Socialist Educational Association |
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The Caroline Benn Memorial Lecture 2007 Terry Wrigley Another
school is possible Perhaps I am the first person to
give the Caroline Benn Memorial Lecture who did not know Caroline
personally. That is a great regret and loss for me, and it is an
enormous honour to be chosen to present the lecture
today. The diverse contributions in the Tribute volume edited by
Melissa Benn and Clyde Chitty testify to her historic contribution to
one of the most important democratic struggles of our time, a struggle
which connects our personal and professional lives. In my own case, the struggle for
comprehensive schools links my family roots with my professional
activity. There is one story I hear each time I visit my 80 year old
mother. Born in a very poor Irish immigrant family, growing up in
Blackburn at the height of the Depression, she emerged as ‘top of the
class’. Despite her high marks in the first stage of the Scholarship
exam for entry to grammar school, she was told there was no point her
sitting the second stage because her family could not possibly afford
the school uniform. Ironically, the message came from the headmistress,
a nun from the same convent which ran the Catholic girls grammar school
from which she was barred. She stayed on until the age of 14 at St
Mary’s elementary school. When she had read all the books in the
cupboard, she was told to read the same books again. To add insult to
injury, she remembers visits to her teacher by a former classmate who
had gained a place at the convent grammar school despite being 17th in
the class. There are parallels today. The German PISA research
discovered that even pupils with similar levels of literacy had very
different destinations according to their social class background; the
child with professional parents was three times as likely to go to the
grammar school as the child of semi-skilled or unskilled manual workers.
I owe my own educational success
and my professional engagement in large part to my parents’ justified
anger and their determination that we would not suffer the same fate. I
was reminded of her story recently, at the House of Commons Committee of
Enquiry on Academies; campaigners from Walsall were able to provide an
explanation of how the Academy there had re-engineered its population,
to reduce the free school meal percentage from 51% to 11%. Prospective
parents were interviewed and told they could not benefit from the
education offered by the school if they did not have broadband internet
access. They were also told of school uniform requirements. The sports
kit alone costs £125.
These personal histories ground
us, and protect us against the false histories perpetrated by New Labour
ideologues. I read in one document that, before the 1990s, there was no
innovation and no standards. I recently challenged the head of the TDA
on her version of history: she had told the BELMAS conference that the
government had needed to use authoritarian methods to move schools from
being awful to being alright, but now we were on the way to excellence,
so schools had been given autonomy and there was policy coherence, if
only headteachers were good enough leaders to manage it. I asked what
evidence she had for her version of history? when precisely were schools
just awful, and when did they become OK? It appears they were awful when
Michael Barber took over, and the evidence that it’s fine now is the
test results. More on this later.
The struggle for comprehensive
schools must be understood in depth. It is undeniably a struggle about
institutions, but it is also a struggle about ethics, political virtues
and in the rich Germanic sense of the word, pedagogy. The struggle for
comprehensive education is about social justice, equality and (as Steve
Sinnott reminds us in a recent NUT publication) the virtue and practice
of solidarity. As Caroline Benn and those who worked closely with her
constantly remind us, it is a question of school culture and not simply
structure – though structure is fundamental: we cannot have an
egalitarian culture in an elitist selective structure.
This struggle is not completed by
a school reorganisation implemented once and for all. Indeed what we
once thought was a secure historic settlement has turned out not to be
quite so solid.
In the early days, many saw
comprehensive schools as a way of overcoming social division. Actually,
there were other forces at work. Islands of ‘civic socialism’ are an
illusion while society remains irreconcilably divided between
capitalists and workers (by workers I mean all employees, blue or white
collar. I am using Marx’s understanding of a society divided
fundamentally into two great classes, capitalist and proletariat). This,
and all those other divisions which this fundamental opposition
generates and sustains, for example the division between manual and
white collar and professional workers, cannot be overcome by forms of
schooling alone. The wider society intrudes time and again into
education. For example, we cannot simply blame divisive patterns of
school choice on ‘pushy parents’ without recognizing the deep
insecurities brought about by neo-liberalism. Nor should we be surprised
that some young people appear uninterested in school, when they and
their parents struggle against crushing poverty.
I think we can sum up one strand of the comprehensive school dream with the term ‘meritocracy’, that ‘equality of opportunity’ that occurred so frequently in Blair’s speeches. It did not take long to see that comprehensive schools alone would not transform a hierarchical society, increasingly divided in our present era. Meritocracy – the British version of the American Dream – is not equality but a steep and slippery ladder. It was not the comprehensive school itself which led to underachievement. It was not the schools which were too ‘bog standard’. It was the boggy ground, the social and economic morass which thwarts the aspirations and undermines the achievement of so many young people. As the PISA studies have shown, the UK is one of the most divided societies, and one in which those divisions are most seriously replicated educationally. Firstly, we have poverty -
the sheer Weight of the World, as Bourdieu put it. As part of
this, the loss of hope and prospects which is, in many ways, the
enduring consequence of the de-industrialisation which Thatcher
engineered, and which subsequent neo-liberal governments regard as
beyond the scope of governments to alter.
Secondly, and again drawing on
Bourdieu, we have the explanatory concepts of cultural capital and
social capital. Even when offered the ‘same education’, some
children are less able to draw benefit from it. For example, their prior
experiences and talents are undervalued in school; they have less access
to support networks which help them overcome difficulties along the way.
Part of the struggle to develop truly comprehensive schools was about
providing a broad curriculum which would value the world of working
class pupils, and of the many cultures represented in our city schools.
It was also about developing community schools, in reality not just
name, which would connect up with the lives and needs of parents, and
not just those who played golf with the headmaster. In Bourdieu’s
terms, part of the function of comprehensive schools was to re-value
what had been de-valued, turning popular interests into cultural
capital, and turning social networks into social capital.
The struggle for comprehensive
education is tied up with the whole policy environment. Indeed,
comprehensive schools are being undermined by wider educational policy. I wish to consider some of the
key ways in which the school system is governed, 1) the regime by which they are
judged, 2) the ways in which central
government has sought to raise educational standards. These are supported by the
dominant academic paradigms called School Effectiveness and School
Improvement, and there is a strong two-way relationship between the
academic fields and the practical real of school governance,
though in the last resort government ignores the subtler findings
of the academic fields.
The evaluation regime is a
strange hybrid of centralised control and local market competition.
Central government sets the terms which bring about the local
competition, and ensures that it is high stakes. This is governance by
numbers, and, as I have argued in the first chapter of Schools of Hope,
it is reductionist. The complexities are reduced to percentages on which
spurious comparisons are based. There are, of course, historical
precedents: Taylorism as a regime of industrial management, and the
accountability structures of Stalinist Russia. The latter used as its
proxy measure of economic growth the tonnage of pig iron produced. The
quality didn’t matter, nor indeed whether the people needed pig iron
or more food on the table. Such evaluation methods produce a
bog-standard economy.
Similarly, in the English school
system, SAT results and the percentage 5 A*-Cs are the proxy measures
used to evaluate schools. The motto of the government should be ‘Never
mind the quality, feel the width’. As Mary Hilton’s and Peter Tymms’
research, recently taken up by the Primary Review, has shown, KS2
reading tests were made easier to prove that the literacy hour was
working, yet Lord Adonis continues to boast of better test results.
Similarly, when politicians needed to show that government policies were
helping inner-city schools in the key Labour heartlands, they invented
the spurious GNVQ=4 A-Cs equivalence – an equivalence which has never
been tested by QCA or OfSTED, and which later came in useful in the
claim that the Academies programme was bringing results. I referred earlier to the way in
which the subtleties of the academic field are ignored when they are
inconvenient. School Effectiveness Research, also deeply reductionist,
nevertheless tries to factor in the impact of poverty on school
achievement. It is inconceivable that our new Prime Minister did not
know or understand this when he threatened the closure of schools not
achieving 30% 5A*-Cs with English and Maths. In doing so, he put a
failure label on a third of Sheffield’s schools, half of
Newcastle’s, Sunderland’s, Liverpool’s. Indeed, half of
Birmingham’s schools, once you leave aside grammar schools. And
remember Birmingham was hailed as the flagship authority, to the credit
of its director of education Tim Brighouse. In effect, the net of
privatisation has suddenly been enlarged. Who will apply for the
headship or a teaching post in these schools in the knowledge that they
are under threat, and that inspectors and so-called school improvement
partners will never be away from the door. Incidentally, the logic of
Gordon Brown’s announcement would be to remove the sponsors of most
existing academies, and put them back in local government control, since
they also fail his test!
The problems faced by schools
which, in spite of everything, are still nominally comprehensive are
largely due to reactionary government policies, yet it is the
comprehensive school which gets the blame. The straightjacket of the
National Curriculum, the use of testing and league tables to instigate a
vicious competition, have undermined the intended parity between
schools, but it is the schools and the very concept of comprehensive
education which gets blamed. The greatest victims have been schools
serving the poorest parts of our cities. Unable to show the high scores
of schools in the residential suburbs, they have gradually become
concentrations of struggling pupils, far from comprehensive in their
intake, yet their comprehensive status has been blamed for low
attainment. This is the system which produced the Ridings, and many
schools like it – schools which were sandwiched and squeezed between
grammar schools, church schools with an ability to select covertly,
harbours of white-flight, schools with sixth forms serving more affluent
neighbourhoods. Sandwiched and squeezed.
If we wish comprehensive schools
to thrive, we need to form united campaigns to get rid of crude
accountability regimes and dog-eats-dog competition. Without that,
schools will be subject to invidious and unhelpful comparisons and will
continue to have a limited educational purpose.
It is these crude pig-iron high-stakes evaluation regimes which
lead inexorably to bog-standard education. Indeed, this is already
apparent in many academies, when we look at the curriculum.
Secondly, the dominant notion of
School Improvement is deeply
problematic. Whilst paying lip-service to notions of participation and
empowerment - central to School Improvement theory as it developed
internationally - the hegemonic English version tangles it up in the net
of a centralised command structure. Many of its high priests, in
government and academia, then
speak as if there were no contradiction. The result of this confusion is
that headteachers are expected to find ways of making teachers believe
they have ownership of policies which are in fact externally imposed,
and which may actually be harmful. Teachers must be made to feel
empowered to do exactly what they are told to do. This trick is,
ironically, called ‘Transformative Leadership’. I say ironically
because true leadership depends on having a sense of direction. Though
School Improvement writers still speak routinely of ‘vision,’ it
means little more than re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. We have to ask some rather basic
philosophical questions about School Improvement. Doesn’t it depend on
a view of what a good school would be like? Whose learning and whose
lives are getting better? What kind of world do we want to live in? What
kind of young people do we wish to grow? Without these questions,
Improvement is merely intensification, speeding up the conveyor belt, a
damaging process simply being performed more efficiently.
This form of ‘Improvement’ is
actually not helping comprehensive schools to develop their strengths.
It is a hollowing-out process. Sadly, too many academic writers on
School Improvement have become the court priests of government. By
remaining silent on the oppressive structures of high stakes
accountability, market competition and (more recently) privatisation,
they reinforce the power of an oppressive regime and incapacitate the
genuine educational leadership which might make English comprehensive
schools flourish once again. Beyond this, I have argued, the dominant
School Improvement paradigm has the following characteristics: ·
it focuses most of its attention on leadership and
management; ·
it either neglects teaching and learning, or reduces it to
the “effective” transmission and absorption of information; ·
it regards a centrally determined curriculum as sacrosanct
– an off-the-peg suit to be ‘delivered’; ·
it has an instrumental view of the internal ethos and
relationships of the school, and its links with parents and the wider
community – they are merely vehicles to help boost test scores.
Attention to these neglected
issues is vital in the improvement of city schools. Pedagogy,
curriculum, school ethos, community – these are essential
considerations in a version of educational change based on social
justice and democratic citizenship. They are also crucial in the
struggle to improve standards for all and in any depth. The emergence of the Academies
project is, in many ways, a sign of government failure - the failure of
Conservative and New Labour policies a) to alleviate child poverty, and
b) to espouse an adequate model of educational change and improvement.
However, academies currently represent the sharpest attack on the
comprehensive school idea. Schools
which sit outside local authorities, which are beyond democratic control
and restraint, which can choose their own pupils – and decide whom to
evict – cannot for long be expected to sustain a comprehensive intake.
Indeed, there has already been a significant switch of population in the
academies, which take fewer disadvantaged pupils than the predecessor
schools. The academies are neglecting lower-achieving pupils – they
have slightly more pupils not getting five A*-G grades than the schools
they replaced, around twice the national average – a figure which
elsewhere would lead to a ‘special measures’ designation from OfSTED.
It is probably well known in this audience that the academies
show a very marginal improvement in attainment, once you see beyond the
GNVQ trick, and that this slight improvement can be explained largely by
a change of population. If it is not, I will happily explain in question
time. We must however recognise also that the drive to privatise now
goes well beyond struggling inner-city schools. Indeed, the average 5
A*-C rate of schools which are due to become academies in 2008 and 2009
is around 40%, double that of the first academies. No school is safe –
and if not an academy, then a trust school. That is the neo-liberal
direction, and as Stephen Ball has argued, England is the epicentre of
this process. Privatisation will finally undermine the comprehensive
school project. We must unite to fight against it, whether inside or
outside the Labour Party. There is no time for divisions on this.
*
* * The Power to Learn, a set of case
studies of successful multi-ethnic schools, illustrates the importance
of a curriculum which engages pupils; pedagogies based on social
constructivism, creativity and problem-solving; an ethos based on mutual
respect; and schools which really connect with the communities they
serve. These case study schools certainly did not have a deficit view of
ethnic minority communities and cultures, nor indeed of young people.
These issues are then discussed
more theoretically in Schools of Hope. Many of the issues are taken up
again in Another School is Possible, but which also contains many
international examples of innovation. This, my most recent book, was in
a sense commissioned. It is written for a popular readership as well as
teachers. It is a rare example of a book jointly published by a
socialist publishing house and a major educational publishers. It
results from conversations with activists in NUT branches who felt that
a defensive struggle was no longer sufficient. Teachers and their allies
had to know there was something to fight for. Younger teachers in
particular have been trained to fit one model of schooling – however
dissatisfied, they often find it hard to imagine that schools can
possibly be different than the ones they have experienced. I wanted to
pass on some of the vision and idealism which I had felt in the 1970s
and 1980s as a comprehensive school teacher. We are told that vocational
courses are new. Back in the 1970s I taught in a school where large
numbers of 14-16 year olds chose child care and car mechanics, which was
taught in the school flat and garage, or bricklaying and hairdressing at
the local Technical College. However, in those days, nobody ever
suggested that these same pupils would not also do drama, geography or a
foreign language. That is the difference between the comprehensive
schools of that time and the 2006 Schools and Inspection Act. The 2006
Act is a frontal attack on the comprehensive school principle, in that
it divides 14 year olds rigidly into two, the academic track and the
vocational track.
Our curriculum development
involved considerable innovation in the humanities and social studies,
to enable young people to understand the world. This was suppressed by
the National Curriculum, though
subsequently restored in a tokenistic way as citizenship lessons. This
was not centrally imposed, nor could it have been. We must support, build upon and
publicise the work of those brave and creative teachers in English
comprehensive schools who have struggled against the odds to provide an
engaging curriculum. However, the straightjacket has been so oppressive
that it is necessary to look beyond our shores at education systems
which have provided a more fertile context for school development. I
would like to introduce three illustrations from the book. Firstly the appendix. This
contains descriptions of the Laboratory School in Bielefeld, a truly
inspirational school, and of the Ramiro Solans school in Zaragoza
serving a community as poor as any we find here. Its pupils are 70%
gypsy, and 25% new immigrants. As one teacher says, these are not just
average gypsies – only one of the parents even has a market stall! It
has reduced its absence rate from 50% to 10%, through a curriculum based
on the creative arts. Literacy and numeracy are also linked to creative
arts projects. Each month’s learning culminates in a festival or
presentation, whether a city festival or school event. Pupils gain a
sense of public value through what they bring to these occasions. Secondly, more open architectures
of learning. Schooling in England, in the past ten years, has been
dominated by the ‘four-part lesson’ and similar structures which
tightly divide up each hour-long lesson into fixed segments. What I have
termed ‘open architectures’ work on a longer time frame, and give
scope for learners partly to direct their own learning. This is what
‘personalised learning’ should really look like. A different kind of
choice is at work than the consumer version of ‘school choice’ and
‘subject choice’ here. They include ‘project method’ as invented
by John Dewey, and popular across Northern Europe. Typically, it begins
with a stimulus to engage pupils’ interest – or frequently with an
issue raised by the pupils themselves. (Indeed, a Danish government
document warns teachers against planning the year’s curriculum too
rigidly, because that will undermine your negotiations with your class!)
There follows a broad discussion in which understanding is broadened and
deepened. The research stage follows, individual or small group, each
identifying a particular sub-topic. Finally plenary presentations by the
small research groups. The same Danish document emphasises the
importance of learners not simply presenting data but leading activities
which will engage the rest of the class in further discussion and may
result in a wider public action. I think this is important, i.e. that
real-world engagement is not limited to charitable activity and
voluntary work. I use this approach each year with PGCE students in a
project about refugees. I engage them through a simulation in which
there is a fictitious military coup in a dystopic future Scotland -
where will they flee? what will happen to them? Some pursue
research of a basic factual kind – what happens to asylum seekers in
Britain? why did they flee? Others are ready to work at a more
theoretical level, exploring such issues as national identity and
xenophobia. This is personalised learning in a democratic sense, not one
which segregates. Another ‘open architecture’
is Storyline – invented in Scotland and flourishing in Scandinavia. It
was invented for lower primary, but is now used in Norway and Denmark to
age 16 and beyond. This is a kind of cross-curricular thematic work
based on a loose narrative. A scenario is presented – usually a large
mural on the wall. The students invent characters for themselves,
locating themselves visually and emotionally in this scenario. The
teacher’s role is to organise events, stages in the plot, which will
trigger learning activities such as drama, writing, maths or research. A
good example is Rainbow Street, invented by a rural school in Norway and
set in a multicultural district of Oslo. The students stick paintings of
the houses they imagine living in around the wall. At one stage, a
visiting speaker appears, posing as a fundamentalist Christian who
frowns disapprovingly when anybody answers that they are Hindus or
Muslims. One day, the students arrive to find racist graffiti on one of
their ‘houses’ and begin to investigate. Two students in the role of
Iranian refugees seek approval from the community to establish a prayer
room in their house. I hope you will agree that this is the sort of
activity which might really produce high standards. Finally, there are some
reflections in the book on alternative structures within comprehensive
schools which provide a better sense of belonging, of community. I think
we should take this more seriously in Britain. Various models are
available, for example Norwegian schools which are divided into year
groups of about 100 pupils, each served by a team of 5-6 teachers
providing the teaching, pastoral care, parental liaison, and learning
support. There is a massive drive in the USA towards small schools and
schools-within-schools. When the city council in my city attempted to
close schools smaller than 900 as unviable, I checked the Finnish
figures: only one in ten secondary schools in Finland has more than 500,
and half are smaller than 300, yet standards are clearly good. The
international research evidence shows convincingly that small schools
have fewer drop-outs and evictions, fewer alienated young people, and
are particularly more beneficial, including academically, for working
class and ethnic minority pupils. I hope I have given you a brief
introduction not only to the contents of this book, but to the rich
possibilities of schooling. It is appalling that academy sponsors have a
licence to do just what they like, whilst most of our schools are so
strictly controlled. The centralised regulation by which government
claims to improve the quality of schooling reminds me of quality control
at MacDonalds. At the best, it will reliably produce identical burgers.
Similarly, highly regulated schooling can only
provide reliable MacWorkers for MacJobs. Perhaps that is the
intention? Much stands against us in the
struggle to defend and develop comprehensive schools, but the greatest
obstacle might be the limits of our imagination. Terry Wrigley, University of Edinburgh |