Opinion Piece
I’ve recently been talking a lot with educators about the potential to improve, and I get confronted almost exclusively with the following responses;
“that’s lovely but idealistic”
“that would never work in our setting”
“we haven’t got the time/capacity/resources”
or worst of all;
“they don’t pay me to do that”
I get it, teachers are underpaid, under-appreciated and forced to be accountable in ways that stifle the vocation. They are taken away from the teaching by the paperwork and given unsustainable amounts of work. Its tough. No question. But why do we as educators put up with it?
And this is the crux of it all for me; we are stuck in a system that is designed to provide accountability at all costs, and willing to forego learning in the process. It is a system that doesn’t seem to care if learners don’t get a well rounded education as long as the minimal and reductive content that is stuffed into their heads is well measured and can be regurgitated at will by willing and well behaved automatons.
So why on earth would anyone fight to save this system? There are many well meaning attempts to reform the process and systems in education but we are well past the ability of tinkering at the edges to solve anything. Changing a few minor bits won’t help in the end. It’s fiddling while Rome burns. We need system wide changes to support education better and make it fit for purpose in the 21st Century.
I want to clarify here that I am not talking about specific pedagogy, there is some fantastic teaching that goes on that is doing what it has been asked to do incredibly effectively; which is meet the outcomes of the national curriculum and exam boards criteria. This is not about teacher bashing, and it is not denigrating the profession people work so hard in. But we need serious reform to support this good work.
Some suggestions:
- Decouple education from government. We will never achieve long term aims in education when we are forced to reform practise every 5 years on the whim of the political system. Education is a tool for governments to use because it has a large impact almost immediately due to the large public sector element, and it is easy to make changes because largely the school age population will not impact on the votes the government receives. It is a safe playground for government reforms and it suffers massively as a result. It is open to political whims, lobbying and political point scoring all of which are to the detriment of the learners. Yes education must be accountable to the political system and open to voter influence, but this should be through a cross party coalition of experts that are well guided in reforms by expert panels, and there should be a mandatory long view approach that looks at lifelong learning not just the election cycle.
- We need a curriculum that supports the world of the future not classic subject based approaches. There is so much in education that is learned too late. Vocational elements only available in later secondary and up, there is a lack of functional skills across the board for learners, and almost no time or focus given to a wider holistic curriculum. Look at the skills that industry are saying they need in a future workforce; team building, communication, problem solving etc. Where is this in the curriculum? Yes you can say this is all included in what is already there, but is it helping learners to consciously grow and develop a skillset? “percentages are taught in year 7 so we are covering tax and interest rates” Does this really cut it? I think to argue we are already doing well enough is to be an apologist for a broken system.
- We need to see education as holistic and lifelong. The system is siloed from all sides. We have such a knowledge heavy curriculum that we are unable to find time to see Pastoral elements of learning as a crucial part of the curriculum too. If learners are not able to learn how to interact, manage emotions, discuss and debate and disagree well, then they are not being prepared for civic life, adulthood or employment. Education is also siloed in terms of funding, how much damage is done in society by not having the health, education and prison services all united in supporting the development of happy healthy and well rounded individuals who are able to contribute? We see social problems in isolation too often and it bears a very real social, human and financial cost.
We owe our future generations more than we are currently providing for them. We owe ourselves more as professionals, and we owe the country more in terms of productivity in the workforce and civic involvement. We can do better, we should do better.
What we need is system wide reform, not just tweaking Ofsted guidance or the curriculum. The world around us has changed, to the textbooks in school currently, written 30 years ago, the world is unrecognisable. The jobs of today were not even conceivable 30 years ago and the jobs of tomorrow don’t even exist yet. We cannot base the needs of individuals or society on a knowledge based curriculum any more, we simply do not know what knowledge is needed. We no longer have a static predictable system in which we operate. We need to be equipping people with the ability to build skillsets and toolkits for learning, to be able to cope with and adapt to change and to understand how to navigate the plethora of reliable and unreliable sources of information in the world.
Someone once said the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result. Education is a broken dinosaur that is failing the next generation and the answer so far to this failing system? More of the same.
Shevek Pring 