Our Education system is due a Jag Ad revisit...
Everyday is a school day
I wholeheartedly believe in ‘classrooms without walls’ and ‘learning without boundaries’ - snazzy little taglines, no? They have served me well by capturing the essence of my own pedagogy after many crystalising years in the business of Early Years, Education and Special Needs Education. Such mantras have allowed me to maneourve through the shadows of periphery education and therapies as my talents and training, time and inclination takes me.
It has soaked up rich experiences of learning outdoors with children, immersed in Nature, taken me to corners of the teaching realms I had studied and heard of, but only as an antidote to the groundhog dayness of so many day to day school/nursery staff rooms. But the truth of the matter is, is that like so many other aspects of our modern lives, schooling too has been reduced to taglines, marketing USP’s, models, marketable programmes/themes and schemes, memes and outcomes. To its detriment.
I have long since pondered why if children are curious discoverers and divergent thinking innovators, and our Education system classrooms and knowledge acquiring spaces are where it is that ‘school’ learning should be happening, why are children not banging the doors down to get in? What has gone wrong?
For my money, we have laid our professionals souls out for imprinting to the ‘fix it’ consultants, the problem solving ‘solution focussed’ experts, the SLT’s and the ‘change agent’ initiatives over decades and the relentless incline to oblivion of additional skillsets/CPD qualifications in the name of demonstrable progress being evidenced as made.
In essence, we have lost our way, overwhelmed by those who, although often through good intent, have lost sight of the learner at the core of all we do.
It was all there in the National Curriculum pre-ambles, most specifically reflected on in private files of the now late Margaret Thatcher, when
In 1986, policy adviser Oliver Letwin wrote in his ‘swansong’ direct memo to Mrs Thatcher on leaving the policy unit that she (Thatcher) had "failed" to give people more responsibility for their own lives within the education system. He went on to say that there had been no effort to change the "framework" - a point noted by Mrs Thatcher in her personal files with a large black tick in the margin of the memo received - and that education was still "a nationalised industry".
"The provider decides what the customer ought to have, largely ignoring what the customer actually wants," he continued - words which the then prime minister underlined….
….The private files include a paper titled "Education without LEAs", marked "secret" - politicians and civil servants knew how controversial these ideas would be.
The documents show that Keith Joseph, education secretary from 1981 to 1986, had wanted to create 12 new independent state primary schools to show how a new approach would work.
The idea was supported by Mrs Thatcher, and other members of the cabinet were enthusiastic too.
Extracts form Berg 2014, in a BBC News article entitled
“Margaret Thatcher explored education overhaul, archives show”
We have political actors in our histories that were clear that a decentralised, away from central funding (and control) was to be ideologically avoided in a model that relinquished the education of children back to communities they exist in and beyond the reach of LEA’s. So, in a world driven by capitalism, and and its overbearing big brother, corporatism, what if we forgot to be customers, voters and taxpayers and instead focussed in on being parents, teachers and advocates for our collective children - when are we going to begin to imagine for ourselves, and on behalf of children and young people as their advocates, what we want supplied?
From the deficit model driven by ‘value added education’, from target driven, progress tracking, trajectory recording and SMART outcome, the ensuing Thatcher era story of education, hammered home by the now visible uniparty political leaders of the last 30 years, has seen it hugely overcooked and we have devalued every authentic learning experience children might have encountered in decades we all might be nostalgic of.
Whether it is the sticker for ‘good listening’ or weekly certificate for attendance, we have overdone it. Using the carrot as the stick you could say. Have we perhaps created such a grayness of the learning experience that it denies children the colour palette they need to hold their interest, and harness their intrinsic motivation for learning sufficiently? Or more importantly, inbue the value of learning anew as a character and life trait?
As the grown ups in the room, the ones ultimately responsible for the children and youths in our communities, and in our schools, we are going to have to own it, our mistakes, our lessons learned and be bold in creating anew.
The human inclination and primal learning mechanism to ‘categorise’ has been capitalised on and monetised in every possible perspecitve niche of modern schooling. But as fund savings, streamlining and ‘value adding’ has occurred over decades, it has become a bit thin in its fundamental resource - people with time to care. When we have become so reductive in our differentiation that it becomes necessary to create legislation and regulations to protect the rights of the learner, we have cut too deep into the baseline bottom line.
A renaissance in education is coming, not because the current Secratry of State has completed a National Curriculum review recently, but because the lived experience of so many ‘education customers’ hasn’t delivered on providing the skills, knowledge or motivation for lifelong learning we all have the right to have preserved during our most vulnerable years as humans, our childhoods.
If you have already been bold enough to devote your lives, careers and focus to be the guardians of the wellbeing of the children you know and/or their teaching as your vocation, children need us to remember that and be bold for them now.