Turning Back the Counter Revolution
Blog 17 Ken Jones outlines the 'Jigsaw of Control' the Tories have put in place in education. Meena Wood blames one of the pieces, the narrow curriculum, for many of the service's problems
A Jigsaw of Control
Emeritus Professor Ken Jones (Goldsmiths College) catalogues the counter-revolution in education and asks how far a Labour government will challenge it.
For more than 40 years, schooling in England has experienced a long counter-revolution. Since 2010, that process has speeded up.
Its central features are well known – a punitive inspection system, a curriculum shaped by preparation for tests and exams. Less often noticed is a thread of policy which supplies the counter-revolution with much of its coherence. In a host of ways, the constitution of schooling – the laws, regulations and government practices on which it is grounded – has been redesigned so as minimise the space available for ideas and actions which might question or challenge a new orthodoxy. This is a system which has insulated itself against the wrong kind of change.
As in many other countries, the counter-revolution rests on the suppression of forces and institutions which were central to an earlier period of progressive reform. Elected local authorities are a shadow of their former selves. Unions lack negotiating rights and if the government has its way are about to be deprived of their effective right to strike. Teachers, whose energies were once recognised as an essential resource for educational change, are assigned the role of deliverers of a curriculum designed by the multi-academy trusts for which they work and shaped at crucial points by the political preferences of government.
At stake here are issues of democracy, understood in a broad sense. For school-workers as trade unionists, they centre on freedom to organise. For school workers as educationalists, they involve the right to voice individual and collective opinion, to be recognised as legitimate social actors, possessing knowledge and expertise.
For students and parents, questions of voice and representation are in play. In each case, democratic practice is confronted by tendencies towards increased central control, by managements which seek to extend the frontiers of their control of teachers’ practice – or by a combination of both. The effect is to create a dense infrastructure of practice, shot through with restrictions, sometimes in the form of legislation, sometimes of guidance and sometimes of preferred forms of provision.
An example of the latter is the Oak National Academy, set up with £43 million of funding as an ‘arm’s length’ agency of government to provide schools with curriculum materials and programmes. Oak is presented as an answer to the problem of teacher workload and an alternative to what the Department for Education claims to be teachers’ habit of planning the curriculum ‘from scratch’. Strongly pushed by Ofsted, and adopted by the managements of some school trusts, Oak is a means of transferring curriculum initiative from school to government, from local context to central authority. Ministers will appoint its chair and its non-executive directors. Its budget, business plan, objectives and Key Performance Indicators must be agreed by Ministers.
Oak is another piece in a jigsaw of control. It belongs alongside numerous other initiatives. The Phonics programme imposes on primary schools ministers’ preferred – and not particularly effective – methods of teaching reading. ‘Reforms’ to teacher education have diminished the role of universities, and thus of educational research, in favour of new creations like the National Institute of Teaching and the Ambition Institute for the professional development of teachers. Ofsted has set itself up as an authority on educational research, producing a series of reviews of curriculum research which either ignore or disparage educational traditions which run counter to current models.
The jigsaw of control has other, more overtly authoritarian elements. Every school has a statutory commitment to implement the Prevent strategy, described by Amnesty International as an activity akin to that of a thought police. Local Authorities, in one of the few growth areas, employ Prevent officers, in regular touch with schools. The government funds a large collection of curriculum materials, devoted to the fight against radicalisation and extremism.
Prevent’s deterrent effect on student and parent voice is by now a well-established fact. The threat to refer parents and students to Prevent has been deployed by some school managements to control responses to what is happening in Gaza.
Alongside Prevent sits government guidance on ‘political impartiality in schools’, a document which names Black Lives Matter as a movement that ‘goes beyond the basic shared principle that racism is unacceptable’. Classroom discussion of ‘potential solutions for climate change’ is likewise a problematic area.
One test of a Labour government’s democratic credentials will be whether it possesses the understanding and determination to undo the system elaborated since 2010. This would mean taking a hard look at Labour’s own past. The habit of regarding teachers as a policy problem and the years of progressive reform as an educational disaster were solidly established in the Blair years, even if it took a Michael Gove to turbo-charge them.
Unless the achievements of the counter-revolution are challenged and reversed, the promise which the labour movement has always seen in education – one of individual fulfilment and social emancipation – will continue to be denied.
This article was originally written for Labour Hub
Leading on an inclusive education through an equitable curriculum; a game changer.
Meena Kumari Wood, author, former college, secondary principal and HMI
As Transformative Leaders if we want to do well by all our children, then we could be steered by an ambitious vision of tackling the bleak backdrop of a rising trajectory of permanent and fixed term exclusions over the past thirteen years. This persists, despite behaviour hubs and a Behaviour Tsar. Boys, Irish, Black Caribbean, Gypsy and Roma, disadvantaged pupils and those with special educational needs and disabilities are significantly far more likely to be excluded than their peers.
Lowering the current unacceptably high levels of persistent absence in our schools means addressing the challenge of approximately 1.7 million children missing from education. Young people I talk with may cite inconsistent and unfair approaches by teachers in applying school behaviour policies, resulting in repeat internal exclusions. Some raise the barriers they face in accessing the curriculum, including their literacy, oracy, numeracy, language skills, or other educational needs. Others identify the quality of the teaching as, without doubt, the prime factor affecting their learning and motivation.
So far, so expected. A strong correlation between curriculum, exclusions and persistent absence is seldom postulated. And yet, a knowledge-based curriculum with sequential learning should raise concerns. As leaders, do we ensure ‘excluded’ students are consistently monitored in every subject and lesson they miss? Do they receive quality teacher feedback so they ‘catch up’ on learning missed? Undeniably, gaps in students’ knowledge and skills, accruing over time across the curriculum, demotivate and can result in a vicious cycle of poor behaviours and low achievement leading to repeat exclusions.
Most importantly, young people know only too well when the curriculum is relevant and meaningful for them. The curriculum may not cater well for children who do not fit the typical mould of an academic student. Increasingly, schools are dropping technical and creative subjects such as D+T performing arts, music, art in favour of EBAcc subjects.
In researching Secondary Curriculum Transformed, I spoke with many young people whose stories speak of an almost inevitable disaffection. Kwesi, for example, was permanently excluded. “I’m not smart academically and am dyslexic,” he told me. “I found science, construction, technology easy but had to find my own way of solving things and remembering information. I wanted to be an architect but failed maths and English GCSEs.”
The secondary curriculum cannot be deemed broad or balanced unless it recognises students’ actual capability and future aspirations and preferences. Even the most academic are challenged when faced with Year 9 subject choices. One student saw her career aspiration of robotic engineering reduced to a Hobsons’ Choice. She was unable to pursue both technology and computer science as her options were narrowed by EBacc targets and Progress 8 ‘baskets.
A more equitable education system means curricular pathways enabling young people to move seamlessly from key stage 4 into post-16 academic or vocational education, training or apprenticeship. Countries as diverse as Singapore and Estonia have created an ‘adaptive curriculum pathways model’, with equal parity for academic, creative and technical subjects. Learners can choose or combine their disciplinary pathways. By so doing, there is a commitment to social levelling, plus a recognition that all skills and knowledge are pathways to lifelong learning and employment. Narrow choices in the UK mean too many are unable to study the technical, vocational, creative subjects they want, or need for their post-16 destination, owing to a lack of
parity between A levels T levels and BTec. It is hardly surprising that by Year 9 or 10, a great many feel they have been shoehorned into subjects they didn’t choose and become disaffected or disengaged. Coincidentally, these are the year groups with the highest levels of exclusion and persistent absence nationally. Tragically, one way or another young people vote with their feet and behaviours to avoid being in school, with generation after generation of wasted talent and potential.
Finally, Ofsted does not hold schools/Trusts to account for these unreasonably high levels of exclusions and persistent absence, resulting in loss of learning for pupils with the same characteristics. Why? Because inspectors are no longer tasked to scrutinise the school’s SEF and its pupil data; nor do they probe the effectiveness of school’s policies for impact of improving behaviours, attendance and exclusions by specific pupil groupings. Ofsted is solely preoccupied with the priority of ensuring the EBAcc sequenced curriculum results in ‘knowing more and remembering more’. Ironically, inspectors are unable to test these cognitive science theories with the ‘invisible children’ as these have either chosen not to sit in lessons, or have been kicked out of lessons. No school should be seen as strong, and no trust should be allowed to grow, if high proportions of pupils with EHCPs in its catchment area attend other schools, without a really compelling and fully audited explanation. I recognise this is not straightforward and we need to guard against unintended consequences with any accountability measure, but the work of FFT Datalab shines a light on the issue through analysis of the profiles of schools' cohorts and the extent to which they reflect the areas in which they are located.
One of the true marks of transformative leaders is embracing the mindset. We are all connected, through Ubuntu ( a Zulu/ Swahili expression ); meaning a "how can we all thrive" approach, rather than a "how can me and mine thrive." A powerful game changer as a leader is to listen to our students without fear or favour, and place children’s voices and aspirations – especially those who are marginalised – at the heart of planning their future education. Only then can we make a difference to their lives and remake our social settlement.
Meena Wood is the author of ‘Secondary Curriculum Transformed: Enabling All to Achieve’ Routledge 2020 Secondary Curriculum Transformed: Enabling All to Achieve - 1st Edition (routledge.com) ( 20% discount code SMA38) The book features on the core reading list for the MEd in Educational Leadership (University of Birmingham) and has led to a series of training workshops in UK, Northern Ireland, Dubai and India. Meena Wood was a former FE College Principal, DfE Education Adviser, HMI Ofsted and Principal of a Secondary Academy. She currently supports schools in the UK, including Alternative Provision providers through curriculum reviews and leading on peer review systems, instructional coaching, inspection and governance.
Event: Come to ‘Priorities in Education for the next Labour Government: Tackling the Counter Revolution’ March 9th Central London with Ken Jones, Diane Reay, Lloyd Russell Moyle MP et al
Details and sign up here