Who Cares About Education?

By Eric Macfarlane

We all have opinions on education, but how far do we understand the powerful forces that shape the learning experiences of our children and young people? Eric Macfarlane takes a critical look at the traditions, government policies and individual ideologies that currently determine priorities in our schools, colleges and universities. His disturbing conclusion is that we are fast losing sight of the basic principles that underpin effective learning and teaching. Who Cares About Education? is a call for concerted action from all who share an interest in young people and the way in which we prepare them for adulthood.

'This wise book will speak to a wide range of audiences and prove an important resource for a generation of teachers, parents and young people who sense that something has gone very wrong in today's system.' Melissa Benn

'Eric Macfarlane has a real gut feeling for what education should be about. At a time when discussion is mainly about exam results and giving schools new titles, he provides a forceful reminder of what really matters in educating our young people.' Chris Green, MBE

'Education remains political dynamite, with teaching professionalism and autonomy constantly undermined, and school leaders flung aside like football managers in a bad season. That's why we need books like Eric Macfarlane's - restoring perspective, channelling rage, providing historical context, and voicing solutions. It's a book for all who care about real education.' Geoff Barton

'Eric Macfarlane shares his passion for a broad and balanced curriculum and emphasises the enormous benefits of the arts as a serious part of every child's education and well-being. His book will empower us to ensure accessibility to the arts for future generations.' Dame Evelyn Glennie

Eric Macfarlane has taught in, and been head of, both secondary modern and grammar schools. He was the founding principal of Queen Mary's College, one of Hampshire's pioneering 16+ comprehensive colleges, and has been an LEA adviser, examiner and assessor of several different initiatives to improve the learning and teaching processes in both schools and universities. Whilst Principal of Queen Mary's College, he was seconded to Keble College for a year to assist with the Oxford Department of Education's introduction of a school-based teacher-training course. He worked at the University of Surrey and Birkbeck College promoting the Enterprise in Higher Education initiative, before becoming academic staff adviser in University College, London. Eric has had a long association with out-of-school learning initiatives and was chair of the Governing Council of the Active Training and Education Trust. He received the OBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours List in 1988.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Legend Press
• Release date: Nov 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781787192270

Book preview

http://melissabenn.com

Chapter 1

Unrealised Potential

We are all born with immense natural talents but few people discover what they are and even fewer develop them properly. Ironically one of the main reasons for this massive waste of talent is the very process that is meant to develop it: education.

Sir Ken Robinson.

We’re having to be on our toes today: our little granddaughter is visiting. We’re racking our brains for names for her two butterflies that hatched this morning. Any old names won’t do: they must be alliterative, and appropriate for the personality and behaviour of their owners, like the names already chosen for earlier arrivals - Tumbling Tom, who, after emerging from his chrysalis, promptly fell over, and Laura Longlegs who got her limbs tangled up as she struggled to free herself from her cocoon (cue here for question and answer session on human births).

At the moment granddaughter is in the kitchen watching the routines intently and lending a hand. She knows where everything goes and remembers that the cutlery-drawer has to be eased out carefully. We have to explain why there’s a new place for the teapot. She’s found an unused craft set in the toy cupboard and she closely studies the explanatory diagrams, noting in passing that the colouring of the pictures doesn’t precisely match that of the materials to which it relates. Having mastered the processes outlined, she uses them to develop an idea of her own, rather than one of those given in the instructions as an example. At lunch she watches grandpa struggling with a new but refractory salt cellar. Gently taking the offending object out of his hands, she silently demonstrates how it works.

Child prodigy?

I doubt it. Just an alert and watchful child, full of questions and ideas that she wishes to share. Children are born with a sense of wonder and are determinedly inquisitive about the world around them. Confident in their response to their surroundings, they can be remarkably thoughtful, focused and persevering when trying to find out about something they want to understand. And they dare to dream - to imagine what would happen if you apply an established theory to an unknown situation, a process once called intelligence. Children have an obvious potential to become creative thinkers, problem-solvers and innovators. It’s easy to forget this, for something happens to that potential as children grow up. Too frequently the sense of wonder and clear-eyed vision become dimmed, even lost. The instinctive interest in everything around them fades. There is a marked falling off in confidence.

Pablo Picasso is said to have believed that all children are artists: the problem was for them to remain so as they grew up. Systems of formal education all too often confine or deny children’s potential, rather than develop it. Sir Peter Ustinov’s school report stated, He shows great originality that must be curbed at all costs. Winston Churchill hated school and was consistently bottom of the class at Harrow. Albert Einstein was considered slow as a young child and eventually expelled for his poor attitude: he was alleged to have asked too many questions and to have been a bad example to other pupils. At school, says Sir Richard Branson, I was a dyslexic and dunce. Many succeed in spite of the system. Not everyone, however, is so fortunate.

Within a short time of starting their formal education, many children seem reluctant to talk about their experiences, responding to a parental ‘What did you do at school today?’ with bored and non-committal replies. It’s accepted that, by their early teens, children can concentrate their learning on particular aspects of human knowledge and experience and that others areas of human knowledge can be closed off, perhaps forever. Many teenagers are switched off by the whole learning process and just go through the motions to avoid getting into trouble. And by no means all of those who continue with their studies after school do so out of a genuine enthusiasm for learning: there is a significant drift into higher education on the conveyor belt of peer expectations and parental and institutional ambitions. Most university students clearly enjoy the social life, but if you question them closely about their course their response is often an equivocal ‘It’s all right’.

How does this loss of excitement in the learning process come about? What has happened to the young child’s natural curiosity, the insatiable desire to know more about the world? Can we really be unaware how important it is for us to ensure that children hold on to their spirit of wide-ranging enquiry and creative thinking? - important for their own development and the quality of their future life as adults, and indeed vitally important for the survival of our society in a world of unprecedented change and complexity. Or is it that we simply cannot summon up the collective effort to create a new education system fit for this purpose? We are inclined to cling to traditional ideas and ways of doing things well beyond the point when they are effective and relevant. This is particularly true of education. Whilst the need for radical change grows daily, our system is becoming ever more entrenched in the past. We are currently losing what H G Wells called civilisation’s race between education and catastrophe.

The challenges facing the world are multiplying at a bewildering pace. The population explosion, the indiscriminate use of resources and destruction of the environment, climate change, terrorism, stress and mental illness, pandemics and the rapidly-increasing ability of life-threatening diseases to resist antibiotics, an ageing population, mass migration, world-wide economic fluctuations - these are just some of the areas where the rate and magnitude of change are causing immense global problems. Our ability to respond to this situation is seriously impaired by the way in which we have been conditioned to view the human situation compartmentally and parochially. Many of our current difficulties are too complex and inter-related to be resolved by groups of specialists working largely in isolation.

A feature of the regular reports on the economy given by Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, has been his insistence on the need to look at the economy, not as a self-contained problem that has to be sorted out before we tackle issues like education, social welfare, immigration, but as an integral part of a complex pattern of closely-related global problems. Speaking on climate change, Mark Carney has reiterated the warnings of Pope Francis and President Obama that, unless we take action now, the consequent disaster will be beyond the future generation to rectify. The consequences of inaction on this issue will, he has asserted, not simply be environmental, but will impact on many other global problems and seriously threaten the economic, financial and political stability of the world. Some critics have responded by suggesting that the Governor has stepped outside his brief and should not get involved with things that are not his concern. They could not be more wrong: these problems concern every one of us.

As long as we cling to our compartmentalised view of the human situation we shall struggle to solve global problems. We need to cross traditional disciplines and geographical barriers, consulting, co-operating, sharing information, and working together in a common cause. The paralysis that gripped Europe in the face of the recent waves of refugees escaping from civil war and persecution are a clear indication of western governments’ failure to cope with an unforeseen problem. At a domestic level, a series of totally unexpected political developments has completely changed the political scene in ways that no-one fully understands and to which we are struggling to adapt. The key players in both major parties have changed out of all recognition so that many of our new leaders are not only woefully short of relevant experience but appear to be lacking the new ideas and imagination that the current situation requires. The June 2016 referendum on our European Union membership revealed frightening degrees of prejudice and intolerance that show just how fragile our carefully-nurtured democracy is. If the education system is to play a part in seeking to remedy this situation it has to revise its priorities.

Our education system was designed at another time and for another purpose: it is entirely inappropriate to meet current needs. Sir Ken Robinson, a lifelong campaigner for creative thinking, speaks passionately to audiences across the world on the global challenges facing our society and the need for revolutionary changes in the way in which we prepare young people for them. In his book, Out of Our Minds, Robinson draws a parallel between our neglect of the environment and our failure to provide young people with an education appropriate to the 21st century:

... there is a similar calamity in our use of human resources. In the interests of the industrial economies we have subjected generations of people to narrow forms of education that have marginalised some of their most important talents and qualities. In pursuit of higher levels of efficiency and productivity in our organisations, we have overlooked the essentially human factors on which creativity and innovation naturally depend. We have wasted much of what people have to offer because we have not seen the value of it.

Mass education in this country dates back to the latter half of the nineteenth century when it was strongly influenced by the economic needs of the time. A second stage of the industrial revolution required a more skilled labour force and created new kinds of employment which led to a close connection between the education provided by the state and the factory system. The system was based on instruction and repetition with obedience, order and conformity its key features. There has, of course, been enormous progress in education over the last 150 years, but our approach still bears the hallmarks of nineteenth century priorities. Much of what we currently do in schools is inappropriate, even counter-productive.

In the past, change has often been predictable, a gradual variation in an otherwise fairly stable situation, a slowing down or quickening of a trend with which we are broadly familiar. Now change is headlong. We are constantly presented with situations and problems that we haven’t previously encountered and that we don’t fully understand. They come at us out of the blue - unforgettably so on that cloudless morning of 9/11, which announced an age of global terrorism.

The technological revolution alone is completely changing the way we think and live. We are having to adapt to new ways of working, studying, accessing information and communicating with each other. No aspect of our lives is untouched by the new technology: it has changed our leisure time, our personal relationships, even our sexual behaviour. These changes are not always for the better. Like many of the great scientific discoveries of the past, today’s technological developments can be used for good or evil, and we must be concerned that, whilst raising standards of living, technology is also substantially reducing our quality of life. Hackers, criminal gangs, sexual predators, suppliers of lethal drugs, fraudsters preying on the elderly and vulnerable, extremists of every kind - they are all experiencing a bonanza using the internet with impunity. They pose a serious threat to our way of life and we have to learn fast if we are to maintain control of current technology.

In a BBC radio interview on the first day of the 21st century, Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, was asked what chance he would give the world of surviving the next millennium. I’m not sure about the next millennium, he replied, but I think I give us a 50/50 chance of surviving the next 100 years. Why do you say that? asked the interviewer. Well, replied Sir Martin, I fear that the speed of man’s technological discoveries is outpacing our wisdom and ability to control what we have discovered.

Naturally we want to believe that this is an unduly pessimistic view of the dangers we face. But what if these repeated warnings are justified? We have a long history of pursuing scientific and technological research in a vacuum without considering the outcomes, implications and human cost of what we are doing until it is too late - one of the unfortunate consequences of our specialist approach to education. Can we really break that mould? Is there still time for our educational system to be re-invented for the twenty-first century? Are we prepared to turn our practices upside down and nurture rather than stifle children’s imagination and creativity? Are there ways in which we can ensure that our children leave the educational system with a better understanding of human needs, combining a spirit of enterprise and innovation with the resilience to respond to fast-changing situations? Will they possess the idealism and moral strength to tackle the manifold problems facing our society? And the empathy and communication skills to work collaboratively to solve them? Charles Darwin stressed that it was those species that were most adaptable to change that stood the best chance of survival.

We have to start educating our young people to think in a wider and more imaginative dimension so that they recognise the connections and transferences between different phenomena and human experiences that many of our compartmentally-trained specialists seem incapable of comprehending. The traditional emphasis on the acquisition, retention and testing of the knowledge of our ancestors has to give way to a skills-based education system in which the next generation learns how to access and evaluate new information and to develop a spirit of enterprise, creativity and entrepreneurship. The CBI’s warning that some British schools have become mere ‘academic factories’ indicates how far away we are from realising this vision. British pupils and students are the most tested in the industrialised world, and the whole paraphernalia of assessing, examining, grading and ranking of schools’ exam results in league tables has had a disastrous effect on educational priorities and practices.

There is no sign that our political decision-makers are listening to what is being said or, if they are, that they understand it. Their background - an élitist education, political career and often affluent lifestyle - cocoons many of our leaders from the lives of the ordinary people that they represent. Their interest in educational reform is limited to quick-fix solutions and peripheral adjustments designed to appeal to the self-interest of specific sections of the electorate. They constantly tinker with the system, but remain slaves to it. There is no sense of permanency about the changes that are made: each successive government seeks to cancel out the initiatives introduced by its predecessor and to establish its own limited political agenda. Moreover, there is little consistency, even within the lifetime of a single government: successive Secretaries of State bring their personal ideology to the Education Department and seek to stamp it on the system as a mark of their effectiveness. Since the 1988 Education Reform Act, which introduced the process of political intervention in the curriculum and management of schools, there have been twelve different Secretaries of State for Education with an average tenure of less than two years. Barry Sheerman, a long-serving chair of the House of Commons select committee on education, is quoted as saying: A school that was changing its leadership as regularly...would be put in special measures immediately.

As soon as they are appointed, fly-by-night Education Secretaries declare their personal prejudices, announcing, without consultation, that history syllabuses are to have a greater focus on medieval times, or that books by American authors should be removed from English literature courses, or that we should adopt the intensive methods of teaching used by totalitarian states. Having shown their mettle in this way, they often depart, leaving someone else to force through their so-called reforms.

A popular ploy used by Education Secretaries to create the illusion that they are action men or women and up-to-date in their thinking is to alter the name and logo of their Department. Thus the Department for Education and Skills became the Department for Education and Employment, then the Department for Education, followed by the Department for Education and Science, the Department for Children, Schools and Families and back to the Department of Education. These little self-indulgences wouldn’t perhaps matter very much if they didn’t use up time, energy and money that could be more profitably spent in other ways. The DCSF was known as the Department for Curtains and Soft Furnishings, in recognition of the fact that, when he was Secretary of State for Education, Ed Balls installed a grand staircase made from glass and surgical steel, together with new designer furniture shipped in from Italy - at a total cost alleged to have been £3 million. The Department was having to make £2 billion pounds of savings at the time.

Another more obvious illustration of politicians’ extremely limited and superficial view of what constitutes reform is the constant alteration of the system examination boards are required to employ to indicate grades of success and failure in national examinations. My own 16+ School Certificate recorded the result in each of my subject examinations under four headings - very good, credit, pass and fail. Lettered grades were then introduced, initially six (A-F), later reduced to five (A-E). Further differentiation followed with the introduction of a nine-point numerical scale, 1 being the top grade and 9 the lowest. Then a two-level exam system was introduced, with the highest numerical grades of the lower level equating with the lowest grades of the higher level. These two levels were later merged and the recording of results reverted to a letter system, this time with seven categories (A-G). A super grade (A*) was subsequently added to make eight categories. In 2012 the Secretary of State, Michael Gove, announced yet another resurrection from the past - nine grades designated by numbers, but with 9 this time being the highest grade instead of the lowest. By the time this version of recording exam results is implemented we shall no doubt be due for another turn of the merry-go-round. Teachers are well-used to this scenario: we have all encountered pupils who spend more energy and time on strategies for avoiding their homework assignments than they’d use if they simply got down to doing what was required of them.

The confusion caused by constant re-adjustment of the level of exam achievement denoted by each grade is compounded by the habitual attempts to make success more difficult. So, in the Gove scheme, a 9 grade is to be a ‘super grade’, an A** in the previous terminology, and reserved for a very small élite of high-fliers. Further refining of the differentiation process takes place as one moves down the scale, with the categories 9-5 representing the old A-C range. Category 5 is tricky, equating with the middle and upper parts of the old grade C, whilst category 4 is equal to the lower part of C and upper part of D. The outcome of all this complex fine-tuning is that in the future it’s going to be more difficult to obtain a 5 than it had been to obtain a C. This, of course, is what the tinkering is all about.

Anyone depressed by this latest manifestation of the obsessive desire to establish multiple categories of human success and failure should take heart from the fact that the exam system is becoming increasingly irrelevant to employers, many of whom are seeking to recruit young people with a wide range of experiences and skills, most of which are not revealed by exam results. Exams primarily test knowledge acquisition and retention, the importance of which has steadily declined with the technological revolution. The need now is for the next generation to know how to access, understand, evaluate and use the information that is so readily available to them. In 2014 a survey by the CBI and Pearson, the publisher, indicated that, when they were recruiting school and college leavers, employers considered basic factors such as attitude (85%) and general aptitude (63%) considerably more important than examination performance (38%).

A similar message is coming from graduate employers who are abandoning a longstanding recruitment policy of filtering out candidates on the basis of A level results. PricewaterhouseCoopers, the prestigious accountancy firm, has rejected school exam results as a criterion for determining the potential of their applicants for employment, declaring that they are missing out on able job applicants whose exam results didn’t reveal their potential. In a May 2015 BBC interview, Stephen Isherwood, Chief Executive of the Association of Graduate Employers, welcomed this initiative by the country’s leading graduate employer and called on all the Association’s members to embrace the same policy.

These are small but significant steps forward towards a wider understanding of the limitations of the academic curriculum. Exam results are nowhere near as important as we are led to believe and we need more people to say that openly and emphatically. Judith Carlisle, the Headmistress of Oxford High School, hit the Daily Mail headlines in the run-up to the 2014 GCSE exams by asserting that five years after the event ‘no-one will give a damn’ what results her pupils had received.

It is to be hoped that at least some of the Daily Mail ’s readers took note of the thinking behind this inflammatory statement. Concerned at the stress that candidates put themselves under in the run-up to public exams, Judith Carlisle urged them to get their exams into perspective. She wanted her sixteen-year-olds to understand that an exam grade is merely a record of something you did on a particular day: it doesn’t define you as a person or predict what you will do in the future. Worrying about your performance is likely to be counter-productive.

A similar theme ran through a letter, adapted from an American original, sent by teachers at the Buckton Vale Primary School in Stalybridge to their Year 6 pupils, just before they sat their 2015 Stage 4 National Curriculum Tests, known as SATs:

"Dear Year 6 Pupils,

Next week you will sit your SATs tests for maths, reading, spelling, grammar and punctuation. We know how hard you have worked, but there is something very important you must know:

The SATs test does not assess all of what makes each of you special and unique. The people who create these tests and score them do not know each of you in the way that we do and certainly not in the way your families do.

They do not know that some of you speak two languages or that you love to sing or draw. They have not seen your natural talent for dancing or playing a musical instrument. They do not know that your friends can count on you; that your laughter can brighten the darkest day or that your face turns red when you feel shy. They do not know that you participate in sports, wonder about the future, or sometimes help your little brother or sister after school. They do not know you are kind, trustworthy and thoughtful and that every day you try to be your very best.

The levels that you get from this test will tell you something, but they will not tell you everything. There are many ways of being smart. You are smart! So, while you are preparing for the test and in the midst of it all, remember that there is no way to test all of the amazing and awesome things that make you, YOU!

Sleep, Rest, Believe.

Good luck."

This letter is a poignant reminder of the wider purposes of education that cannot be encapsulated in a fleeting externally-imposed academic assessment. Dedicated primary schoolteachers are keenly aware of their responsibility to hold on to the qualities that young children bring with them into the school system. They recognise the different personalities, interests and skills of their pupils as a precious resource with which to develop the potential each child has to achieve personal fulfilment in adult life and to make a valuable contribution to society. They welcome the diversity that children show in the learning situation and respond by offering a correspondingly wide range of learning experiences. Above all, they see education as a partnership in which children and teachers work together in pursuit of a common goal.

These values and priorities were key features of the influential 1967 publication, Children and Their Primary Schools, known as the Plowden Report, after Lady Plowden, Chair of the Central Advisory Council for Education which produced the report. Fifty years on, the insights of this report remain crucial to our education system. The essence of Plowden was its assertion that ‘at the heart of the educational process lies the child’. The Council emphasised the need to recognise that any school class, however homogeneous it might seem, should always be treated as a body of children needing individual and different attention.

Crucial roles for the primary school were to build on and strengthen children’s intrinsic interest in the world around them and to lead them to learn for themselves rather than out of fear of disapproval or desire for praise. Recurring Plowden themes were: a flexible curriculum determined by teachers’ understanding of their pupils’ needs and learning through practical experience, discovery and exploring the environment. Whilst the evaluation of children’s progress was important, teachers should ‘not assume that only what is measurable is valuable’.

In the twenty years following Plowden, almost every document relating to primary education contained references to, or echoes of, the report. A series of government publications stressed the value of building on children’s natural enthusiasm and curiosity and the need to respond flexibly not only to individual needs but to the many different stages of children’s growth and development.

One of the most interesting endorsements of the Plowden recommendations came more than 20 years after their publication with the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. This Convention produced a Charter on a range of childhood entitlements - protection, health, welfare and, of course, education. The emphasis was placed on the need to recognise the distinctiveness of the individual child’s personality, strengths and potential for adult self-fulfilment. The Charter stresses that if we want children to grow up to respect the rights of other people, including those from other cultures, then we must sow the seeds in our relationships with children, respecting their opinions and recognising the positive contribution that they can make to their own learning:

"Without the active participation of