Ben Chacko

BRITAIN FACES a crossroads at the coming General Election. For the first time in a generation, we have an opportunity to turn away from decades of neoliberalism and choose a different path.

In education that neoliberal approach has developed since Margaret Thatcher’s 1988 Education Reform Act into the movement known as the “Germ” – the global education ‘reform’ movement. The principles behind the Germ are essentially that competition between schools will improve schooling, that competition between teachers will improve teaching, and that in order to measure who’s winning and losing in this constant game of beggar-my-neighbour we need to harvest vast amounts of data through an endless succession of tests.

In short, it’s the extension of the neoliberal approach to all public services into education – competition breeds excellence, “failures” are weeded out, “consumers” of services select which service they want and to do so they are aided by a standardised testing regime that allows schools to be simplistically judged against each other. Innovation, creativity and tailoring classes to pupils’ needs are out and teachers fit into the picture as workers on a production line judged and rewarded on the exam results they can produce for their school or academy chain, enabling it to attract more “consumers” (parents).

In this vision there’s no such thing as a society, as someone once said. The concept of a school serving a community disappears and of course the free schools and academies programmes take away accountability to local communities, by removing schools from the supervision of a local authority, and we know the various negative consequences that follow.

The approach taken to education since Thatcher’s Act is, then, not unique. In order to fight the Germ we need to fight that whole conception of how society works and how our economy should be run. From the Morning Star’s perspective, that’s a key reason why we welcomed the election of Jeremy Corbyn to lead the Labour Party. A real challenge to the deeply problematic experiment being inflicted on our country will not come from politicians who have largely supported the marketising trends of the past few decades, but only from a total rejection of this and a different collectivist vision.

Labour is articulating that vision. Just as the paradigm-shifting Labour government of 1945 fundamentally and permanently changed the face of healthcare provision in this country by establishing the NHS, the Corbyn government hopes to do the same for education with the creation of a National Education Service.

Currently our education system crystallises and reproduces class differences, with the 7 per cent of children who attend private schools dominating the top echelons of politics, law and the media.

Campaigns such as Abolish Eton have won significant support, both from leading Labour figures, such shadow chancellor John McDonnell and party chairman Ian Lavery, and from Labour Party Conference. Support for an education system that gives all children the same foundation in life is growing.

The precise shape of the National Education Service is a work in progress: a vision of “cradle to grave education free at the point of use.” But Labour’s leadership contrasts to its predecessors and to a succession of Conservative education secretaries in being keen to involve educators’ voices in driving education policy. This is why Labour are ready to abolish SATs in primary schools — an important step away from the counterproductive testing obsession which is spoiling a generation’s childhood and leading to increased stress, depression and mental health issues among pupils and teachers alike. It is also why they have announced their intention to abolish OFSTED and replace it with an accountability system that has the confidence and support of both parents and educators.

And one of its core commitments is to restore local accountability to schools, ensuring they “serve the public interest and their local communities.” Local authorities will Education is part of a broader Movement once again be both responsible and able to ensure school provision for all children in their area, while proper investment will reverse the damaging cuts which are starving schools across the country of the resources they need, with horror stories such as teachers having to pay for equipment out of their own pockets or schools even cutting down on lighting and heating becoming a thing of the past.

The National Education Service is about more than schools — it involves plans to allow all parents to access childcare and early years learning, as well as for adults to train and study for free in a rapidly changing world of work. It dovetails with Labour’s plans to abolish tuition fees and restore fully funded university education for all — important for shifting our society’s attitude to education. A degree should not be a financial investment made in the hope (often now dashed) that it will increase your earning potential later on: society needs scientists and engineers, historians and artists, musicians and mathematicians and we should all contribute to providing the opportunity for people to develop these skills. Labour’s plans represent an ambitious attempt to set Britain’s education system on a new footing.

But that can only be done in the context of a reset of our whole economy. Teachers don’t need telling that there are limits to what even an excellent and properly resourced school can achieve. An NEU survey published in April found that more than half of teachers reported teaching children whose performance was affected by hunger. Ill health, bullying, fatigue and an inability to concentrate were all reported as increasingly frequent problems among children brought up in poverty as child poverty rates have continued to grow under the Conservative government. More than half the children in poverty in Britain now come from working households: the party that took an axe to the welfare state in order to “make work pay” has also presided over an explosion in insecure work and poverty wages, meaning all too often it does no such thing. And ensuring our children are given the opportunity to flourish presupposes a world they can flourish in. The “bargain-basement” Britain of dead-end jobs, long hours and low productivity is a result of a government that refuses to invest in our regions or our people. As many graduates are finding, expectations that even a university education will result in a rewarding professional career are now proving misplaced. A generation has been told that it cannot expect the kind of life that its parents or grandparents expected: a home, a secure job and a pension they could live in dignity on. Four decades of neoliberalism have drained our society of hope: the idea that the future can be better than the past.

Unless our political system undergoes a profound shock and change of direction, our lives are set to become harder and poorer with each successive year. That’s before we even consider the existential elephant in the room: the climate crisis that schoolchildren have played such an important role in highlighting with the school strikes for action on climate change. It is becoming clearer and clearer that the only alternative to catastrophic climate change is system change: that an economy based on the relentless pursuit of profit by private corporations is incapable of reining in its unsustainable overexploitation of our planet’s huge but finite resources, or limiting the constant expansion of polluting economic activity. By contrast, Labour’s plans for renationalising the National Grid and tasking it with meeting climate targets, extending public ownership over the whole energy and utilities sectors so we can plan them sustainably and building a publicly owned, integrated public transport system represent the most detailed project proposed so far in British politics to get working on the changes our future depends on.

In short, it’s a package. The education revolution we need is an integral part of a bigger revolution, one that will reshape our whole society. It’s why electing a Labour government led by Jeremy Corbyn is essential. But it will not be enough.

The effort required to transform communities must come from the bottom up. The TUC’s New Deal for Workers campaign marks a step change in the audacity of trade union organisation: a recognition that we have been on the defensive for too long and need a new balance of power between workers and employers, so that technological changes such as the advance of robotics and computing do not cost jobs but improve them. We have the opportunity to reduce the working week and lower the retirement age.

Labour has a host of legislative proposals to empower workers in the workplace: from revoking the anti-trade union laws to establishing a Ministry of Employment Rights, imposing sectoral collective bargaining on employers and putting workers on company boards. But as Jeremy Corbyn has said, change does not come from Members of Parliament putting down motions or even governments proposing Bills.

It is driven by ordinary people whose victories are, once won, sometimes ratified by law. And the forces ranged against change are powerful: the masters of the world economy whose profits depend on endlessly perpetuating the rapacious capitalist economic setup will deploy markets, media, lawsuits and worse against the revolution. They can only be overcome by a mass movement: one in which the Establishment is not just fighting against a transformative Labour government in Parliament, but is under siege, with workers demanding higher wages, better conditions and a real voice at work, community organisations fighting for change at a local level on the high streets and in the town halls and people power holding politicians to account, mounting a countering pressure to that wielded by corporate lobbyists.

Educators can play a decisive role in building such a movement, because schools are at the heart of our communities. Already, in the 2017 election, the School Cuts campaign launched by the NUT and other unions was able to change the way 800,000 people cast their votes: because everybody wants their children to go to a properly resourced school. Boris Johnson is said to be planning a spending splurge this autumn, a response in part to the success of teaching unions in forcing the issue up the political agenda, resulting in scores of Tory MPs reporting to Downing Street that school cuts are their Achilles heel. But the time for tinkering at the edges of our system is over. Our schools, like our society, need a wholly fresh approach. The amazing mobilisations we are seeing in protest at our rulers’ refusal to act on climate change show the will to take action is present. The action itself is only getting more urgent.

The post Education is part of a broader movement appeared first on education for tomorrow.

David B Morgan

National Education Service needs to consider parental and community involvement if it is to deliver on its vision of a progressive and inclusive service meeting the needs of all.  Any trawl of the academic literature on the subject is unlikely to get far before meeting the juggernaut which is Joyce Epstein’s 6 part model which has become so influential in the United States, South Africa and across the world. (1)  Likewise, an examination of major education reform since the late 1990s and the interaction between community (third sector) and schools will continually bring up reference to Epstein’s model and the National Network of Schools in Partnership (NNSP) established by Epstein, and a range of similar initiatives in other countries.

To be clear, the NNSP approach does not offer a solution for implementation in the English context.  On the contrary there are significant flaws in the approach, which have received insufficient attention outside of US academia.   Epstein’s model merits our attention due to the extent to which it has dominated the narrative in the first part of this century, and in many ways continues to do so today.  Furthermore, the six-part model which Epstein introduced is largely descriptive and does provide a useful framework for assessing the issues and requirements associated with discrete aspects of this broad topic.

Epstein Identifies:

• Parenting and Volunteering which are examined in relation to material conditions and direct economic barriers.
• Learning at Home which is considered within the frame work of ZPDs and in the context of social capital based curricula.
• Decision Making and Collaborating with the Community which is set in the broader context of ruling ideology and the involvement of various economic and social actors.[1]

Some Criticism of the NNSP and Parental Involvement Policies in the US

The relationship between the NNSP’s ongoing campaigning work and Federal Government’s education reforms in the United States is its-self contested ground.  One can view the NNSP’s work as pivotal to the parental involvement sections of the Goals 2000: Educate America Act(1994) and the more significant No Child Left Behind Act (2002) making the NNSP complicit in the failing of these reforms.  Alternatively, the continuation of the NNSP campaigning work today can be seen itself as challenging failings in the Federal legislation.  That debate perhaps deserves a separate article.  This piece is concerned with the following.  The nature of weaknesses we can observe in the policies implemented in the US, whether the NNSP has the answers to address these weaknesses and where else we can look for such answers.

From the mid-2000s it has generally been recognised that the two reforms have not led to a narrowing of the gap between the best and worst performing school in the US; that parental involvement following the Epstein model has not been taken up with any degree of uniformity across the range of schools provision in the US and that urban schools (particularly those predominantly attended by Black and Latino communities) continue to be left behind. Discussed in (2)

While the Epstein model sets out a very broad range of channels of involvement a narrower definition has often been adopted in schools themselves.  This narrower definition stems from initiatives being school led and the self-imposed boundaries of what is considered the school sphere and where this crosses over into the family sphere.  The narrower definition has focused on volunteering (giving of unpaid labour to the school in the school setting) and financial giving via fund raising drives. Bowers H.A and Griffin D point to evidence for this in (3) (4) and go on to explain:

Traditional definitions of parent involvement require investments of time and money from parents, and those who may not be able to provide these resources are deemed uninvolved. (5)

In the US context of their study Bowers and Griffin cite parents of Black, Latino and others from low socioeconomic groups among those deemed uninvolved under these definitions.  Given the funding crisis we face in English schools (and across Britain) these particular forms of parental involvement should be increasingly familiar to us.  Indeed, there is ample evidence of a significant rise in this resource-based demand for parental involvement in schools in the British context. (6)

These tendencies illustrate the first of significant barriers to parental involvement from Working Class and minority communities, namely the direct economic barriers realised as a lack of time and money to donate. Inequalities of income and the need for parents to spend their time in paid employment are features of capitalist society and it is unsurprising, therefore, that the question of parental involvement quick expands to cover a range of socio-economic policy concerns. 

In the Epstein Model, the ‘Parenting’ element is where the material welfare of the child is located, as part of the construction of a stable environment conducive to positive educational outcomes.  To be sure, NNSP document in particular, recognise the difficulties parents may have in achieving this alone.  Their prescription is, however, based on a combination of school centred philanthropy and community activism.  For example, where parents can’t afford adequate meal for their children, schools should establish foodbanks and other initiatives of that nature.  While we can applaud those providing such support, we should keep in mind some fundamentals.  Firstly, in the vast majority of cases a lack of adequate meals is a societal failure not a failure of parenting. To see it in those terms is dangerous misapplication of agency.  Secondly, the school of neighbourhood level is simply the wrong level to combat such failings by any means, philanthropic, community activism, or even structural reform, because the determinants of the economic barriers faced operate at much broader geographical level as part of complex geo-political networks.

The need to shift from the emphasis on parental responsibility for a child’s economic circumstances and the individual school’s obligation to correct for any deficit; to a model of broader societal responsibility is expressed most eloquently in the US literature by Anyon who has argued that:

Macro-economic policies like those regulating the minimum wage, job availability, tax rates, federal transportation and affordable housing create conditions in cities that no existing educational policy or urban school reform can transcend. (7)

This, I think, underlines the extent to which it is vital that the National Education Service reform proceed as part of a wider integrated programme of socio-economic change of the type outlined in Labour’s 2017 manifesto but also why ultimately why a revolutionary transformation is needed.

While support for radical change needs to be built, we should recognise that the majority already exists for the demand that parental involvement should not simple plug the gaps left by inadequate state funding.  Escaping from this narrowing of the definition of parental involvement is an important strategic step because it is not simply the direct economic barriers that block wider parental and community involvement in schools. 

Epstein and Vygotsky

Moving on from the direct economic wellbeing of the child (and the school) Epstein advocates parental involvement through learning at home.  The power dynamics at play are again most explicit in the NNSP Guides and magazine articles that promote them, rather than Epstein’s academic pieces. (8)  The role of parents is seen as encouraging and guiding children to complete their homework including keeping track of deadlines and the like.  On the face of it this may seem benign but there are some serious issues here if we remain ourselves of Vygotsky’s work on ZPDs. 

Where the agenda setting power continues to rest solely with the school the schools sets the cultural and experiential basis for the ‘scaffolding’ required by the parent (the person of higher skill than the child).  The ability, based on prior knowledge, to provide a ‘scaffolding’ around the interpretation of the works of Shakespeare is much more likely to be in demand than, for example, an actual knowledge of scaffolding and construction work.

The point is not that knowledge of either literature or construction work is innately of more value.  It is rather that the development process through ZPD relies on the prior knowledge of the teacher, adult (parent) or more skilled peer.  Those parent that most closely reflect the culture knowledge and experiences of the curriculum provide advantage to their children and those furthest away experience disadvantage.

Neither parents, nor the community at large play a role in selecting the curriculum, determining types of knowledge that they value in their communities in the concrete world of today.  The proposed National Education Service must be flexible enough to facilitate parental and community involvement in these decisions or it will be doomed to hardwiring in the prejudices of remote policy makers.

Epstein and Social Capital

Neither agreed curricula nor the accepted definitions of parental involvement, evolved in a neutral fashion.  They are part of and design to serve a dominate ideological narrative.  In the US this has manifest in significant racial bias and accompanying attainment gaps. 

The work of Jonanthan Kozol has demonstrated a continuing divergence between the accepted values of parent involvement (as perceived by policy makers and professionals) and the lived experience of Black parents interacting with their children and their children’s schools.  These antagonistic phenomena are perpetuated in the worrying context of an increasing tendency towards racial and class segregation in schools and the communities they serve. (9)

Kozol’s work is of course part of the broader body of critical race theory that exposes the disconnect between theories of positive involvement and their cultural context. Reynolds has argued that

Educators often assume that Black parents‘ culture, values and norms do not support or complement the culture of education (Delpit, 1995; Edwards et al ., 1999; Ladson-Billings, 1994;Noguera, 2001; Yan, 2000); thus, many educators, along with policy-makers, have come to accept the idea that Black parents are more of a deficit to their children‘s educational development than an asset. (10)

While the racial content may be less evident in England it is well documented and the continuation of race and social-economic educational outcome gaps is undeniable. (11)

The knowledge and skills working class and parents from minority ethnic groups have and are able to support their children to learn are systematically ignored or undervalued by those formulating school curricula in all cases where they do not conform to the body of knowledge deemed, by elites, to be indicative of refinement and status.  As a consequence, parental involvement that does not conform to these terms is deemed non-involvement.

The persistence of such bias and the fundamental failure of initiatives including by the NNSP, US Government and UK Government to address them lie in adherence, by elites, to notions of a restrictive set of Social Capital (sometimes termed Cultural Capital).  Parental involvement has been seen as a means to promote social mobility by supplementing the school’s ability to provide the learner with the social capital  networks and resources they need to ‘get on’ in the prevailing economic climate. (12)

This approach has been accompanied by two further developments.  Curriculum reform explicitly designed to present a single, limited, social capital connected menu of knowledge to be dispensed by school and willing parents, and the opening up of school to the direct manipulation by employers via their participation in academies and free-school in England and private and charter schools in the US.

Such approaches are few steps away from the attitude of colonial rulers of the 19^th and early 20^th century who sought to ‘civilize’ the oppressed through cultural domination, and should be rejected with equal vehemence.

It is clear that contrary to its stated aim of social mobility, this approach reinforces the advantage of the already privileged, side-lines and undervalues the knowledge and skills of those of the oppressed class and minority communities.

The Mechanics of Community Involvement

At the end of the 1990s and early 2000, the Epstein Model provided the basis of substantial educations reforms in South Africa.  The features described in US context above, were present here too.  In fact, the University of Pretoria event went as far as establishing a distance learning Certificate in Parental Involvement.

The South African experience is most informative in relation to the community involvement aspects its implementation which took on particular characteristic, in part due to the weight of the legislative, pollical and institutional backing for the programme.  I particularly want to draw attention to realisation of the Epstein maxim that parental and community involvement must be school driven.

An independent primary school located in the suburbs implemented community collaboration as a reciprocal activity.   Firstly the school established the needs of the school and drew up a community register of local agencies and organisations. (13)

The return for the agencies participating was phrased in terms of children being ‘made aware of their civic obligation’.   While this makes sense in relation to children learning fire safety responsibilities from the Fire Service it is less clear what meaning reciprocity had in relation to the involvement of the local supermarket, referred to in the same case study. 

If as we have explored above, the reliance on a school driven approach, holds the dangers of perpetuating a narrow ideological view of parental involvement in the learning journey, what can we do to prevent this danger emerging in relation community involvement?  After all the close ties between schools and big business can be seen by their supporters as a form of community involvement. (9)  If such ties come with the financial aid desperately needed it is unsurprising that struggling schools have entered into such partnerships.  But do they really reflect the values and priorities of the community or simply the dominant ideological narrative?

Community Involvement Governance and Ideology

Here I will pause to introduce a couple of Marxist concepts highlighted by Althusser. Firstly, Althusser argued that in addition to the oppressive apparatus of the state, the capitalist hegemony was ensured by ideological state apparatus.  Further, he argued that in the modern epoch the education system had taken over, from the Church of the middle ages and early modern period, as the key apparatus for the perpetuation of ruling class ideas and the reproduction of the relations of production.

Secondly, Althusser highlighted class struggle as the motor of history.  By which he understood the interaction of and conflict between competing class interests as the dynamic force behind human development and progression.  His emphasis was on the interaction, the antagonism, as opposed to viewing revolutionary change as a matter of inspiration or volition in the oppressed class.

Why have I seemingly wandered away from my topic into a world of abstract philosophy? Just as Vygotsky and a critical analysis of social capital can give us a transformative perspective on lower echelons of Epstein’s six part model, so Althusser’s two insights can help when we turn to the upper end and begin to examine community involvement and parental involvement in school governance.

Regardless of how explicit it is in the promotion of the National Education Service; the designers need to consider the education system as a site of struggle.  Furthermore, they need to recognise the character of the system they are intending to replace.  The traditional school system, in Britain, relied on the compliance of teachers as promotors of the ruling ideology and as trainers of the various social strata of in their place within the system.  At the lower end not only were manual skills taught but systems of discipline and characteristic behaviours conducive of a stable uncomplaining workforce were instilled.  In the grammar schools and private schools, the social capital was dispensed along with the behaviours and attitudes required of the technical specialists, the professional and the manager. 

This was increasingly challenged by the radical thinking of the 1960s and 70s provoking a governmental response.  At first this was characterised by clamping down on the dissent, removing its room to manoeuvre, via the imposition of the national curriculum.  However, teachers could not be fully put back in the box and the response shifted towards de-professionalisation and reforms in the governance sphere.  By the 2010s we see not only the tight grip on curriculum (the bourgeois social capital curriculum) maintained, but also the direct insertion of business leaders and managerialism into school governance structures through the academy and free-schools systems. 

In the governance sphere, just as in the curriculum sphere, the ‘site of struggle’ has been dominated by one side of the struggle.  Like a chessboard with pieces of only one colour the prospects of dynamic play have evaporated.  The National Education Service must provide arrangements that allow us to bring our pieces back to the board.  That means representation for the full diversity of parents but also for the diverse community too. 

A twisted self-centred entrepreneurship, business values and managerialism dominate our societal values and impinge upon our schools in an increasingly direct way as Entrepreneurs and managers are invited in as social partners. Community involvement schemes need to give voice to workers, trade unions and community campaign groups to counteract this, not simply as champions of leftist ideology, but as living demonstrations of the contradictions, the competing interests at work in our society.

With public agencies too, I would argue that it is not enough for children to learn what do public services do for us and what are our civic obligations to them.  Through their educational journey our children should be given the opportunity to learn what it is like to work in a public service, what challenges public services face and the ideas that are being suggested to overcome them.  

The detail of appropriate community engagement in any given school setting will remain contested and as such should be determined by decisions made by an inclusive and democratic governance structure.

Here I think we can learn some useful lessons from the Educational experience of Cuba.  Under the Cuban system school governance in the primary setting is directed by a powerful Parent-Teacher Committee, importantly with an extensive membership.  In fact, all parents are members simply by having a child in the school. (14)

Towards Effective Solutions

The detailed structures for parental and community involvement that will be required to make a success of the National Education Service cannot be set out in an article of this scope.  Nevertheless, there are some principles that arise from my conclusions here.  They will hopefully inspire debate on this vital aspect of the proposed reforms.

The proposals for a National Education Service in England need to:

1. Be a conscious part of wider socio-economic improvements designed to meet a child’s material needs and facilitate the establishment of an environment conducive to study.
2. Remove direct economic barriers to parental participation, which may require paid leave schemes specifically for this purpose.
3. Enable the community to direct curriculum development in a way that reflects community valued knowledge and enables children to benefit from the skills of a wider range of parents, adults and more skilled peers.
4. Challenge the dominance in the curriculum of narrowly defined concepts of social and cultural worth.
5. Broaden the range of community partners engaged with schools to encompass the organisations of workers, progressive campaigners and minority communities.
6. Democratize governance structures with the aim of the widest possible involvement.

References

1. School, family, and community partnerships: Caring for the children we share. . Epstein, J. L. 1995, Phi Delta Kappan, 76(9) , pp. 701-712. .

2. Lewis,Framing African American students success and failure in urban settings: A typology for change. Lewis, C. W., James, M., Hancock, S., & Hill-Jackson, V. s.l. : Lewis, C. W., James, M., Hancock, S., & Hill-Jackson, V. (2008). Framing African American students success and failure in urban settings: A typology for change. Education and Urban Society, 44(6), 707-723. , 2008, Education and Urban Society, 44(6) , pp. 707-723. .

3. School programs and teacher practices of parent involvement in inner-city elementary and middle schools. Epstein, J. L, & Dauber, S. L. 1991, The Elementary School Journal, 91, pp. 289-305.

4. Epstein, J. L, Sanders, M. G., Simon, B. S., Salinas, K. C, Jansorn, N. R., & Van Voorhis, F. L. School, family, and community partnerships: Your handbook for action. Thousand Oaks, CA : Corwin Press, 2009.

5. Can the Epstein Model of Parental Involvement Work in a High-Minority, High-Poverty Elementary School? A Case Study. Bowers, H.A. and Griffin, D. 2011, American School Counselor Association, p. 78.

6. TES. 40% of parents ‘asked to donate to schools. Tes. [Online] November 01, 2018. https://www.tes.com/news/40-parents-asked-donate-schools.

7. Anyon, J. Radical Possibilities: Public policy, urban education and a new social movement. New York : Routledge., 2005.

8. Ramos, M. How to be an adult: Epsteins six types of parent involvement. howtoadult.com. [Online] September 26, 2017. https://howtoadult.com/epsteins-six-types-parent-involvement-4705.html.

9. Kozol, J. The shame of the nation: The resoration of aparteid schooling in America. New York : Crown Publishers, 2005.

10. “They think you’re lazy”, and other messages black parents send their black sons: An exploration of critical race theory in the examination of educational outcomes for black males. Reynolds, R. 2010, Journal of African American Males in Education, 1(2), pp. 145-163.

11. EHRC. Is Britian Fairer? pp. 24-37. London : HSO, 2018.

12. Lee, S-J. and Bowen, NA. Parent Involvement, Cultural Capital, and the Achievement Gap Among Elementary School Children. 2006.

13. Parent involvement in teacher education in South Africa. Lemmer, EM. 2007, International Journal about Parents in Education Vol..1, No. 0,, pp. 218-229.

14. MacDonald, TH. The Education Revolution: Cuba’s alternative to neoliberalism. London : Manifesto Press, 2009.

[1] Epstein also identifies ‘Communication’ as an important parental involvement type.  However, school parent correspondence, parents evenings and other such feedback are not covered in any detail in this article. 

The post Parental and Community Involvement appeared first on education for tomorrow.

Dan Carden MP

There are 260 million children worldwide not currently enrolled in school. And too many who are enrolled simply don’t receive the education they need to equip them for life. The World Bank has declared this situation a “learning crisis.”

In my first exchange in the House of Commons with the new Secretary of State for International Development earlier this month, I asked the government why – given this global learning crisis – it was continuing to use UK Aid to support the privatisation of education overseas.

Fee-paying private schools don’t reach the most marginalised children. And we know from our own experience here in the UK that a universal public education system is a basic requirement to provide all children with the schooling they are entitled to.

The International Development Select Committee (IDC) have said that the Department for International Development’s (DFID) support for private education is “controversial” at best, and has questioned the sustainability of the model in the long run. The IDC has called on DFID to focus on supporting partner countries to “provide free, inclusive and quality education to all its citizens.”

Similarly, the UN Special Rapporteur on Poverty and Human Rights was damming in his report into the impacts of widespread privatisation of public goods as it “further marginalising those living in poverty.”

I saw for myself when I visited Kenya last month the huge educational needs that are faced by countries in the Global South. I visited both state schools and low-fee private schools and I met pupils, parents, teachers, trade union representatives and civil-society groups. 

They told me worrying stories about their experience with so-called “low-fee” private schools, and one chain of schools in particular: Bridge International Academies. A school chain so riddled with problems that over a hundred civil society groups have previously called for donor countries – including the UK – to stop investing in the company.

Parents told me how they’d been misled into believing their kids would benefit from scholarships which never materialised, leaving them unable to pay fees and their kids missing chunks of schooling as a result. These claims of “false advertising” form part of the case these parents have filed with the World Bank’s Ombudsman.

When I met the head of the Kenyan Union of Teachers, he was clear that he wanted the UK to stop using aid money to privatise their country’s education system.

When it came to education, the people I met wanted the same thing my constituents in Liverpool want: decent quality, publicly-funded, schooling for their children.

Labour is committed to restoring basic goods and services here in the UK to democratic public control. We know that our NHS and universal public education underpin our efforts to build a fairer more equal society. We also know that it is the reckless privatisations of these services in the UK in recent decades that have weakened them.

It is not right that the UK exports models of privatisations for public services overseas, rather than supporting the public ownership of these services to countries that so desperately need them. We must radically change the approach and strategy of DFID under the next Labour government and we are committing now to set up a new unit within DFID dedicated to promoting public services through UK Aid and working in partnership with civil society and governments across the world to achieve this goal.

As well as supporting quality education systems, our Unit for Public Services will focus on strengthening health systems as well as water and sanitation services which are crucial to public health.

Labour’s focus on public services will signal a clear break from years of ideological promotion of privatisation overseas.

For several decades now, the UK’s Department for International Development, along with other donor states, the IMF and the World Bank, has pursued policies aimed at reducing the role of the public sector.

The commercialisation of public services through privatisation and liberalisation has become widespread and fledgling public services in some of the world’s poorest countries are increasingly under threat from the latest generation of free trade deals.

The same agencies are now promoting various forms of Public-Private-Partnerships (PPPs) as the way to finance the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Yet PPPs have proved an expensive way to invest and because they are ultimately accountable to shareholders not citizens, provision tends to be focused on those who are easily accessible or able to pay rather than the most marginalised.

We cannot allow this to continue when we know it serves to worsen the divide between rich and poor and drives down decent work through cost cutting.

At this month’s UN General Assembly in New York, member states will come together for the first ever high-level meeting on universal health coverage.

At the time of writing it is not clear if our own Secretary of State plans to attend. A coalition of global health NGOs, as well as a cross-party group of MPs, are all calling on the Secretary of State to attend the meeting and show UK leadership in achieving health for all.

Given the scale of need globally, it is vital that this meeting confirms a strong commitment to publicly delivered universal health systems. The World Health Organisation is asking the world’s leaders to commit to ensuring that everyone has “access to the health care they need, when they need it, without facing financial hardship.”

In government, this is the leadership that Labour will show. Our own Unit for Public Services will be rooted in the principles of universality, democratic accountability and accessibility. It will support financing through progressive taxation to ensure services are available free at the point of use and support the development of a skilled public workforce.

When delivered in this way, public services are a powerful force for equality, social justice and economic development. Because, when provided universally they do not discriminate in who can access services.

This agenda is also vital in achieving greater gender equality as we know it is women and girls who are forced to take on the burden of unpaid care and domestic work when these services are absent.

The SDGs set out an ambitious vision for the world: a world that is free from hunger and poverty, where men and women have equality, where everyone, regardless of income, can realise their right to health, education, water, energy and decent work, and where peace, justice and climate action are prioritised.

It is only through putting people, rather than profit, at the heart of the agenda that we will achieve this vision and ensure a global generation are equipped with the necessary capabilities and skills needed to meet the developmental challenges of our time.

Dan Carden MP is Shadow Secretary of State for International Development and Member of Parliament for Liverpool Walton.

@dancardenmp , http://www.dancarden4walton.org/

The post Promoting Public Services through UK Aid appeared first on education for tomorrow.

Ian Duckett, Pam Tatlow and James Whiting.

A bigger, braver and more rounded curriculum that is truly broad and balanced, is a longstanding aim of progressive educationalists. Bolstered by a National Education Service (NES) the aim of the next Labour government, if it has the courage to take on the siren voices of the right now embedded in the education establishment and the media, has to be exactly that. This means implementing, in the 14-to-19 phase, a unified developmental curriculum, where the academic and vocational are equally valued. At its heart, it should be developing the skills and knowledge in our young people that are necessary to engage fully with the modern world in a critical and reflective way. Communication in all its facets, problem-solving, collaboration, critical thinking and reflection must feature. It must also be flexible and personalised, allowing young people to choose courses which suit their aspirations and interests. Finally, the assessment model should recognise the achievements of all learners, including those with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), rather than segregate them through crude pass/fail measures. We have been close to achieving this bigger, inclusive curriculum previously, notably when the Tomlinson reforms were proposed in 2004 and the short lived curriculum 2000 agenda was developed.

A progressive 14-to-19 curriculum must:

• develop the knowledge, skills, attitudes and dispositions to enable young people to be responsible citizens and independent thinkers. Students should be prepared for employment, competent to make choices and learn throughout their lives.
• prepare 19-year olds to progress to employment or continue in education, with useful social and learning skills and qualifications that are valuable and understood by both employers and education institutions;
• be sufficiently engaging to retain young people at risk of leaving education, employment and training.

The Tories initiated the Sainsbury Review which they have accepted in full. Currently, Labour has accepted it too. The Sainsbury Review was flawed from the beginning as its terms of reference only included ‘technical education and qualifications’ as opposed to ‘academic’ GCSEs and A-Levels, which would perpetuate their role, untouched, in the selection of the elite to run the establishment. Further, it only considered post-16 study and was therefore prevented, unlike Tomlinson, from recommending courses and programmes pre-16 to provide progression onto more vocational routes post-16. It is now the case that pupils at Key Stage 4 have to meet tough entrance criteria based on success in academic GCSEs to be able to study at A-Level. If they do not meet them they are ‘guided’ into vocational courses like BTECs or into apprenticeships. Vocational courses are often not, therefore, a positive choice for students but a fall back reluctantly undertaken because they have ‘failed’ in their academic courses. The government’s insistence on ever higher proportions of pupils taking the EBacc combination of subjects at GCSE further reinforces the perception that vocational courses are only for those not bright enough to succeed academically.

The new Tory T-Levels, proposed for post-16 study and arising from the Sainsbury Review, maintain and reinforce the existing academic-vocational divide.  There are many similarities between the Tories’ new T-Levels and the ill-fated ‘diplomas’, which New Labour, at great expense, failed to make a permanent feature of 14-to-19 education in the noughties. The same employment areas with slightly amended names will become available for study at T-Level e.g. Business and Administration. Again, as with the diploma, when students opt to take a T-Level they will find there is no room for other options. Like the old diplomas they are all encompassing and will contain elements of English and Maths no doubt tailored to be ‘relevant to the sector’, taking students to higher skill levels than GCSE. Again, similar to the diploma, colleges and now some schools, have to show they have the expertise and resources to deliver the T-Level and have to gain approval before offering it.

In New Labour’s case the Diploma, which ended up covering vocational subjects only, arose out of a cowardly political decision not to implement the Tomlinson report which would have meant incorporating A-Levels and GCSEs as well as vocational qualifications into the new diplomas. An imaginative implementation of Tomlinson would have allowed students to mix and match academic and vocational elements. Fear of the right-wing media’s reaction, in the lead up to an election, led to this climbdown. The right focused, as they continue to do, on Labour being soft on standards. What they presented as the abolition of A-Levels was, they claimed, strong evidence of this. The achievement of students more suited to vocational study was not their concern. Instead of incorporating A-Levels into Tomlinson’s new diplomas, new Labour said it would allow A-Levels, so strongly rooted in post-16 academic education in the minds of middle-class parents and favoured by the Russell Group, to simply ‘wither on the vine’. Ed Balls claimed diplomas would become the ‘qualification of choice’. The NUT at the time were right. They saw the decision as a clear reversal by the government saying ‘the decision to ditch Tomlinson’s 14-19 reform proposals was fundamentally wrong’. It was wrong because it would perpetuate the arbitrary academic-vocational divide and the perceived low status of vocational education. The proposed new diplomas, unlike Tomlinson’s originals, were not as inclusive either. The New Labour foundation diploma was still well beyond the reach of many SEND learners. The chance of creating a qualification framework accessible throughout life, which would have been so suited to a National Education Service, was missed.

In contrast, the day after its publication, the Tories announced that they had accepted the Sainsbury Review in full. Its recommendations are currently being progressed via the government’s Post-16 Skills Plan. Accordingly, there has been no consultation within the Conservative Party or more broadly about the merits or otherwise of the Sainsbury recommendations (nor, it has to be said, in the Labour Party).

While unsurprisingly welcomed by the Association of Colleges (AoC), which may well see benefit in the assumption that FECs will deliver the new T-level qualifications, there have been wider criticisms, including of the implication that certain routes are associated with particular qualifications, the requirement for students to choose routes at 16 and the suggestion that students who want to transfer onto ‘academic’ routes will have to spend time ‘transitioning’ from one pathway to another. Currently students can choose a combination of advanced vocational (often BTECs) and academic qualifications. In 2017 the number of university students with BTECs has doubled since 2008 to more than 100,000. At the government insistence rigorous external examinations now form part of the qualification, so this puts paid to the argument that BTECs are chosen because they are an easy option. The rushed introduction of T-Levels and the recent refusal to continue funding BTECs looks suspiciously like cutting off a route to university favoured by students coming from families without university experience. It also looks like a deliberate attempt to reduce student numbers, university places and even the number of universities.

T-levels have been criticised as being ill-thought out and for being yet another reform for which schools, colleges, students and employers are ill-prepared. The simplistic claims made in the Sainsbury Review that T-Levels will lead to certain jobs have also been debunked as unrealistic and far-removed from the real world, in which vocational qualifications are already studied by many students and where so-called academic routes often include vocational and technical education and vice-versa.

“Students, parents and employers will not buy-in to T-levels which are cobbled together and are only targeted at young people. Quite rightly, qualifications in the UK are not age-dependent and need to be fit for study for people of all ages including those who want to return to improve their career options later in life. The challenges of improving the UK’s productivity and skills base will not be met without a lot more work, resources and joined-up thinking.”

T-Levels in some subjects are being piloted but concerns continue to be raised e.g. the requirement to undertake lengthy, local industrial placements (a particular challenge in rural areas^[1]) and the refusal of the Department for Education (DfE) to fund students’ transport costs.

The SEA’s position

Labour’s support for separate vocational and academic pathways has frequently been referred to since the 2017 election. For example, both Jeremy Corbyn and Angela Rayner referred to the value of separate pathways at the launch of Labour’s Life-long learning Commission. Labour’s apparently unquestioning support for the Sainsbury Review’s recommendations, including the development of T-levels and the Tory idea that vocational courses are only delivered by colleges and not by schools, other providers and universities – or through collaboration and partnerships between institutions – is also problematic.

The first T-Levels are due to be launched in 2020. Other than criticising the timetable for implementation, it appears that Labour is effectively supporting the Conservatives ‘two-pathway’ agenda without considering the options or whether and how this agenda aligns with a ‘cradle to grave’ NES or the Party’s ambitions to deliver a green economy. To ignore this issue would be to mean once again that Labour would miss the opportunity of a lifetime.

The Tories are being far more ruthless in introducing T levels than New Labour was with its diplomas, which were always second best any way. Hinds has even overruled the Civil Service who have pleaded with him not to go ahead in 2020 because the relevant preparations have not been completed. The introduction of T-Levels will cement the partition between academic and vocational study up to age 18 and beyond because students will not be able to take A-Levels alongside them. The decision to withdraw funding for applied general qualifications like BTECs will prevent students pursuing a mix of vocational and academic qualifications post-16 and affect university admissions.

Despite its age, the Tomlinson agenda would have:

• revolutionised assessment reducing the number of exams taken;
• allowed for students to take assessments when they were ready rather than at a particular age;
• allowed for students to take either specialised vocational or academic courses, as well as a mix between the two, from age 14 effectively abolishing the vocational/academic divide once and for all;
• included all learners;
• provided a qualification framework accessible throughout life.

It remains the basis or a model for any radical reform of the 14-to-19 phase of education.

Recommendations

The next Labour government should:

1. Immediately cancel the implementation of T-Levels should it be elected soon, and continue the current mix of academic and vocational qualifications until a new review can be completed
2. Remove the EBacc ambition from performance tables
3. Immediately set up a new review that essentially builds on and updates Tomlinson for the NES. The scope of the review must look at the whole 14-to-19 phase within the context of the new NES. It must meet the needs of all learners. It must end the academic/vocational divide. It must have a ‘climbing frame’ approach to assessment recognising the level a learner reaches, however high or low that is. It must allow learners to ‘climb’ higher at later points in their lives.
4. Instruct the SEA to organise a seminar entitled “Tomlinson for the Twenties” to help facilitate this radical agenda.

Ian Duckett is a member of the SEA National Executive. He was a 14-19 advisor for the Learning and Skills Development Agency and is currently Post-16 Officer for Norfolk NEU, a school improvement partner and teacher.

Pam Tatlow is Chief Executive of Million Plus and a member of the SEA Natioal Executive. She has worked with modern universities throughout the UK to promote the contribution of these universities and their students to the economy and society.

James Whiting is an Ofsted Inspector and currently General Secretary of the Socialist Education Association (SEA) .

The post Towards a Comprehensive 14-19 Curriculum: a Socialist Perspective appeared first on education for tomorrow.

Tony Eaude

Introduction

This article considers the role of primary education and of teachers of young children in a National Education Service, drawing especially on research on teacher expertise and how this is developed. Any such discussion must take account of the context of primary education having been less well-resourced, and often seen as less important, than other phases, with primary teaching usually thought not to require as great a level of knowledge or expertise as that needed to teach older students – views which I shall challenge.

The Cambridge Primary Review (Alexander, 2010) provides a well-argued and detailed view of how primary education should change to meet the demands of the 21^st century. Drawing on the Review, Eaude (2015) argues that primary education has never really escaped the legacy of elementary education, where it was thought appropriate for young children to be taught a narrow curriculum based mainly on reading, writing and arithmetic – what Alexander calls Curriculum 1, – with little emphasis on Curriculum 2, including the humanities and the arts. Eaude (2018b) suggests that a world of constant change requires a holistic approach which develops children’s agency and the qualities and dispositions associated with global citizenship. Drawing on these, this article makes the case for moving away from the current narrow approach based on delivery and performativity (see Ball, 2003) which fails to meet the needs of young children and has de-professionalized teachers in the primary sector, as elsewhere.

This article summarizes briefly some key ideas on expertise and what the expertise of primary classroom teachers involves, as discussed in Eaude (2012), which drew on the international researchon teacher expertise in Chapter 21 of the Cambridge Primary Review. It then considers how such expertise is developed, as explored in Eaude (2018a), before examining the implications for a National Education Service, especially in terms of professional development, with the conclusion summarizing the argument. The issues raised are complex and often debatable, but further detail is available in Eaude (2012 and 2018a).

Expertise

Eaude (2012) acknowledges that being ‘an expert’ is often viewed with suspicion and that teachers, especially in primary education, are reluctant to see themselves as such, and that terminology such as ‘novice’ may be off-putting. However, he suggests that examining the idea of expertise can help to raise the status of teaching as a profession and identify those aspects of pedagogy which teachers require, and should try to improve.

Berliner (2001: 463-4) summarises various propositions about expertise, in general, as follows:

• expertise is specific to a domain, developed over hundreds and thousands of hours, and continues to develop;
• development of expertise is not linear, with plateaus occurring, indicating shifts of understanding;
• expert knowledge is structured better for use in performance than is novice knowledge;
• experts represent problems in qualitatively different – deeper and richer – ways than novices;
• experts recognise meaningful patterns faster than novices;
• experts are more flexible and more opportunistic planners and can change representations faster, when appropriate, than novices;
• experts may start to solve a problem slower than a novice but overall they are faster problem solvers;
• experts develop automaticity to allow conscious processing of more complex information;
• experts have developed self-regulatory processes as they engage in their activities.

Eaude (2012) adds that:

• experts, in any field, make an activity look easy and effortless, but thatwhen someone less expert tries to act in similar ways they soon find out how difficult it is;
• expertise is demonstrated in performing an activity, not just talking about it and needs to be constantly refreshed over time;
• what expertise involves is usually understood best by people with similar expertise, although it is manifested in many different ways;
• the features of expertise are subtle, often tacit and hard to articulate, both for the person with expertise and for observers.

A vital distinction is that between expertise in a relatively static situation, such as a chess match, where there is usually time to deliberate, and a fluid one, such as a sports match or teaching a class of young children, where there is not. Expertise in fluid situations involves abilities such as making and constantly checking hypotheses, interpreting cues, seeing potential difficulties in advance and so avoiding them and changing course quickly, improvising when necessary and exercising peripheral vision. Expertise in such situations entails relying heavily on intuition and case knowledge – ‘I’ve been in a similar situation before and so know roughly what to do’- as well as a deep knowledge of the task and the context. These abilities are acquired and refined to some extent through experience but require much more than that, in ways discussed later in this article. The next section considers how these features of expertise apply to teachers, especially primary classroom teachers who spend most of their time with a class of young children.

Teacher expertise and the expertise of primary classroom teachers

The Cambridge Primary Review (Alexander, 2010: 417-8), drawing on Bond et al.’s research, identifies thirteen main areas of teacher expertise, here grouped under five headings:

            teacher knowledge

• better use of knowledge;
• extensive pedagogical content knowledge, including deep representations of subject matter;

            setting objectives and providing feedback

• more challenging objectives;
• better monitoring of learning and providing feedback to students;
• better adaptation and modifications of goals for diverse learners including better skills for improvisation;

            understanding and responding to events

• better perception  of classroom events including a better ability to read cues from students;
• better problem-solving strategies;
• more frequent testing of hypotheses;
• better decision-making;

            climate and context

• better classroom climate;
• greater sensitivity to context;
• attitude and beliefs

• greater respect for students;
• display of more passion for teaching.

Alexander (2010: 418) indicates that these were ‘correlated with measures such as students’ higher levels of achievement, deep rather than surface understanding of subject matter, higher motivation to learn and feelings of self-efficacy’, especially with younger and low-income pupils. However, while this is a useful framework, what ideas such as ‘better’ and ‘more challenging’ mean must be considered in relation to the specific context of the primary classroom.

One key aspect of teaching is to find ways to combat historic disadvantage on the basis of factors such as sex, ‘race’/ethnicity, class and/or (dis)abilities. Doing so requires creating genuinely inclusive environments, with relationships that are supportive but firm, and expectations that are ambitious but realistic. With young children, especially, such an approach involves teachers knowing about, and drawing on children’s existing ‘funds of knowledge.’ Gonzales, Moll and Amanti (2005) use this to describe those types of knowledge, usually associated with minority or working-class cultures, which are not, or not highly, valued in schools, often practical activities, though I would extend the term to include a wide range of activities such as cooking, photography or videogames which many children find more engaging than school learning, to develop procedural – know-how – as well as propositional – know-that – knowledge. Moreover, countering disadvantage involves seeing children holistically to identify the factors and barriers which may be hindering progress, whether socially constructed ones such as discrimination on the grounds of sex, ‘race’/ethnicity, class or (dis)abilities, or more individual ones such as difficulties at home or in the child’s life outside school.

Shulman (2004: 96) writes ‘most of the embarrassments of pedagogy that I encounter are not the inability of teachers to teach well, for an hour or even a day. Rather they flow from an inability to sustain episodes of teaching and learning over time that unfold, accumulate, into meaningful understanding in students.’Cooper and McIntyre (1996: 78 ff.) highlight that the skilled teachers whom they studied balanced long-term aims, over an extended time scale, with short-term objectives.  While such teachers may focus their own, and their children’s efforts, on a particular skill or activity, they work on the ‘big picture’, not aiming only for short-term success, but laying the foundations for the future. Just as one would not judge a garden designer on only the quality of the rockery or the vegetable patch, teacher expertise should be assessed not on one lesson or one topic but more holistically. In other words, expertise involves a pattern of consistent high performance over time, not just meeting short-term objectives or putting on a good demonstration lesson. But the expectation that any teacher should be outstanding all the time is unrealistic.

In terms of the curriculum, a holistic approach, especially with young children, entails giving a high priority to Curriculum 2 – including the humanities and the arts – as well as Curriculum 1. It must enable both logical-scientific and narrative modes of thinking (see Bruner, 1996: 39-40) and ensure that young children are engaged as active learners. The humanities are vital in helping children to engage with complex issues related to what it means to be human and to explore their own, and other people’s, identities and cultures. Similarly, the arts are not a desirable add-on, but help children to explore some of the most profound aspects of human experience, whether as a performer or as a watcher and listener.  However, while the formal curriculum matters, pedagogy, the ‘how’ rather than the ‘what’ of learning and teaching, matters more.

Elliott et al. (2011) emphasize that skilled interpersonal relations are crucial for effective teaching and learning. This is especially so with young children, given that they are usually less predictable and more dependent on adults than older students are. In considering what is distinctive about the expertise of primary classroom teachers, Eaude (2012) highlights that primary classrooms are unpredictable with dilemmas and compromises ever-present and inherent in the teacher’s role. So teachers constantly need to make judgements in-the-moment, rapidly and accurately, and exercise what Sawyer (2004) calls disciplined improvisation.

All teachers must be able to manage what happens in the classroom.  Primary classroom teachers with a high level of expertise are in control of the class, but they do not overcontrol and so restrict children’s agency and creativity. Such teachers pre-empt and so avoid difficulties, rather than allowing these to occur and then re-acting. This involves abilities such as making accurate hypotheses, checking regularly whether these are accurate, interpreting cues, changing course rapidly when necessary and exercising peripheral vision to know what is happening in the classroom. These abilities depend on intuition and case knowledge, which is mostly tacit and hard to articulate.

One contested question is the extent to which primary teachers require subject knowledge; and the extent of this in different subject areas, given that they cannot have as much across the whole curriculum as a subject specialist is likely to have in one or two subjects. However, primary teachers require a deep knowledge of how young children learn, especially through activity and representing experience, kinaesthetically, visually and symbolically; and through dialogue, rather than mainly through listening. For instance, Donaldson (1992)highlights the need for activities to be meaningful to the children and relationships of trust if young children are to be engaged. And, as Shulman (2004) argues, pedagogical content knowledge – the ability to structure knowledge to make it meaningful and accessible to a particular group or individual – is more important than subject knowledge, as such (see Eaude, 2018a, Chapter 5, for a more detailed discussion).

Confidence, and a sense of teacher agency – being able to make one’s own decisions and professional judgements – underpin teacher expertise. Teachers must be encouraged and allowed to take risks without the fear of being heavily criticised when they make mistakes. Passion and enthusiasm are qualities strongly associated with teacher expertise, and frequently manifested by teachers working with young children, but these are too often squeezed by the pressures of delivery to cover an over-full curriculum and the demands of policy-makers in terms of accountability.

Recalling that expertise is associated with creating and taking unexpected opportunities, such an approach requires planning which is sufficiently fluid to allow the teacher and her class to follow children’s interests, questions and insights, while being clear enough in terms of aims and objectives to enable progression both within the particular area being taught and more generally.

It is vital that assessment is not conflated with testing and that all concerned recognize that many important aspects of learning and teaching cannot be measured with any degree of validity. There needs to be more emphasis on formative teacher assessment, and less on data, especially in terms of judging teacher quality. However, data can be valuable in identifying possible misconceptions of a group or an individual, though the nature of such misconceptions is likely to require more detailed observation and discussion.

Developing the expertise of primary classroom teachers

Eaude (2018a) argues that developing the abilities associated with primary classroom teacher expertise is difficult and takes a long time, drawing on Berliner’s (2001) conclusion that it takes up to five years for teachers to become experts. Doing so involves a great deal of practice in the context of the classroom, but practising the right things. To know what these are means that teachers need opportunities to watch other teachers in the classroom and try to identify, with them, the key aspects on which to concentrate.

Feedback is necessary to improve, though this is more complex than it may seem. Schon (1987) makes a useful distinction between reflection-on-action and reflection-in-action, with the former essentially looking back at what has happened and adjusting what one does in future as a result, and the latter essential when one has to make very quick judgements and has very little time to deliberate on feedback. While reflection-on-action is necessary, Eaude (2018a: 75) highlights the need in fluid, fast-moving situations for what Bateson calls calibration, where learning (as a teacher in this case) is embedded by acting fluently, without deliberate reflection, so that much of what the teacher does becomes automatic, enabling her to concentrate on what really matters.

To develop case knowledge, it helps for the teacher herself to be able to identify the salient points in any situation, such as when and how to intervene to avoid difficult situations occurring, though early-career teachers are likely to need mentoring to help in this process – and even experienced teachers can articulate this better when helped by a sympathetic observer. It is hard to know exactly how teachers develop peripheral vision, except by constantly looking and checking what is happening, to identify what requires action on their part and what to ignore.

To develop pedagogical content knowledge, rather than just subject knowledge, primary teachers must learn to identify children’s misconceptions and how these can be overcome. This indicates that assessment must be continual and integral to teaching, rather than seen as a separate activity. The ability to plan fluidly and to assess continuously depends largely on confidence and experience. But teachers in the early stages of their career or in areas where they are less confident will usually need to plan in more detail than a teacher with greater expertise.

Berliner (2001: 466) points out that expertise is not just a characteristic of the person, but of the interaction of the person and the environment in which they work. One vital aspect of how teacher expertise is strengthened is recognizing that this is not only an individual process, but a collective one, within professional learning communities (see Stoll and Louis, 2007) where all teachers learn from each other; and where taking risks, and making mistakes, is normalized as a necessary aspect of teaching, whatever one’s level of experience.

Implications for a National Education Service and for professional development

It may reasonably be asked whether the vision of primary education outlined in this article and the place of teachers in enabling this is achievable. Such an approach will require a different view of primary education which strives to ensure that all children receive the balanced and broadly-based education to which they are entitled by law. This will not just involve changes to the formal curriculum, assessment processes and accountability mechanisms, but a change of culture among teachers and the relationship between politicians, policy-makers and the profession.

There will always be a debate about the sorts of knowledge young children need to know; and issues such as the role of subject specialists, especially in Key Stage 2, with the answer often depending on specific issues such as the size of school and the range of subject expertise available. For instance, there are arguments in favour of subject specialists, particularly in some subject areas at the older end of the primary school, though a continuity of relationships is very important, especially for those children who find learning difficult, and there are practical problems in small schools. However, a National Education Service must;

• view education as not just a preparation for employment but as a process which helps children to internalize the qualities, dispositions and values associated with democratic citizenship (Nussbaum, 2010) and the intrinsic motivation to act appropriately on their own;
• see primary education as an essential part of this process and place more trust in primary teachers, encouraging a view of professionalism based on autonomy and an extended, rather than restricted, view of professionality (see Eaude, 2018a, Chapter 8 for a discussion of different models of teacher professionalism and the implications for primary teachers); and
• provide sustained opportunities for professional development and the expectation that teachers will participate in these, with more resources allocated to enable this.

The evidence suggests that, to have a lasting impact, professional learning opportunities must:

• be of appropriate duration, over at least two terms, usually a year or longer;
• have rhythm, with follow up, consolidation and support, so that participants grasp the rationale and use their understanding to refine practices and support implementation;
• be designed for participants’ needs, so that there is overt relevance to teachers’ day-to-day experiences and their aspirations for their pupils, while allowing for differences to be revealed and discussed;
• create a shared sense of purpose, so that teachers can collaborate and engage in peer learning and support; and
• be aligned across various activities, so that the focus is not just on specific activities but consistent with the principles of how children learn.

TDT (2015: 11)

Teachers manifest their expertise in different ways, so that no one template is suitable for all teachers, with the current Teachers’ Standards presenting a limited view of what teachers require. Moreover, initial teacher education (ITE) and continuing professional development (CPD) must be seen as a continuum, with the early-career phase, in the years soon after qualification, especially significant. While the best approach to ITE requires more detailed discussion than is possible here, one must recognize that a one-year course is not long enough to develop a high level of expertise. Therefore, a greater emphasis on professional development and support – for instance through opportunities to observe other teachers and mentoring – in the years soon after qualification will be essential to help embed key features of expertise and to broaden teachers’ perspectives, for instance by considering recent research in psychology and constantly reviewing how teachers’ practice reflects what they are trying to achieve.

CPD opportunities should be based mainly on learning in the context of the teacher’s own school, though with regular, sustained opportunities to visit other schools and watch other teachers, rather than attending courses, especially one-off events. Such an approach will require more money and resources than at present. However, if primary education is be accorded the importance that it deserves, this is essential.

Conclusion

This article has argued for a view of primary education and teaching very different from that based on the ‘standards agenda’, performativity and delivery, one based on children’s entitlement and the expertise and professionalism of teachers to enable this. Such a view is required if historic disadvantage resulting from discrimination on the basis of factors such as sex, ‘race’/ethnicity, class and (dis)ability is to be countered; and if all young children are to be, and become, confident and resilient and able to cope with change and adversity. This will involve a better balanced and more broadly-based curriculum, drawing on children’s existing ‘funds of knowledge’; but also a more holistic view of children and their abilities, emphasizing procedural and personal/interpersonal knowledge, rather than focussing mainly on a limited view of propositional knowledge. It will require more emphasis on the humanities and the arts to help children to engage with complexity and to develop qualities, dispositions and values associated with democratic citizenship. However, even more important than the formal curriculum will be a greater emphasis on pedagogy and professional development, to enable a holistic, inclusive approach where primary teachers develop and strengthen, collectively, the features of expertise outlined above. This will require a policy context which encourages a view of teacher professionalism based on professional autonomy and trust, with less emphasis on data and measurable outcomes and a model of accountability and inspection which is developmental and supportive rather than punitive.

Dr. Tony Eaude was the head teacher of a multi-cultural Church of England First School in Oxford, UK, for nine years before completing a doctorate, entitled Beyond Awe and Wonder- a study of how teachers understand young children’s spiritual development. He now works as an independent research consultant.

References:

Alexander, R., ed. (2010), Children, their World, their Education – final report and recommendations of the Cambridge Primary Review, Abingdon: Routledge.

Ball, S.J. (2003), ‘The teacher’s soul and the terrors of performativity’, Journal of Education Policy, 18 (2): 215-228.

Berliner, D.C. (2001)‘Learning about and learning from expert teachers’, International Journal of Educational Research, 35: 463-82.

Bruner, J. S. (1996), The Culture of Education, Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press.

Cooper, P. and McIntyre, D. (1996), Effective Teaching and Learning: Teachers’ and students’ perspectives, Buckingham: Open University Press.

Donaldson, M. (1992), Human Minds – an exploration, London: Allen Lane.

Eaude, T. (2012), How do expert primary classteachers really work? – a critical guide for teachers, headteachers and teacher educators, Critical Publishing, www.criticalpublishing.com

Eaude, T. (2015), ‘Primary education: can we escape the legacy of elementary education?’ in A Generation of Radical Educational Change – Stories from the field, 43-54, Routledge: Abingdon

Eaude, T. (2018a) Developing the Expertise of Primary and Elementary Classroom Teachers: Professional Learning for a Changing World. London: Bloomsbury.

Eaude, T. (2018b), ‘Addressing the Needs of the Whole Child: Implications for Young Children and  Adults who Care for them’, International Handbook of Holistic Education, 61-69, Abingdon: Routledge.

Elliott, J.G., S. E. Stemler, R.J. Sternberg, E.L. Grigorenko and N. Hoffman (2011), The socially skilled teacher and the development of tacit knowledge, British Educational Research Journal, 37 (1), 83- 103.

Gonzales, N., L. Moll, and C. Amanti (2005), Funds of Knowledge, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Nussbaum, M. (2010), Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, Princeton:  Princeton University Press.

Sawyer, R.K. (2004), Creative Teaching: Collaborative Discussion as Disciplined Improvisation,   Educational Researcher, 33 (2), 12–20.

Schon, D. (1987), Educating the Reflective Practitioner: Toward a New Design for Teaching and    Learning the Professions, San Francisco: Jossey Bass.

Shulman, L.S. (2004), The Wisdom of Practice – Essays on Teaching, Learning and Learning to Teach, San Francisco: Jossey Bass.

Stoll, L. and K.S. Louis (eds) (2007), Professional Learning Communities: Divergence, Depth and   Dilemmas, Maidenhead: Open University Press.

TDT (Teacher Development Trust) (2015), Developing Great Teaching – Lessons from the international reviews into effective professional development, Available online http://tdtrust.org/about/dgt (accessed 30 August 2019).

The post Developing primary education and the expertise of primary teachers in a National Education Service appeared first on education for tomorrow.

David Ridley

If Labour’s visionary National Education Service policy is to be successfully implemented, there must be a simultaneous process of de-commodification from the top, in terms of national policy, and from the bottom, in terms of democratisation. This article sets out perspectives upon which such transformation should take place and ideas for how to move forward.

In terms of national policy, Labour’s pledge in its 2017 manifesto to introduce free, lifelong education in Further Education and to abolish tuition fees and reintroduce maintenance grants for university students in Higher Education, will do much to remove the market incentives from tertiary education.

However, alongside these funding reforms which will move tertiary education policy away from ‘nudging’ students into believing they are ‘consumers’ of education and institutions away from behaving as if they were for-profit corporations, Labour must also, once in government, establish a democratic and transparent framework for deciding how this funding is allocated and how the provision that this supports financially is organised.

Labour must abolish all market-based systems of accountability such as Ofsted in FE and the Teaching and Research Excellence Frameworks in HE. In their place, Labour should create a national regulatory body for tertiary education – intrinsically linked and co-operating with a similar body in compulsory education – that can allocate funding according to a national education strategy informed by robust and democratic feedback mechanisms. This body should have an elected board, with representation reflecting fairly the mutual interests in tertiary education: academics, teachers, administrators, parents and communities, students, trade unions, civil servants, and Members of Parliament from all political parties.

Once established, this body should begin a wide-ranging, patient and inclusive consultation with all of the above stakeholder groups, to create a framework for self-evaluation and collaboration within tertiary education. This consultation should also include teachers, students, parents and communities involved in compulsory education to identify the connections between the two sectors, how regulatory systems can complement each other and to look at how teacher education in the UK can be strengthened within the NES system.[1]

Expunging marketisation from within the system

As the commission notes, ‘since 2010 the education of our citizens has been treated as a commodity, something which can be bought and sold’ and ‘from the tripling of tuition fees in HE to the acceleration of the academies programme, the Tories have adopted a market-based approach to education and consequently the system has become increasingly fragmented, opaque, and individualistic.’[2]

However, while it is true that marketisation in tertiary education was accelerated in 2010 by the Coalition government, the introduction of market behaviours into the sector in fact began much earlier, with Thatcher’s reforms to the governance of colleges and polytechnics through ‘incorporation’ as part of the 1992 Further and Higher Education Act. By encouraging these institutions to behave like private-sector corporations, the Tories introduced powerful market norms and behaviours into the UK’s tertiary education system[3]. This is important because the introduction of an alternative system like the NES will not, even within itself, remove market behaviours from tertiary education.

Abolishing fees and loans in HE, for example, will be argued by vice-chancellors to be a move that will either mean re-introducing student numbers caps or will create a financial crisis for over-leveraged universities. This is evidenced by reactions to the long-awaited Augar Review of post-18 education and funding.[4]

Meanwhile, the Office for Students’ chief executive Sir Michael Barber has warned that the regulator will not ‘bail out’ universities in financial difficulty.[5]  I have argued that, in response to institutional failure, a Tory government will seek – as it has done in FE – mergers or hostile takeovers by other local institutions, or if they were to be unwilling or unable, by private-sector, for-profit corporations, educational or otherwise.[6]

Firstly, to prevent such a scenario from happening, Labour must commit to adequately and fairly funding all levels of education through taxation. The University and College Union’s proposal to fund tertiary education through an increase in corporation tax is a sound one, as corporations benefit directly from investment in ‘human capital’ and applied research.[7]  As UCU also suggests, this funding should come with conditions, such as the establishment of democratic governance and public accountability structures, including trade union representation at board level, and an end to casualised employment contracts.

Secondly, Labour should protect the public interest in universities by placing each university’s assets in a nonrevocable trust – after the model of the John Lewis Partnership – which would hold the formal legal title to the organisation’s assets.[8]

Furthermore, FE has also been devastated by funding cuts and forced mergers as a result of the Area Reviews.[9]  As well as funding FE adequately to prevent the need for closures and mergers, the trust model should also be applied by Labour immediately to FE colleges.

Democratising college and university governance

As Boden and colleagues also argue, the trust model of universities and colleges would need to establish a ‘social compact’ between members of these institutions – teachers, administrators and students – and surrounding society, ‘underscoring the common ownership of the university’. They suggest ‘search conferences’ based on social science methods of ‘action research’ to begin the process of democratising institutional governance.[10]

In my own work[11], I have outlined a practice of ‘democratic collegiality’ very much in line with Boden and colleagues’ suggestions, based on the work of 20^th century educational philosopher John Dewey, as well as on contemporary examples of grassroots economic planning such as the Manchester and London People’s Plans, and also earlier examples such as the Lucas Plan and the GLC’s People’s Plan for the London Docks.[12]

As part of the wide-ranging consultation for self-regulation proposed above, Labour should

Support the University and College Union, in conjunction with the Trades Union Congress, local trades councils and community organisations, to set up these search conferences, with the long-term aim of establishing new democratic forums like citizen assemblies. These search conferences would seek to find out what local communities would like to see from their local colleges and universities, in terms of local re-skilling and employment needs, but also in terms of ‘socially-useful’ research that could be undertaken by universities.

Working with teachers, academics, administrators and students, these search conferences could then bring together the needs of the community with the professional and user knowledge of those inside individual institutions to create democratic five-year plans for those institutions, much in the spirit of the people’s plans mentioned above.

Practices of democratic planning and consultation established through these search conferences could also provide the basis for self-regulation. Labour as part of its wide-ranging consultation on self-regulation in tertiary education could propose an expanded legal definition of ‘scholarship’ to reflect the practices of ‘co-inquiry’ and democratic structures of ownership and control described above.[13]  This definition would recognise that ‘education’ and ‘research’ are inextricably linked at all levels of education and in society, with colleges and universities ideally becoming centres of lifelong learning, socially-useful research and community inquiry.

As in Finland, college and university libraries could become hubs for citizen curiosity and research, providing training and support for non-academic amateur and professional inquirer alike, as well as free lectures and workshops on topics of general interest.

On the basis of this definition, the consultation could propose the creation of a tertiary level National Council of Scholars – which may in future also incorporate compulsory education – with local Councils of Scholars sending delegates to national conferences to discuss and decide on national policy proposed by local assemblies, which would then be taken forward by an elected executive tertiary education body.

Co-operation, municipalisation and inclusive growth

In the long-term, once robust structures of local self-governance have been established as part of an integrated and holistic National Education Service, Labour should explore alternative models of ownership in tertiary education, in line with its alternative economic strategy.[14]

The asset lock proposed above provides an ideal transitional form towards co-operative ownership models, for example. The creation of a Co-operative University is currently being explored by the Co-operative College, and examples of co-operative FE and HE already exist in the UK and abroad, as well as in compulsory education.[15]

However, it must be noted that co-operative colleges and universities do not, in themselves, challenge the logic of marketisation.[16]  While Co-operative Principles require democratic member control and economic participation, these principles are inward facing, designed to shield from the market while allowing them to operate effectively within it.

Furthermore, while co-operative principles mirror perfectly the principles of academic freedom, providing a strong foundation for the autonomy of tertiary education institutions in self-regulation by the academic profession, there is a real danger that this model would signal a return to an earlier, elitist and selective HE system severed from further and adult education.

To bring out the best in the Co-operative University model as part of a National Education Service, Labour should explore this model as part of devolved and democratised structures of municipal ownership and inclusive regional economic growth. The ‘Cleveland Model’ in the US and the Preston model in the UK both suggest how such a model of local and regional regeneration based on co-operative universities as socially useful ‘anchor institutions’ could work in practice.[17]

Democratised universities, by sourcing their services from local co-operatives while extending their extensive resources to wider communities as part of co-ordinated approaches, could become anchor institutions for genuine, democratic regeneration and positive, long-lasting social change. Where co-operative service providers do not yet exist, co-operative universities as part of a national and international network of co-operation, could provide education and financial support for local businesses seeking to explore co-operative business models. [18]

The vision of HE presented above, of democratised universities acting as co-operative anchor institutions and hubs of ‘collective intelligence’, also provides an institutional framework for the implementation of Labour’s ‘Green Transformation’ programme.[19]   While Cleveland and Preston models show how wealth can be kept within local and regional communities, democratise universities acting as socially useful anchor institutions can research green technologies, help green co-operative start-ups thrive and teach young people and adults alike how to live in a sustainable and environmentally friendly way.

Devolution in its current form, however, presents a block to this vision of green, inclusive regional growth and re-generation. As Richard Hatcher argues, under the Tories, devolution has disguised a new form of highly centralised power and further cuts to public services.[20]  Through the role that Combined Authorities play in distributing devolved adult skills budgets and the close involvement universities have in these authorities, the Tories also seek to use devolution to further marketisation, specifically to bring tertiary education in line with the needs of neoliberal capitalism.

Alongside their alignment with business needs, the internal structures of the Combined Authorities[21] also reflect the dominance of business over wider social interests, with the number of representatives from Local Enterprise Partnerships in most cases far outnumbering those from the community groups or trade unions and exerting a direct and pernicious influence over regional strategy and policy making.

Within the West Midlands Combined Authority, for example, LEP representatives participate directly in strategic decision-making, sitting not only on key strategic decision-making committees but also on the committee that scrutinises the decisions and policies of these committees. Furthermore, while LEP leaders have voice but no formal vote, they can veto increases to the region’s business rates, a key source of extra income for CAs.

Labour must therefore democratise the Combined Authorities and use devolved structures to transform regions into genuine ‘powerhouses’ for sustainable and inclusive growth. Alongside democratising the governance structures of individual CAs, democratic assemblies should be created to not only hold these authorities to account, but also to feed in local and regional social needs beyond purely business priorities. Socially useful colleges and universities, as suggested above, can act as democratic hubs to facilitate, organise and consolidate local knowledge and feed this knowledge into these assemblies for discussion and decision.

David would like to thank Jonathan White for invaluable feedback on an
earlier draft of this article. 

[1] 1 Examples of self-regulation in UK education include the National Union of Teachers’ ‘Schools Must Speak For Themselves’ framework in the 1990s and Lawrence Stenhouse’s Humanities Curriculum Project in the 1970s

[2] https://www.policyforum.labour.org.uk/commissions/education/local-accountability-within-the-national-education-service – p. 5

[3] 2 Ridley, D. (2019) Markets, Monopolies and Municipal Ownership. Available at:

[4] 3 Representatives from the Russell Group coalition of redbrick universities, for example, warned that if the 20% reduction in to £7,250 was not made up with public funding, English HE would face a ‘funding crisis.’ ‘Some institutions would likely close,’ they insisted. ‘Others would have to reduce the range of courses they offer. Higher cost subjects, such as science, technology and engineering, would be threatened even though they are producing the graduates our economy needs.’ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2018/11/23/tuition-fee-cut-will-send-universities-crisis-leading-vice-chancellors/

[5] 4 ‘Should a university or other higher education provider find themselves at risk of closure, our role will be to protect students’ interests, and we will not hesitate to intervene to do so,’ he insisted. ‘We will not step in to prop up a failing provider.’ https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/news-blog-and-events/press-and-media/we-will-not-bail-out-universities-in-financial-difficulty-regulator-chair-says/

[6] 5 Ridley, D. (2019) ‘What if a university fails?’ Available at: https://www.redpepper.org.uk/what-happens-if-a-university-fails/

[7] 6 ‘University and College Union response to Labour Party policy consultation on a National Education Service’ (2018): https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/9439/UCU-response-to-LPF-consultation-on-the-National-Education-service-June-2018/pdf/UCU_NES_consultation_response_June_2018.pdf

[8] 7 As Boden and colleagues argue, ‘this would also create clear governance responsibilities under trust law and prevent the privatisation of publicly funded assets.’ Boden, R., Ciancanelli, P. And Wright, S. (2012) ‘Trust Universities? Governance for Post-Capitalist Futures’. Available here: https://josswinn.org/tag/bibliography/

[9] 8 According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, funding for adult education has been cut by 45% since 2009: https://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/13307; The Association of Colleges reports that the number of colleges in the UK has halved since their incorporation in 1993, dropping from almost 450 to 251 in 2018: https://www.aoc.co.uk/about-colleges/college-mergers

[10] 9 ‘These dialogues would constitute a strong form of accountability, they would be informed by formal reporting, but importantly, the parties would hold each other to account through social processes and relationships which cultivate increased understanding of each others’ work life, hopes and worries.’

[11] 10 Markets, Monopolies and Municipal Ownership, and also: Ridley, D. (2018) ‘What can academics learn from the Lucas Plan?’ Available at: https://www.redpepper.org.uk/what-can-academics-learn-from-the-lucas-plan/; Ridley, D. (2019) ‘Towards Collectively Rethinking Ourselves’ https://www.oneducation.net/no-03_december-2018/towards-collectively-rethinking-ourselves-a-response-to-eric-lybeck/

[12] 11 See Just Space’s London Plan, https://justspace.org.uk/about-the-london-plan/; People’s Plan Greater Manchester, http://www.peoplesplangm.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/PEOPLES-PLAN-April-2017.pdf; Lucas Plan, http://lucasplan.org.uk/

[13] 12 Ridley, D. (2019) ‘Towards Collectively Rethinking Ourselves’

[14] 13 Labour (2017) ‘Alternative Models of Ownership’. Available here: https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Alternative-Models-of-Ownership.pdf

[15] 14 See Joss Winn’s ‘Co-operative universities: A bibliography’: https://josswinn.org/tag/bibliography/

[16] 15 As noted by the Co-operative College, market reforms actually open up for the first time the possibility of creating a Co-operative University in the UK

[17] 16 Labour, Alternative Models of Ownership

[18] 17 See Centre for Labour and Social Studies (2019) ‘A New Vision for Further and Higher Education’

http://classonline.org.uk/pubs/item/a-new-vision-for-further-and-higher-education

[19] 18 https://www.labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/The-Green-Transformation-.pdf

[20] 19 ‘Power lies with government, not just because they have imposed the model (largely through secret deals with local government elites) but also because they set the economic agenda and targets and evaluate the Combined Authorities on their performance. Devolution is licensed, conditional and revocable.’ Hatcher, R. (2017) ‘The West Midlands Combined Authority has turned its back on inclusive economic growth to tackle inequality’. Contact: Richard.Hatcher@bcu.ac.uk

[21] 20 There are currently seven CAs with Mayors and two without, for list, see: https://www.local.gov.uk/topics/devolution/combined-authorities

The post How to create truly public tertiary education system under Labour appeared first on education for tomorrow.

Dr Mary Bousted

At the heart of Labour’s vision of a National Education Service is a vision of an education system from cradle to grave. A life-long service which meets every citizen’s needs in the different stages of their life and in the different roles that they play in their working lives and their leisure.

It is a powerful vision, and one that inspires.  But it will not be easy to achieve.

Consider the following facts:

By the end of secondary school pupils from low income backgrounds are, on average, a year and a half behind their peers and this achievement gap is now starting to widen.

The uncomfortable truth facing a government which, a decade ago, drove through heavily contested reforms to implement a ‘knowledge rich’ curriculum assessed by timed exams is this – the concentration on ‘powerful knowledge’ has not achieved social mobility which is, in fact, in decline.

Educational achievements remain dominated by the accident of a students’ birth. Access to the ‘best that has been thought or said’ has not resulted in greater educational or economic equality. Poverty and inequality have, as always, impacted on the life chances of children and young people to a far greater extent than the school they attend or the curriculum they are taught.

The effects of the pressure of exams on children and young people have had other, very serious consequences.  Much has been written by various commentators this summer of the soaring rates of anxiety and mental distress and ill health of young people.

A survey of NEU teacher members revealed starkly the depths of their concern that the revised GCSE and A level exams have increased pupil anxiety and ill health.  The weight and pressure of timed exams upon which so much of their future depends is taking its toll on young peoples’ mental health and could, even, be causing a decline in entries to EBacc subjects as the sharp decline in entries to English and Maths A level is starting to become a cause for concern in education circles.

And then there is the problem of teachers – or, rather, the problem of a lack of teachers. The sad fact of the matter is that, in England, we waste teachers on an industrial scale. They are driven from the profession because of excessive workload, and the stress that this brings.

Teaching as a career is now a very hard sell. The government has missed its teacher training targets for the past six years.  A vast sum – £550 million pounds a year is, according to the National Audit Office, spent on teacher recruitment and training.  But much of that money is lost as teachers leave the classroom earlier and earlier in their careers. One fifth of NQTs qualifying in 2015 no longer worked in state schools by 2017.  Up to 40% of teachers leave within ten years.

When asked what was the greatest barrier to improving educational quality school leaders  identified a shortage of qualified teachers  as the most significant – indeed this was cited twice as much as any other reason.  Government ministers would agree – as teacher supply has gone up the list of concerns as the government has missed its teacher training targets for the last six years.

Too few teachers affects education quality in several important ways. In particular, in England at present, there is an epidemic of teachers teaching out of their subject area. One in five maths and English lessons are now taught by teachers with no more than a GCSE in those subjects.

Teacher shortages affect disadvantaged children disproportionately. They are far more likely to be attending schools in deprived areas where it is more difficult to attract qualified teachers. They are more likely to be taught by inexperienced teachers who, disproportionately, take their first teaching appointments in challenging schools. 

The disadvantages that these children face from birth are not, I am afraid, ameliorated in our education system. Despite the dedication of their teachers, educational inequality is compounded within our schools.

Nothing that the government has done to tackle the teacher supply crisis has worked.  The Department for Education has put significant resources into a teacher workload reduction tool kit and other measures.  Every new policy emanating from the DfE has to be examined for its workload implications. Ministers make speeches asserting their absolute determination to make teacher workload their top priority.

And yet, workload continues to increase – averaging over 55 hours for teachers according to he latest TALIS survey (and more for school leaders). A part time teacher now works, on average, more than a full time working week.

So what are teachers doing in their working time? They are not spending longer in the classroom than their OECD counterparts – teachers in the UK have, on average, 21.5 contact hours a week. So far, so internationally normal.  Where the extra hours come in – double those spent in the classroom – are in preparation for teaching and learning. That is, lesson planning, assessment and data production.

Teachers find far too much of this preparatory work to be meaningless and useless. They complain that it is not work done to improve their teaching and their pupils’ learning, but to prove to someone else who is not regularly in their classroom, that they are doing what they say they are doing – teaching classes of pupils and enabling them to learn.

The question has to be asked. If teacher workload is out of control – and it is – why have the government’s efforts to reduce it not paid off?

And here we come to the crux of the matter. Government initiatives will have little or no effect on teacher workload because ministers will not tackle the heart of the matter. They will not act to counter the enormous, unsustainable and, ultimately, hugely damaging effect that the inspection agency Ofsted has on our schools and those who work in them.

Ofsted – a long and dishonourable history

Ofsted was established in 1989 in the belief that it is possible to come to valid and reliable judgements about school quality by examining proxies established to judge  teaching quality and pupil progress.  Ofsted’s inspection practices have changed over the course of its history – moving from longer inspections with more subject specific inspectors, to short inspections with generalist inspectors.

As Ofsted’s budget has been constrained, the inspection agency has cast around looking for short cuts to assess school quality. Some of these, in retrospect, were patently ridiculous – I remember, about 7 years ago, Ofsted required teachers to demonstrate progress when being observed by inspectors in 20 minute time slots.  The fact that progress cannot be demonstrated in this time frame is obvious. This did not stop Ofsted insisting that progress must be shown in 20 minutes, nor did it prevent countless twighlight CPD sessions where teachers were taught how to demonstrate progress in 20 minutes.

Each and every new iteration of the Ofsted inspection framework has brought about new initiatives to measure teaching quality.  In recent times there has been a focus on pupil data to measure progress which has resulted in teachers spending days and weeks filling in data sets and squeezing the numbers to indicate progress.

True to form, Ofsted now recognises what teachers have known for years – that measuring progress in this way leads to fantasy pupil progress numbers. As criticism of Ofsted has snowballed in recent years, the agency has, increasingly desperately, cast around looking for a new inspection methodology and a new narrative. It has become acutely aware that its reputation is fundamentally challenged by the evidence of its own inspection judgements which, as the Education Policy Institute has shown, privilege schools in the leafy suburbs. The Education Policy Institute’s (EPI) report ‘School Inspection in England: is There Room to Improve?’ provides some interesting answers.  

The researchers concluded that school inspection outcomes appear to be disproportionately affected by the percentage of disadvantaged pupils in a school. Schools with more disadvantaged pupils were more likely to be judged by Ofsted as “requiring improvement”. The more advantaged the pupils, the more likely a school will gain a “good” or “outstanding” Ofsted rating.

The figures are stark. Secondary schools with no more than five per cent of pupils eligible for free school meals (FSM) are over three times as likely to be rated “outstanding” as schools where at least 23 per cent have FSM, only 14 per cent of which are given an “outstanding” grading.

This finding may not surprise many – schools with disadvantaged intakes have long complained that Ofsted inspectors fail to understand, or to evaluate, the immense amount of extra work they do to enable their pupils to learn and to make progress.

What is surprising, perhaps, is the EPI’s revelation that, based on value-added (VA) performance, the number of schools with advantaged pupil intakes given an “outstanding” Ofsted grading would be halved.

And, on the same VA criteria, the number of schools with disadvantaged pupils which would be rated “outstanding” would be doubled.

The EPI researchers conclude: “These findings raise questions about whether the inspection system is fully equitable to schools with challenging intakes. We have found that the least disadvantaged schools are most likely to be judged “good” or “outstanding”, and that notable proportions of “good” and “outstanding” schools are not down-graded, despite a substantial deterioration in their academic performance.

“We have also found that if schools were rated according to levels of pupil progress, we would expect many fewer “outstanding” schools with very low proportions of pupils eligible for free school meals, or low prior attainment when they joined the school.”

If this was not damaging enough to the view of an Ofsted inspection system free from pre-conceptions and bias, there is more.

Ofsted does not appear, the researchers conclude, to recognise, or its inspection judgements reflect, the lack of progress made by pupils in the schools where there has been a deterioration in VA progress scores.

Ofsted awarded higher inspection grades to 47 per cent of primary and 33 per cent of secondary schools, where there were large decreases in their VA progress measures between their previous and latest inspection.

This suggests, in the researchers’ words, that “Ofsted has not been as effective at consistent recognition of deteriorated academic performance as it has been at ensuring schools are inspected regularly.”

It is hard for Ofsted to get out from under that judgement. 

A National Education Service

A national education service will not be built on a fearful, stressed and bullied teaching profession. We need a confident, contented teaching profession if pupils are going to be taught by qualified teachers – the bedrock of any education system.

Schools must, of course, be held accountable. We cannot return to the 1970s where the under achievement of working class pupils was neither remarked upon, nor tackled either on a system wide basis or, sufficiently, school by school.

But it is clear that the current accountability system policed by Ofsted is causing more harm than good – and is not even providing valid and reliable judgements of school quality.

A better, more valid and reliable accountability system for schools and colleges would be built on the following principles and actions.

Ofsted would be abolished.

A national framework for school and college accountability would be implemented locally by teams of regional HMI who would have better knowledge of a school, its catchment area and its context.

Generalist inspections which purport, falsely, to be able to come to one overall judgement of school quality would be abolished and replaced by specialist inspections, conducted by specialist inspectors, on particular aspects of a school’s provision. This would stop the nonsense, embedded in the latest Ofsted inspection framework, of generalist inspectors coming to judgements on the intent, implementation and impact of a school’s curriculum through ‘deep dives’ into subjects which, in the majority, the inspectors will neither have studied or taught beyond GCSE.

Schools which are struggling would be supported by local networks of advisors, made up by teachers on secondment, which would broker school to school support for areas of weakness in a school’s provision – a support system which was integral to the success of London Challenge in raising standards in London schools.

These policy reforms would be accompanied by wholesale reform of the current assessment and exam system.

At present, the ‘cure’ I have outlined for the ‘ills’ of the current inspection system look far fetched and unachievable. I am constantly told that the death of Ofsted is a pipe dream. I remain hopeful. It appears to me that, at some point, perhaps when the teacher supply crisis goes beyond a crisis to critical, then politicians will realise that they can no longer tinker round the edges, that they will have to tackle the root of the problem rather than the symptoms.

It seems to me that change is possible. For the sake of teachers, and their pupils, I hope it comes sooner rather than later.

Dr Mary Bousted is Joint General Secretary of the National Education Union

The post The future of assessment and accountability within a National Education Service appeared first on education for tomorrow.

Henry Fowler

In July 2018, the National Education Union (NEU) launched a councillors’ network after bringing together 50 London councillors for a briefing on the school funding campaign.

Since then, the network has developed into a partnership between local councillors and the union, to shape the future of education.

This network has been successful in recruiting over 1,500 members of all parties and undertaken two important actions; sending a letter to Education Secretary Damian Hinds over education funding and organising a pledge for candidates ahead of the local elections in May.

The development of this relationship is important. The NEU is proud to be agitating, educating and organising in local councils.

This article will reflect on this work and look to the future of democratically elected governance of education and what this means for a National Education Service (NES).

Future of local democratic governance – who is up for it?

Since the creation of local education authorities in 1902, councils have largely been responsible for local education provision.

There is no doubt academisation continues to challenge this model, questioning the importance of local authority accountability and scrutiny, but 79 per cent of primary schools remain maintained by councils.

In recent years, this has coincided with the financial destruction of local authorities through the austerity programme.

According to the Local Government Association (LGA), by 2020, councils will have lost 60p in every £1 of funding from central government.

This a conscious attack on local democracy, instigated by a centralising neoliberal state.

This has had an enormous impact on education. Cuts to support services offered to schools by local authorities has meant in places like Wandsworth, where a campaign continues around the restructure and economising of SEND support, provision will be reduced leading to worse outcome for pupils.

This brings to the fore questions around the legitimacy and usefulness of authorities. Historically, some local authorities have been more supportive than others to schools.

Slough has essentially outsourced its educational responsibility, signing over its role to a private company. This is one of many examples of where local authorities have varied in their support of high-quality public services.

Compare this to Brighton, an LA that continues to support schools despite cuts, and rejects the ‘tide of academisation’ that has swept over many areas, actively encouraging heads and parents to fight the austerity in schools.

The discussion surrounding the future of local authorities cannot simply be limited to saying we should go back to what we had before privatisation, a want to return, it has to be about a newly imagined relationship between the ‘middle tier’, school and national government.

The middle tier needs to be democratic, accountable and responsible to parents, schools and pupils. Debates about what the future of the middle tier looks like can become similar to the debates around re-nationalisation rail, it is not about harking on about British rail with all its faults, but about imagining something better than British Rail and the opposite of academisation, lacking as it is in legitimacy and democracy.

Redeveloping this area won’t be reliant on just funding from central government but also a cultural shift. Our network can give confidence to councillors to become more active against cuts and austerity, not a passive agent of capital whose only resistance is knocking the edges off austerity-led budgets, but rather agitating to take a stand against central government.

Our union has a vested interest in supporting, rebuilding and reimagining these local authorities. Our current structures, based on districts (geographic) and branches (employer based), means that local authorities will remain relevant to our future bargaining relationship, and a less fragmented education system under a different government.

After the recent actions undertaken by the councillor’s network, we are left with the question of how we secure our strategic plan for local government. That is why on 2 November we will be inviting all councillors to join us for a one-day conference on education.

The union is surveying councillors to understand what potential workshops and sessions would interest them. This includes the future of funding; what councils can do for recruitment and retention of teachers and exclusion policies and off-rolling.

This conference will not just be a one-off event to showcase NEU policy and campaigns, but about building a programme for what a better educational authority could be in the future. One that supports schools, educators and most importantly pupils.

There is no way that this development can be managed or is intended to be managed from headquarters. Our districts have long standing relationships with LAs and can help make this vision a reality on the ground – firstly, by recruiting to the network and secondly by instigating local councillor briefings, network events and campaign meetings, putting NEU front and centre for the fightback of local government.

This is not about delivery of service, but about holding candidates and authorities to account when they say they are with us. We have to lead this, otherwise it is not clear how we re-imagine a democratic middle tier under an NES.

What does the future of authorities look like in the NES?

Our union, alongside local community campaigners, has for a long time highlighted how academisation has failed. Our members continue to fight in areas like Peacehaven and Moulsecomb. The arguments against academisation are well developed and can be found on the website of the Anti Academies Canpaign.

However, we must continue to articulate and develop ideas of what the alternative is – what that middle tier looks like in an NES.

The end of academisation is on its way under a different government. Angela Rayner said in her speech at Labour Conference 2018 that a future Labour government will “end the Tories’ academy and free schools’ programmes.

This announcement was welcomed by many who have campaigned against Labour’s academisation creation. However, it did leave a lot of discussion about how this would be realised.

As discussed above, authorities vary in both their financial position and how supportive or not they have been on education.

What is clear is that an attitude of ‘going back to local authorities’, won’t deliver what we all want – a democratic authority, responsible, accountable and supportive of all schools. To do that, we need to consider the involvement of educators, trade unions, parents and students, alongside elected politicians, in plotting the future course of our schools.

Conclusion

The NEU is at the forefront of the fightback of local government. We are not going to stand back and allow councils to simply be the passive agents of austerity. We need a fighting local government, democratic on the side of the workers it employs.

Our councillors’ network is an attempt to realise this. Not through just passing motions and events, but about building a programme for local government that delivers for education, and holding councils to account.

The NES is a chance to reimagine councils and their role in education. Let’s rid ourselves of the legacy of authorities not supporting us and our members and forge a new partnership, built on negotiation.

As a union, we have a unique historical link with authorities and relationships which we can utilise to deliver for members. Together if we work locally as part of a national programme we can prepare the democratic middle tier for a post academisation landscape.

Our ambitions shouldn’t be limited under an ideological government that doesn’t support the profession, we can give confidence and expertise to councils to not simply wait for a change of government by start the fightback today, for their rebirth tomorrow.

Henry Fowler is a National Campaign Manager of the NEU

The post NES and the rebirth of local democratic schools appeared first on education for tomorrow.

Melanie Griffiths

Labour needs a radical vision for education to present to the electorate at the next General election, which will be upon us very soon. In addition to presenting the “idea” of an NES, providing a truly comprehensive and broad education from cradle to grave it needs a coherent road map to show how this will be achieved. The Socialist Education Association has brought proposals to this year’s Labour Party Conference which set out how Labours education policy can move forward, reverse marketisation and privatisation and bring schools back into a truly comprehensive, cooperative and democratic system.  Now is the time.

Labour gets it. The launch of “Democratising Local Public Services: A Plan For Twenty-First Century Insourcing” on July 20^th 2019 is a game changer.  John McDonnell spoke about how after the election of Thatcher forty years ago the Tories forced compulsory competitive tendering on councils. Over the last decades governments of all persuasions bought into the idea that ‘private’ was good, ‘public’ bad. This inevitably led to “the outsourcing scandal, which has seen private companies rip off the taxpayer, degrade our public services and put people at risk whilst remaining wholly unaccountable to the people who rely on and fund these services.”

So this break with the existing orthodoxy will be welcomed by public sector workers and citizens. Outsourcing has allowed employers to cut workers’ terms and conditions in the search for ready profits. But of course, the true motives of the elite were hidden, dressed up in waffle about ‘efficiency’ and ‘value for money’. No public service escaped, but I would argue that no service has been damaged more by the pursuit of this neoliberal agenda than education.

In the education system the key buzzword was ‘freedom’ for schools to spend money as they saw fit. This, it was argued, would allow individual schools to better meet the needs of their pupils and target money more efficiently.  It hasn’t been like that.

Before the 1990s the Local Education Authority (LEA) was the employer of teachers in schools and those who provided the vital services that allowed them to run – cleaners, cooks, advisory teachers, caretakers, educational psychologists, supply teachers, payroll and personnel services, IT support and so on. Strong LEAs acting as a central service provider had some downsides for sure. Sometimes bureaucracies were entrenched and inflexible, but as experience has demonstrated the pros clearly outweighed the cons.

Firstly, these arrangements encouraged fair recruitment practices and ensured that staff were suitably qualified. LEAs provided Teachers’ Centres where staff could go for advice, meetings and training.  These created opportunities for teachers from different schools to meet and share good practice. Schools were not in competition with one another. Schools and staff from within an LEA and sometimes between LEAs worked together.

Sharing practical services also had advantages. For example, support staff like caretakers and cleaners tended to enjoy considerably better pay and conditions. But above all, centrally provided services were able to avoid unnecessary duplication of back office functions and economies of scale. This meant better value for the tax payer and left school leaders more able to concentrate on the task at hand: educating children.

But in 1988 the misleadingly named Education Reform Act (ERA) took the first steps in trashing this “cooperative” integrated education system and that agenda has been pursued by all governments since. The ERA transferred many of the powers (including some financial powers) and responsibilities from LEAs to heads and nominally governing bodies.  It also gave the option for headteachers to go further and turn the schools they manage into Grant Maintained (GM) schools. GM schools got their funding directly from central government, bypassing the Local Authority (LA) completely.  The funds given to GM schools were then deducted from Local Authority budgets.

Once headteachers were given control of schools‘ budgets and the “opportunity” to opt out of using Local Authority provided services, the floodgates to outsourcing were opened.  Scenting profitable opportunities, a host of consultants and companies targeting the lucrative education market were ready to pounce.

This change to the way money was provided for central services had a devastating effect on Local Authorities. Once a certain tipping point was reached, it was no longer viable to provide many school services as the Authorities could no longer be sure of finances year to year. Inevitably, over time central services diminished, Teachers’ Centres closed, central service staff were made redundant, years of capacity, experience and expertise lost. This in turn made it much easier to convince schools to opt out entirely and become semi-privatised Academies and join unaccountable Multi-Academy Trusts. Meanwhile the business model operated by the private companies that filled the gap relied on cutting conditions and wages to boost profitability. And make no mistake the potential for profit is huge.

Thatcher must be dancing in her grave!

So what should a radical reforming Labour government do to tackle outsourcing in education?

The first step would be to abolish the academy system, which as we have seen is particularly prone to abuses related to privatisation. For example, there is a disturbing tendency for contracts to go to friends and families of managers and governors, and for managers to pay themselves exorbitant salaries. But this in itself would not be not enough, as the root problems can be traced back to the structure of school governance and procurement created by the 1988 Act. These changes must be reversed. Newly empowered and truly democratically accountable LAs need to be the default provider of school services within a particular area. Central funding and resource allocation will therefore need to ensure that local authorities can, once again, build up the skills and know-how needed.

At the 2018 Labour Party Conference a major step forward was taken with the commitment to end the academies programme and establish an integrated and locally accountable school system. Since then the Socialist Education Association (SEA) working with academic and legal experts has developed a strategy for achieving this goal which could be put into effect from Day 1 of a Labour government. The SEA paperRestoring a democratically accountable school system[i] sets out a coherent plan for implementing Labour’s commitment to “establish a new regulatory framework for schools” and to increase local participatory democracy in the school system.  It is referenced in the SEA motion going to Labour party conference this year, which proposes that the Labour Party now commit to ensuring:

1. Local Authorities establish reformed, democratically accountable local education committees with stakeholder representation;
2. That all publicly funded schools be brought back under the control of these new local education committees;
3. The newly empowered local education committees will be the default providers of school services and will be appropriately funded.

This motion will, if passed, firm up Labour Party policy around academies and outsourcing in education.  Its implementation will make it easier for trade unions to organise and negotiate and will lead to improvements in the working conditions of many public sector workers. It will reintegrate school education services and facilitate schools once again to work together, cooperating rather than competing.

The creation of newly empowered Local Authority Education Committees offers a reforming Labour government an opportunity to improve and democratise the education service, tackle profiteering and waste and promote social inclusion and equality. But this can only happen if a determined effort is made to reverse the mistakes of the past. Taking back democratic control and promoting public ownership of central services is the essential first step.

[i] https://socedassoc.files.wordpress.com/2019/04/restoring-a-democratically-accountable-school-system.pdf

Melanie Griffiths is National Chair of the Socialist Education Association, Labour’s education affiliate. She has been a teacher and trade union activist for many years and lives in Huddersfield, Yorkshire.

The post A Radical Vision for Education appeared first on education for tomorrow.

Merike Williams

The North. A vast place of friendly folk, cheap pints and beautiful countryside that stretches for miles.

Some may find being part of such a large geographical area problematic, but the campaigning and organising that occurs all around me goes to show how important grassroots activism really is.

One of the best things about being in a union is the opportunity to change the world and, in the North, we’re not shy in going about doing just that.

We believe that those at the chalk face are best placed to direct the course of action we take. Our members see the world of education for what it is: an underfunded, over tested regime that chews up students and staff alike before spitting them back out.

We want to change that.

We want our children to have access to the very best education, to be taught in buildings that are not crumbling around them, to have access to a curriculum that nurtures the whole child and for our staff to feel as though they can stay in the profession.

Over the years we have developed an ever-growing network of activists, each with their own particular interests and talents. We work as a team to assist one another, to open doors to organising opportunities and to mobilise our membership into taking back our profession.

Our network largely keeps in touch via a WhatsApp group, aptly titled Northern Revolutionaries. To enable us to grow as and when we find like minded individuals, we all have admin rights so we can add new members to our fold. The people in this group are incredible and, without them, I would not have been able to campaign, organise and build locally. Never ones to shy away from a challenge, we have planned conferences, public events and organised competitions. All with one goal in mind: organise members and change the world of education.

Perhaps one of the most exciting new initiatives in the North is NEUIdeas. This idea from Nik Jones is simple yet effective. Instead of waiting for new members to come to us, we go to them. Newcastle University have kindly let us work with their Primary PGCE cohort for two years running. We have introduced the students to our key campaigns and explained the importance of union activity.

Most importantly, we are giving them a voice. A chance for them to create their own educational campaign on an issue they feel strongly about. Over the course of a few months, a group of us mentor the students through the process of creating their campaign, assisting with research and ideas when needed. A panel of high-profile experts including MP’s, academics and trade unionists then judge which campaign is the winner at an awards evening.

As a region, we are now helping to roll out last year’s winning campaign about teacher mental health. Other students involved in the project told us how it had changed their view of a union from that of an insurance policy, to something capable of real change. This, I feel, is one of the reasons NEUIdeas has been so successful. It has shown that the union is not some unknown entity to call upon in times of need, but that we are the union. That what we do and what we think matters.

Most of the grassroots work we see in the North has stemmed from an idea one or other of our network has had. From highlighting the plight of invisible children lost in the SEND system, resulting in a 34,000 signature petition being delivered to the DfE in October by a phenomenal activist and her equally amazing son, to creating the `SEND help` conference – bringing educational professionals, healthcare workers and parents together to fight for funding. Our thoughts have led to some fantastic work.

If I could give one piece of advice it would be to share any ideas you have. No matter how insignificant or bizarre they may seem. Driving to work, thinking about the differences between 4 year olds now and what you did when you were 4 may not appear to be anything worth shouting about. Yet with the support of the grassroots network in the North, it is now a national campaign showing the detrimental effect baseline testing has on our children.

No idea you have is too small. From tiny acorns, mighty oaks grow. Share your concerns, your ideas and your dreams, no matter how far fetched they may seem. Use technology to bounce ideas back and forth, utilise the talents and passions of those around you. Organise. Mobilise. Change the world of education.

The post Organising in the North appeared first on education for tomorrow.