Education, education...education?

Followers of my blog will have noticed that it has been very quiet since I went back to full time teaching for a couple of months. I must admit that I had forgotten just how tiring teaching in a secondary school is - how full on you have to be all the time.  The school I was working in was a great place to work and the staff there were friendly and helpful. So were the kids in my classes for the most part.  I am now in a different secondary school working three days a week and, again, the staff are supportive and most pupils are co-operative and pleasant.

If you have children at school in Scotland, you may be aware that the way they are being assessed and, to some extent taught, is changing at the present time.  People who work in teaching know that this happens all the time - it feels as if you just get used to one system and one set of jargon and then "they" invent another. Right now, it's Curriculum for Excellence (CfE for short) that is driving the change. Briefly, the theory behind CfE is that the way the curriculum is taught and the structure of the curriculum determine the quality of pupil/student turned out by schools.  This initiative is designed to produce pupils/students who possess key attributes called "the four capacities". These are:


Successful Learners
Confident Individuals
Responsible Citizens
Effective Contributors

At this point, like me, you may be forgiven for feeling some incredulity.  If you are a secondary teacher you are probably also experiencing a desire to punch the person who thought this lot up.  How on earth can anyone can believe that tinkering with the curriculum and how it is delivered (because that is what this is) can possibly effect such dramatic changes.  What evidence is there that it will work? No real evidence, I'm afraid. Of course there are thousands of pages of waffle describing and supporting this, written by those who have time and leisure enough to produce spurious apologetics. There are buzzwords and phrases in plenty - "rich tasks" and "crosscutting themes" are two favourites.  These pretty much mean the same as Language Across the Curriculum and similar initiatives from the 1970s - that the subjects in Secondary schools are not discrete but connected and overlapping. This earth-shattering discovery is made again and again by people who don't actually have to go into a classroom and work with kids. People who do knew it all along.

The striking thing for me is that I have been away from teaching for two and a half years and in the last two months have met teachers from different schools in different subject areas and discussed this initiative but I have not met one classroom teacher - or indeed anyone who is not in Senior Management - who believes that this is anything more than a waste of time and an expensive one at that. This is unusual. Typically teachers, like most other working people, do not welcome initiatives because they know that they mean more work for them and, when the backfires occur, the teachers will be left with the repair job.  But opinions have always been varied in the past and criticisms tempered with an acceptance that things in education are not perfect and sometimes new initiatives do bring about changes for the better.  The introduction of Standard Grade in the eighties, for example, took thousands of Scottish children who were previously classed as "non-certificate" and gave them a constructive curriculum with qualifications at the end of it.  It was by no means perfect but it was a big improvement and, although we grumbled, most of us accepted that it was worth doing.  That spirit is completely absent now.  There is no grudging acceptance or cautious optimism. Amongst classroom teachers it is almost universally loathed.

Why does this matter to you?  It matters because teachers do a vital job in society whether you are a pupil, a parent, an employer or just a "responsible citizen".  But they are not allowed to get on with this important task because they are continually having to implement initiatives which are, to say the least, not properly thought out. Initiatives like CfE have a negative effect on education because they waste time and resources and they cause resentment and division.

In my 36 years of teaching I saw countless initiatives and was forced to adjust what I did in the classroom as a result of various reports - too  many to list but here are a few that spring to mind:

The Pack Report
The Munn and Dunning Report
The Bullock Report
TVEI (Training and Vocational Educational Initiatives)
The Houghton Report
The Clegg report
Higher Still
The Howie Report
Assessment is for Learning (AifL)
The 5-14 Initiative (now being superseded by CfE)

The quantity of published material sent in to schools in my time in support of these  - mostly to no good purpose - must be responsible for large scale rain forest clearances.  Time and money and expertise are constantly squandered and we should all be aware of this and fight it. Teachers often get a bad press but they do one of the most important jobs in society and they should be allowed to do that job without constantly being undermined by those who should be encouraging and supporting them.