Stephen Twigg told an audience of educationalists today that he intends to utterly transform education in England.
He didn’t do this, as his anarcho-bureaucrat Tory opposite number does, by conjuring some glib pet project and hurling it at schools – all Twigg’s ideas are explicitly derived from existing evidence, from working practices that are already in place in at least some English schools. A longer school day; iPads and Kindles in the classroom; enduring and valuable partnerships between schools and employers – these are not untested ideas flung out for the sheer joy of announcing another policy. When Twigg says his three priorities for education are ‘evidence, evidence, evidence,’ he clearly means it.
But it is not these specific policies which make Twigg’s speech so radical – instead, it is the vision which underpins it. As a history teacher, I always long for politicians to think a little bit about the past when they make policy – on this front, Twigg doesn’t disappoint. He dissects English education, identifying the twin pillars upon which it rests: an 18th century belief in ‘a hierarchy of knowledge’, valuing the academic over the practical; and a 19th century industrial paradigm, organising schools like factories, ‘[t]he workers downing tools when they hear the bell ring … taught in batches, not by ability or interest, but by their own date of manufacture.’
Twigg calls time on both, demanding a 21st century education, with schools as ‘hubs of innovation’, shaping students as ‘active citizens and active drivers of social and economic development in our communities’. Some will criticise this as overly instrumental: surely education is about freeing young people’s potential and allowing them to shape their own destinies? Well of course it is, but an essential and irreducible part of choosing your own destiny must be that you can work for a living – few indeed, I imagine, are those who are shaping their own destinies having left the British education system unable to read, write, add up or behave sufficiently well to get a job.
Others might cry ‘dumbing down’, but there is no lack of passion here for sending more kids from state school to top universities; instead there is a blunt challenge to both state schools and top universities to improve access. But Twigg clearly has his sights on Gove’s EBacc when he attacks ‘the inequality of esteem’ between ‘academic’ and ‘practical’ skills – Gove, he seems to be saying, is fiddling with the indicator lights, when the whole point is we need to rebuild the engine.
There is plenty more in the speech to please progressive teachers: a commitment to tackle poor or average teachers through greater peer review – it is quite right that ‘the biggest critics of bad teaching are good teachers’; there will be a School to Work Review examining how schools can help build economic growth, led by Barry Sheerman, patron of Labour Teachers and well respected across the party and the education world; there is a slap for Gove and co on phonics: ‘ministers should not see one type of learning as a catch all for improving standards for all.’ There is a robust defence of Labour’s educational legacy but space for reflection too.
Clearly, this is not the final word on Labour’s education policy – Twigg himself acknowledges the severe restrictions on budgets, and there is a need to deepen these policies and to cost them, and ultimately to prioritise if Labour is to offer hope and realism in ‘the age of austerity’.
But the message is clear – forget Gove’s ‘revolution’: Labour was, is and always will be the party of truly radical educational transformation.
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John Blake is chair of Labour Teachers
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I like the idea of schools being at the heart of a community, beyond teaching children; being almost like a community centre outside formal school hours. Where I live lots of people don’t have big houses and loads share rooms with numerous siblings, and so lots of young people just roam the streets from ‘schools out’ time to when their parent’s get home and so they have to be home. If the schools could be open for longer, offering almost like youth clubs, that would be great. It’s a separate point really but I’ve often thought that it seems really odd that these great resources in the heart of the community are shut at weekends and in the evenings and not seen more as a public resourse.
After 30 years of teaching and leading in comprehensives, under a number of administrations, it isn’t easy to welcome any more, new, different ideas BUT if we could ask for anything it would be what is outlined here: careful consideration, and reflection before more or new policy. So the key phrases I really welcome are “existing evidence, from working practices” “enduring and valuable partnerships” to “think a little bit about the past when they make policy” “reflection”. If the key aim really is to find the “evidence” this is to be radical and likely to be successful. There is plenty of research, expertise and experience to consult and reflect upon – not just anecdotal stuff to please political lobbies, with rapid ill thought out policy initiatives. Talk to heads, governors, to teachers; visit institutions (schools, HE) even talk to parents and children see genuine “hope and realism” already existing and to be built on in the new vision.