Why I do what I do – Part II

Or, What should schools teach?

In my first blog I suggested that the purpose of education should be rethought as being to develop a better society, not just to support the economy or the ambitions of the individual – a “social approach”. I suggested a core curriculum designed to give a broad understanding of our society’s geography, its histories and its varied, complex cultures; and an explicit narrative about the values children should grow up with.

Ofsted’s Chief Inspector Amanda Spielman made some very similar points in a speech last year[1], particularly about the “wretchedness” of reducing education to a “functional purpose”, and about the importance of teaching values – “a real civic education”. Her core message was that the curriculum is key – as she framed it, “the body of knowledge that we want to give to young people”; or in my rather broader terms, the question of with what knowledge, skills and values we agree children should leave school. Michael Young in his paper on “What are Schools For” gives a similar primacy to curriculum content, arguing that the distinctive role of schools in society is the transmission of knowledge – specifically, in an argument reminiscent of Hirsch, “powerful” or “emancipatory” knowledge that cannot be obtained at home.

So we broadly agree that we should have a purpose for our education system that is more than functional, and that the curriculum is the key to delivering it. But both Spielman’s speech and Young’s paper lack a core narrative that would shape the content of that curriculum. This is an attempt to structure such a narrative, organised around five principles and rooted in the idea that the purpose of education is primarily to build a stronger, happier society.

1. A set of universal reference points

A less fragmented society needs its members to share far more knowledge in common than ours does today – particularly about its history and culture. Two implications follow. Firstly, a genuinely national curriculum is imperative. The teaching profession may need more autonomy on how to teach, but what to teach is a very different question and is too important to society not to be shaped by political debate and set centrally, ensuring that all young people graduate with the same reference points. Secondly, depth should be sacrificed to breadth, both across subjects and within them. Having your literary and historical world circumscribed to Macbeth, Of Mice & Men and the rise of the Nazis is a huge disservice currently done to young people individually and collectively. The sciences teach a huge breadth of content to a limited depth – requiring specialists who go on to A-level or degrees to rethink fundamentals taught at 16, but ensuring that all children have some knowledge of the basic laws shaping our world. A shared understanding of the broad sweep of history, literature, art and potentially some social science seems equally important.[2] Within subjects that means teaching more, to less depth; across subjects it means a broader baccalaureate-style 16-18 curriculum.

2. Who we are and where we’re from

The next two principles shape what these reference points should consist of. Principle two suggests that our society needs a curriculum that promotes greater empathy, rooted in a better understanding of who we are. For this, young people need to understand the history that has shaped our society – struggles for democracy, industrialisation and de-industrialisation, colonialism, the relationship of church and state. They need to know something about the hugely varied cultures they and their peers come from and that exist around the world – including a compulsory foreign language, as a window on at least one other culture – but with an anchor in a common British heritage shared across generations. This means striking a difficult and unfashionable balance, between a conservative vision of teaching Britishness and a liberal vision of global education. The balancing act will be a success if they grow up both as “citizens of somewhere” and as citizens of the world.

3. The best that has been thought and said

The second principle shaping the content of our common reference points is drawn shamelessly from Matthew Arnold’s famous dictum. While Principle two focuses on common knowledge for society, Principle three is more interested in common knowledge for the individual –music or art that inspire, uplift and articulate profound emotion; literature, history, philosophy or theology that help young people think about their place in the world. This can and should be “the best” from anywhere in the world – Principle two would prioritise content that is to a large extent rooted in British society, but Principle three should open as many doors as possible to the breadth of human possibility from all cultures. And a Arnold went on to say, the purpose of understanding the best that has been thought and said is then “through this knowledge, to turn a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits”. Ground young people in their social context, and then give them the knowledge and perspective to critique it.

4. Values taught through content

Principles two and three deliberately begin to articulate the idea of a “civic education” proposed by Spielman. Part of this civic education is the understanding of your society; but part of it is the personal values you bring to it; and as I said in my previous blog, these values should not be taught as a subject but should run through the content. Crucially, this does not just mean content that is worthy, self-improving or moralising. Just to take poetry as an example, it does not just mean Kipling or Arnold himself (though they both have their place); it could be teaching empathy through Stevie Smith, Auden or Larkin; self-awareness through Eliot or Ginsberg; social justice through Blake or Zephaniah. There’s an important role here of course for a broad religious education, from a moral as well as a cultural perspective, alongside secular philosophy (currently more widely taught in schools in Europe than in Britain). It’s also important to note that these values are not appropriated as “British” – they are universal.

5. A foundation for thinking

A version of the “Matthew Effect” in education means that the more we know, the better we can think, and the better we think, the more we can know. In other words, we find it much easier to perceive things for which we have a frame of reference or a mental model.[3] My final principle, then, is that our curriculum needs to be structured with this insight in mind. Whatever content flows from the first four principles, it needs to be organised and taught in a framework that allows young people to absorb what they are learning, map it and add to it easily as they grow older; to think about what they are learning; and ideally to use it comparatively or analytically – thinking about literature, say, to reflect on a political question. Young people should know more, but also what they know should better enable them to keep on learning through their lives.

These principles have a range of implications. I’ve mentioned the need for a genuinely common national curriculum and a much broader range of subjects taught for longer; it’s worth highlighting three others. First, it’s a “traditional” curriculum in the sense that it’s knowledge-rich; but it should be obvious that any attempt to engage with this curriculum for the purpose it is intended will immediately require the development of “skills” – to debate, write, critique, express complex ideas clearly. There is no “knowledge vs skills” debate here. Second, it’s traditional in the sense that it’s academic; I’m open to the idea that a more vocational path might be right for some young people from 16, but they should not be cut off from this knowledge too soon. This curriculum should be the focus up to 16 and potentially even afterwards, taught in a more limited way in parallel to vocational study. And third, it is not an easy recommendation for the profession. It puts emphasis on the links between subjects, requiring a lot of cross-department collaboration; its breadth means it should start early, before secondary school; and in many cases it expects teachers to know more than they do now.

A final aside – I am not saying anything about how this should be taught. There is a lazy tendency in current debates to equate a “knowledge-rich” curriculum with one taught in a “traditional” fashion[4]. That would be the subject of a very separate blog, if there weren’t already 273 of those all over twitter written by people who have much more experience and better-researched views on how to teach effectively. This is about what to teach. And amid the twitterstorms of how to teach, I do think a bit more focus on what to teach would be helpful.

[1] One might argue I should have known about the speech before writing… oh the joys of blogging.

[2] I assume this would be – as it is currently – predominantly British history & literature, with some European and global context. See also point 3 though.

[3] https://ift.education/learning-paper/

[4] It seems to me that the new DfE “Curriculum fund” commits this error by funding the creation of teaching materials (“complete curriculum programmes”) which must “be knowledge-rich, and have teacher-led instruction and whole-class teaching approaches”. So it’s actually a how-to-teach fund disguised as a curriculum fund.

Why I do what I do – Part I

I work for an organisation that tried to help schools become better at their purpose. We help teachers in the classroom to be better teachers, and we help teachers in management roles to lead better organisations. So, better at what? We should be clear on the purpose that we believe schools should have before we can presume to improve them. What is our education system for? Effectively this is a curriculum question, in the broadest sense – with what knowledge, skills and values should our schools ensure children leave them?

The first and most obvious answer is – those that enable a child to prosper in society. This is the “instrumental approach” to schooling: at its best, the aim of giving the child freedom to follow their ambition. It has been the dominant policy theme at least for the last generation, increasingly involving two priorities – a focus at primary on basic skills, and at secondary on a body of “core knowledge” and a breadth of skills.

Basic skills seem uncontroversial. Since the origins of the universal school system in the nineteenth century, society has decided that a child’s ability to read, write and do basic mathematics should not be left to chance. The importance of enabling children to read, write and do basic maths is worth noting only insofar as our education system is still a long way from ensuring these skills are genuinely universal.

But the idea of a subsequent body of “core knowledge” is much harder, with no equivalent consensus on what should not be left to chance – what curriculum is needed to enable all children to prosper in society. There are broadly two schools of thought. One tries to anticipate what the next generation, and the country, will need in future, and to teach it directly. To maintain our society’s economic prosperity, schools needs to produce more innovators, more creators: a population with twenty-first century skills – be they behaviours such as teamwork or skills such as coding. Or more prosaically, we should learn more from Germany’s approach to technical schools and apprentices.[1].

The second focuses less on vocational content, and more on content that is useful to the child with their professional peers. This approach to “core knowledge”, best articulated by E.D. Hirsch, prescribes a traditional curriculum shaped around the dominant culture in society, thereby to ensure every child is given the “cultural capital” – a familiarity with the art, literature and history references that will enable them to achieve their ambitions even among the elite for whom that culture is a necessary entry point.[2]

Despite the conflict between the two schools, they share an assumption that the purpose of education is to enable children to fulfil their ambitions; such ambitions taking the form of social or economic success. This ethical underpinning is a respectable one – that children at the bottom of our unequal society deserve every chance to secure their future.

But what does it miss? The second broad purpose for our education system would think more about the development of society, not just of individuals – the “social approach”. It might still recommend a “traditional” curriculum, but its definition of core knowledge would be the broad understanding of our society’s geography, its histories and its varied, complex cultures necessary for the child to navigate their way through life with understanding and perspective. It would be less elitist than the cultural capital model; not concerned with providing a stock of capital for individual success, but with breaking down barriers; with giving every child a shared understanding of who we are as a society, where we have all come from and an empathy with those around us.

It would also complement that body of core knowledge with an explicit narrative about the values children should grow up with. This is rare today – either from a weariness about trying to teach values in class time or from a nervousness about making value judgements. The response to the idea of teaching citizenship or “British values” ranges from casual deprioritisation through cynicism to resentment. An instrumental approach has nothing to say about the values children should be taught. Yet it must be important that children leave school with a basic sense of empathy, self-awareness, responsibility to others and duty to society; taught not through PSHE but through geography, history, literature, art. And importantly, between the core knowledge and the values it teaches, this social approach must not just reproduce society – as schooling is often accused of doing – but critique it and encourage children to question its assumptions.

Seen in this light, the purpose of education is not just about the curriculum but about the school in society – not just about what you learn but with whom you learn. Exclusive communities – private schools, grammar schools, faith schools – which can perhaps be justified in an instrumental approach as being in some sense better for the ambitions of one group of children or another are all inimical to this social approach in which commonly shared experience, knowledge and values are of prime importance. Schools can neither aim to perpetuate or exclude any group in society.

Our first approach helps children achieve their ambitions but does not engage with what those ambitions could be. It also glosses over that not all children can fulfil every ambition – a fact that is the fault of our society and our economy, not of our schools. An education system with that purpose alone will continue to leave many children learning to labour – learning a pattern of behaviour for a future workforce but with no other benefit from their years at school.

Our second helps children understand and improve society. It is probably the best starting point for our education system today, given the risks around us – in the UK, in Europe, in the US – of an ever-more fragmented and mutually incomprehending society. But it says little about a child’s own place and identity in that society – how they reflect as they grow up on who they are, what they enjoy – and it remains instrumental in its approach to knowledge.

So there is a final possible perspective, which needs to complement the second. An “intrinsic” approach values knowledge for its own sake and for its ability to help us reflect on who we are and how we want to live. A love of learning is the thing – knowledge is enriching and enjoyable in itself, and as Alan Bennett’s dictum runs in the History Boys, “pass it on” is sometimes all you can, or should, do. Matthew Arnold wanted to hold up to children “the best that has been thought or said”, not as a store of cultural capital but for their enjoyment, to expand their horizons, and to help them understand themselves better. A child from any part of our multifaceted society deserves this. Education should give all children the breadth of knowledge to be free not just to achieve their ambition, but to choose their own identity and enjoy a wealth of knowledge of the world around them whoever they go on to be.

 

 

[1] A couple of challenges can be raised: either that we can’t really predict what skills will be needed; or that schools can’t effectively teach them, because teaching “skills” absent content is meaningless or that schools are the wrong place to teach workforce-based skills.

[2] Interestingly both approaches take a similar view of the importance of a science curriculum, on the assumption that to prosper in society, many children will want careers grounded in the sciences and that grounding needs to begin at school.

“That’s perfect – my state has 120,000 schools”: Scale in Education Reform

The poor quality of much education provision in developing countries is a well-rehearsed problem; yet solutions are elusive. Low cost private schools struggle to show that their quality is materially higher than that found in the public system. On the other hand no successful models exist for quality reforms in state education, either. Given this situation, there is increasing interest in a third alternative in which the state invites non-state organisations to manage public schools – an arrangement commonly called a public-private partnership (PPP) for education. In this context, one new venture ARK is exploring is the opportunity to manage such charter-style schools in India.

This interest took me to India last month to visit a range of schools and school operators. And in many ways, the non-state school landscape I found during that visit is an inspiring one. Providers such as Akanksha and Muktangan run excellent schools in which children are engaged and learning. These are the types of organisations who could inject real quality into the Indian education system under PPP arrangements.

Yet the key challenge is that of scale. In India, most non-state school operators have fewer than 20 schools. A few have as many as a thousand – but this is a system of over a million schools. In this context, it is unsurprising that our proposal for a charter-style schools policy received a sceptical response from the Permanent Secretary of one Indian state we visited. “I understand ARK operates 27 schools in the UK. That’s perfect – my state has 120,000 schools”.

So I have been mulling over a question since my return from India. Can a few, small non-state school chains really have an impact in a country with more than a million schools?

I think there are potentially three answers to this question – with different levels of plausibility. The most obvious is that a few, small school chains could become many, large ones – such that charter-style schools come to comprise the majority of the system. Unfortunately, there are several problems with this solution. Firstly, to attract a wide range of school operators, governments need investor-friendly policies that may be politically difficult to establish. Secondly, those operators have to expand their school networks without losing the quality found in each school. This can be extremely challenging; in most countries with charter systems, excellent providers co-exist alongside much less impressive ones. Finally, there might be limits on how far any single provider can scale up: few operators worldwide manage more than 50-100 schools. The vision for an education system transformed through many large networks of charter-style schools is therefore at best unproven.

A second answer could be to direct our enquiry at how small beacons of excellence can change the way in which public schools are run. Perhaps we can transfer into the state system the best ideas from non-state innovators? There is a case for this. One great benefit of a PPP is that it can bring a range of different school operators into a system, each of whom develops new solutions to the problems of running great schools in difficult circumstances. In theory these could then be transferred: if we were to operate our own school network in India, it would be run with comparable resources to the public system, so that solutions we find in our schools could plausibly be adopted by state authorities.

When you get under the skin of this idea, however, it’s not clear what it would mean in practice. Does an improved curriculum have impact, if delivered by the same teachers? Can teachers improve their teaching practice without better leadership, incentives or training? Can leaders manage effectively with poor information and assessment tools? How does accountability in the system affect outcomes? Like any sector of the economy, education is an ecosystem in which many parts need to function for the whole to be effective – transferring school-level “best practice” alone is unlikely to lead to change.

So our third and final answer requires us to think about this whole education ecosystem – but how can a small network of schools have impact at that level? Happily, ARK’s experience in the UK suggests a few helpful ideas. A key first step is not to try to change the behaviour of a bureaucracy, but to change its expectations: all children should achieve basic numeracy and literacy; all teachers can teach effectively; all state schools can achieve great results. The next step might be to help create the critical building blocks missing in many countries: services such as effective teacher training systems or standardised assessment tests. For this reason, ARK is setting up an incubator which plans to develop and spin off best practice ideas in these types of areas. The final, most difficult, step is not to try to change how schools are run – micro-managing success – but to change how they are held accountable and the parameters in which they operate. If a public system can start to manage its school system in the way that the best operators manage their networks, the whole ecosystem can start to shift towards quality.

How do we show governments what can be achieved, and thereby inspire this level of change in the way politicians and administrators think about the best way to run their education systems? A small network of excellent schools, run in partnership with government, on a government budget, could be the perfect place to start.