any of this they’ll want more proof and reasssurance that we are committed to them and have faith in the advances made over the last twenty years – and especially the success that arose from the improved funding and flexibilities under the Labour government which are now so quickly being eroded and undermined.
As is said below, in opposition we talked about supporting teaching and learning and not getting swamped by structural debates. In the first term and 1/2 we stuck to this and reaped the benefit (as a party and country). Then we got side tracked and started all the academy and specialist school nonsense that now gives Gove an open door for his neo-Con rubbish around free schools and forced academies. We must close this off by incorporating into our programme in clear, unequivocal ways how we can give all schools the support, confidence and resource to deliver flexible learning programmes for students without it mattering what their title or structure is – or in other words comprehensive education for the 21st century.
This cannot reasonably accommodate any on-going funding (and certainly no advantage) for academies and simply can’t incorporate a free school – or state funded private school for elite middle class parents with no monitoring and safeguards on quality at the expense of other local families, as they should be described. And when we re-invest in schools and they can afford to throw out old out dated textbooks they can buy new dictionaires that don’t confuse children about the meaning of the word free.
Whilst I fully agree with a move away from the obsession with governance and structures, which have dominated debate for far too long yet are almost irrelevant to performance, I do feel that we need a more fundamental approach – more on the lines suggested by Dean Rogers.
Surely the major aim of our school education system should be to develop the talents of all of our young people. This is virtually impossible to achieve within the current narrow curriculum which derives from and mainly replicates the Grammar/ Public School curriculum designed to satisfy the needs of University matriculation. Gove’s “English Bac” (ignobly supported by Stephen Twigg) is merely a throwback to the old School Certificate. The examinations used to measure success in the present system are, at best, analogues for achievement and not very good ones at that given that they seem to lack any kind of predictive validity. They are not “qualifications” at all, rather mere credentials. Too much of our current system relies on an unchallenged “taken for grantedness” that lets down huge numbers of students.
We need to define our purposes in education and express these as desirable outcomes. We then need to develop a curriculum that will enable all students to achieve these – that is, a comprehensive curriculum to match a comprehensive system – and a portfolio to enable achievements to be carried forward. Such a new curriculum would have to mesh the false dichotomy between the so-called “academic” and “vocational”. Good education is both – and a lot more.
As Geoff Stanton, then Head of the Further Education Unit, argued many years ago, development in education needs to be along three simultaneous dimensions to be effective: staff; curriculum and institution. Following only one dimension leads to distortion and disappointment.
So, we need a new curriculum to excite and challenge our school students; schools structured in such a way as to support this and teachers and school leaders trained and up to the task of producing youngsters ready to face the 21st Century, rather than the 19th.