So Nicky Morgan didn’t last long. I might have said that her obvious lack of qualifications for the job doomed her chances of survival but that would be casting aspersions on you, too, now you’ve replaced her. Continuity will be safeguarded by Nick Gibb, never one to endear himself with teachers if he can help it, but staying on as schools minister.
Ever since 1988, teachers and parents have had to put up with the bloodsport of education ministers and heads of Ofsted hounding us for being inadequate. Let’s hope at the very least you’ll ban this and remember that the cohort of teachers and parents is the one you’ve got. A better approach would be to consider how the combined wisdom within these thousands of people can be harnessed.
The recent history of education in England offers some signposts. There used to be something called the Schools Council. The idea behind it was to get teachers and academics to research best practice and recycle it to schools. One example of what it produced: a 110-unit programme for teachers and pupils on how to investigate language in use. That’s real language, not the filleted, chopped-up, invented nonsense dished up in the spelling, grammar and punctuation test for year 6 children. And you’ll see that word “investigate” – not the prescriptive, untruthful requirements of the test.
But initiatives such as Language in Use (that was the name of the programme) and the Schools Council itself turned out to be too threatening for people in government. The council was abolished and its publications died on the branch. The whole procedure was repeated in the early 90s. The government of the day set up something truly remarkable: an England-wide investigation of Literacy and “Oracy” (talking and listening), the Language in the National Curriculum (Linc) project. I suspect it was a process that involved the largest number of teachers researching their practice that there has ever been in this country. It was an experiment in harnessing the combined wisdom of the profession, assisted by academics, that would serve as a model for any part of the curriculum.
Everyone could see it was doing two things at the same time: developing ideas about how best to teach, developing teachers professionally as researchers of their own practice. People in government quickly saw this as a threat and abolished the whole thing before the project bore fruit. Millions of pounds of public money was chucked.
In place of the Schools Council and Linc approach to teaching, we have a Napoleonic method. Successive secretaries of state or schools ministers decide what’s best and the profession has to jump to it – with one refinement: the ministers deny this is what they’re up to. In my meetings with both Labour and Tory education ministers, when faced with the possibility of putting in place a truly “rigorous”, universal policy on reading for pleasure, they recoiled and said: “We don’t do directives from on high any more.” Excuse me if I’ve been laughing ever since, through all the hundreds of directives tumbling out of the Department for Education.
The consequences are sitting on your desk right now. There’s the academy conversion debacle, one of the greatest evidence-free vanity projects ever put in place. Now Michael Gove has been excluded after his behaviour issues, he’ll have time to reflect on this.
The 2016 primary school Sats were a disgrace, if for no other reason than the high failure rate. The hapless Morgan tried to justify it on the grounds that they were of a higher standard. One of my children did them. They weren’t “higher”, they were more obscure and in the end, neither reliable or valid. One tiny example: there is no right/wrong answer to the question “what is the antonym of ‘fierce’?” That’s because if you take a word out of context, it can’t have an antonym. It all depends on how it’s used. The only way it can have a “right” answer is if the examiner invents a context the child can’t see. As I said, not “higher” standards at all. It was nonsense used as a means of measuring teachers’ ability to teach nonsense. Our school’s potential for academy conversion was gauged by testing my child’s breaking point.
I see your job is bigger than Morgan’s. Universities have been added to your portfolio. The news from London Metropolitan, a university with one of the largest BME intakes in the country, is cuts and sackings. Presumably one of your first jobs will be to explain to Theresa May how that fits the one-nation Toryism she seems so keen on.
Yours, Michael Rosen
