After an education-free election, schools are back. Nicky Morgan wants to do more about ‘coasting’ schools, all the Labour leadership contenders are talking about aspiration, and Liz Kendall has offered a more nuanced approach to free schools. The attention is welcome. For Labour there is an opportunity to think about schools in a way that unites traditionalists and modernisers – blue and New Labour.
Schools are contradictory places. On the one hand they are about the future. Forward-looking, designed to help children shape their destiny, aspirational, even. On the other hand, they are dominated by the past. Rituals, assemblies, rows, ‘tuck your shirt in’ and ‘line up straight.’
The raging education culture wars are framed by the clash between future and past. ‘Traditionalists’ want a knowledge-rich curriculum and strong discipline. They are sceptical about an intangible and faddish futurism. ‘Progressives’ are taken by the changes in the workplace. They fear ‘factory model’ schooling fails to take account of constant disruption in the economy. ‘Progressives’ want creativity and collaboration at the heart of school life.
To be effective in education policy (and elsewhere) Labour needs to acknowledge both schools of thought: a desire to keep tradition that enriches and secures a ‘British education’ and an imperative to prepare children for the future. A new path is possible.
A Labour approach to the curriculum should emphasise subject knowledge. ‘The best that has been thought and said’ confers a value judgement on scholars and writers of past. And that is good thing. There is a body of knowledge that provides cultural capital and a common reference point. Ensuring children first understand and then critically engage in the history of Britain, for example, is good inoculation against placelessness.
But a traditional curriculum does not have to be traditionally delivered.
How better to bring alive the story of the French and Russian revolutions than through immersive theatre? How memorable might chemical reactions be when represented through sculpture? Why not ask historians, directors and scientists to judge the work of students so that the bar is raised? Dynamism comes from children working together, independently, in different contexts and in interdisciplinary ways.
A Labour approach to school structures should start by acknowledging their importance. The left’s tradition of civic solidarity through mutual societies and trade unions can shape thinking. Schools should be the engine of a new type of public institution – neither run by the remote state nor the unaccountable private sector.
Teacher-led and held to account by parents and the local community, these schools could provide a new channel for civic action and relatedness. Empowered by more autonomy, these schools will innovate their way to new models of excellence.
On standards, Labour should be exacting. There needs to be a particular emphasis on reading early on (as well as exploring better proxies for performance than current exams and assessments). But the scope of high expectations can expand. If speaking is key to advancing in later life (as acknowledged by the new ‘tougher’ national curriculum), why not include it as part of student assessment? If a knowledge-rich curriculum is supported by skills (as almost everyone agrees), why not see failure here as a problem too? We need rigour in traditional and new areas of the curriculum.
The conversation about schools and education policy is now central.
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Oli de Botton is deputy head of School 21. He contributes to the Reform Time column and tweets @olidebotton
How would schools be locally accountable? Wasn’t that what Local Education Authorities with elected representatives did before academies and free schools?
More importantly, we would do well to recall the words of Labour sage and philosopher John Prescott:
“If you set up a school and it becomes a good school, the great danger is that’s the place they want to go to.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/prescott-hits-out-over-great-danger-from-blairs-school-reforms-519970.html
As Labour supporters we must heed John’s words and close any schools that are dangerously good, as this is unfair on and embarrassing to all the others. Our goal must be to ensure that all schools are roughly equally bad.
Probably it will be impossible to stamp out dangerous excellence completely. But the odd one may slip through, and come out of a Labour-designed schooling as a dangerously hard-working, well-informed and ambitious person, rather than a suggestible Labour-voting serf. If so, we can always get them later through the tax system, and call it fairness. That’ll level them down, the bastards.
Our own kids mostly go private anyway.
Progress and the Labour right have – since Blair – viewed LEAs and council involvement in education with deep suspicion. Not for them the “bog standard comprehensive”, but then nothing effective has been suggested in its place. Academies ? Time and again they have been proved to add nothing to the sector. If you throw enough money – and lord knows, enough has been thrown, then schools will improve, whether LA run or not. Free Schools ? None of them actually suggested in areas of need, just in areas where sharp elbowed, pushy parents want a quasi-grammar school for their offspring.