BY JOE NUTT
When Bridget Phillipson’s excruciatingly embarrassing Reign of Error comes to its inevitably ignominious end, all those seriously and professionally involved in thinking about policy relating to schools in the UK, need to grasp the opportunity her failure has dramatically exposed. She will have left a bomb site behind her. Her only achievement has been to dramatically confirm the reality that schools are simply not safe in the hands of politicians.
Like so many of her colleagues, she is not a reformer at all. These people are Marxist dinosaurs, desperately trying to fulfil the adolescent fantasies of their hippy parents. Everyone can now see that our children’s education is not something to be sacrificed on the altar of political ideology; it is far more precious and important to the nation than any adolescent education minister’s belief that there is intellectual nourishment hiding somewhere in a bowl of cornflakes. What all three nations need is genuine reform and on an ambitious scale. The havoc Phillipson has been so busy wreaking is only mimicking what devolution has already done to Welsh and Scottish schools.
However hard it is to accept, it’s become clear for several decades now that politicians are incapable of delivering high quality schools in any numbers. Yes, there have been some improvements but these have been either geographically, managerially and most often, educationally limited. Katharine Birbalsingh at Michaela School, and others who have had similarly transformational impacts on individual schools, know only too well how difficult it is to replicate such complex changes. Inspirational, competent leaders are rare and you can’t clone them. Transposing business change management strategies to schools has been an equally fruitless step, simply because genuinely great schools are unique and neither big business nor ministers deal in non-conformity. Hence the limitations of the Multi Academy Trust model which has only ever managed to make small numbers of weak, and even barbaric schools, better.
But for the bold and genuine professionals out there, there are aspects of UK education that will be much more amenable to genuine reform. One of these is how we train our teachers.
Katharine, amongst others, has rightly pointed out in the national press the fundamental weaknesses of Phillipson’s demand that all teachers have a teaching qualification. I’ve had extensive experience training teachers, for numerous businesses and in a university setting, so I know that you will find precious few of them who would recommend their training experience to others. The gap between what is taught and what they need to do in real classrooms is often substantial, even where training bodies try to make practical experience in classrooms a core feature of their curriculum. This is as true in the US as it is in the UK. Over decades we have developed a teacher training culture which serves trade unions and civil servants, but not schools, parents or children.
At this point I’d stress that what follows applies only to secondary teaching. One of the key issues in all education sector discussion, is the way primary and secondary schooling is conflated; as though they were just two faces of the same coin. They really aren’t.
Successful schooling is quintessentially, simply a matter of knowledge transfer. Ideally, as a vibrant, civilised culture we put knowledgeable adults in places specifically designed so that they can pass their knowledge on to teenagers, in order that our culture and the nation can both thrive. Too often those places don’t allow that transfer to happen for a multiplicity of reasons, the most common and intransigent one being that parents and pupils simply do not buy into that design. There is no high quality school anywhere in the world where the vast majority of children and parents don’t embrace the simple, practical purpose of classrooms, and timetabled lessons. They are designed so that one adult can pass on their knowledge to many children, without disruption or interference. No teacher, however inspirational, energetic or caring can succeed, beyond surviving, in any school in which that doesn’t happen.
When you next think about secondary school lessons and what they require to be successful, whatever the subject being taught, the overwhelming number rely on there being one or more educational assets at the heart of each lesson. Skilled teachers choose these assets very carefully and build their lessons around them. They form the core content of all textbooks. They may be images, graphs, tables, diagrams, entire texts or text extracts, facsimiles of documents or even sometimes tangible objects; but teachers absolutely require them to convey their knowledge. They are a necessity.
You can talk to a class as much as you like about what’s in your head, but without material to illustrate or demonstrate that, even the most articulate teacher risks becoming a very tepid evangelical.
The most interesting aspect of this process is that undoubtedly the most effective teachers choose the assets they need themselves, to suit the children and the timing of the lesson within a course, very carefully. That personal choice is central to the success of any lesson. This is why teachers who slavishly follow a textbook are never as successful as those who, as one experienced American superintendent once put it, own the curriculum. It’s also why attempts by Multi-academy trusts and others to standardise lessons, never achieve anything other than mediocrity.
One of the most damaging flaws in our current schools landscape is the presence of many teachers trying to teach subjects they are not in command of. No amount of teaching qualifications can remedy a subject specific weakness.
When you finally reflect on where these assets originate from, you realise that we have missed a trick by housing teacher training largely in universities. The Victorians knew that education works in this way, which was why they placed such immense, public value on the museum, gallery and archive. They grasped that if what you want is a genuinely educated population, then collecting and making those priceless assets accessible, really matters.
So when the chance for real reform comes, as it will, what I would like to see most of all in the UK is some kind of truly radical managerial and even geographical shift, in which secondary teacher training is housed, not in universities, but in these asset storage organisations: in museums, galleries, archives and other collections. Not only will that facilitate the whole knowledge transfer process, it will refocus schooling on the cultural and national renewal we can all see is so desperately needed.
It would also have the huge national benefit of reminding these institutions themselves of their core purpose and educational responsibility. By entrusting them with such a profoundly important national role; training subsequent generations of teachers, we would create a situation where their political neutrality can also be legally enforced. Peddling the latest political fads or cultural messages is of course anathema in any well run organisation entrusted with training professional teachers.
Would it not be much better for British teachers to have gained their teaching qualification from The Walker Art Gallery, the Science Museum, The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust or the V&A, rather than the flat-pack, deeply politicised, pseudo-universities Tony Blair’s marketing mantra “education, education, education” actually condemned us to?
Joe Nutt is an essayist and the author of several books about the poetry of Donne, Milton and Shakespeare and a collection of essays, The Point of Poetry.