Since I joined the ranks of the Twitterati last autumn, I found one great strength of the Twittersphere: but, like most strengths, it's balanced by a serious downside.
I can choose what newsfeeds I adopt to give me up-to-the-minute headlines and links: since I use Twitter very much as part of my work, not as a personal or family thing, I follow a lot of education sources.
The great thing about this is that I receive breaking educational news very swiftly: the bad news is that reading the latest nonsenses from government and elsewhere does little good for my blood pressure!
So in the past week I've had to put up with the latest instalments of Michael Gove's one-man mission to save education in England: there was a nice bit of humour on that when the DFE discovered that a hacker had placed a story on its own website - with the headline, "Michael Gove to teach all England's children himself"! Well, it would be a learning curve for him.
Meanwhile, for Labour, Tristram Hunt is busy trying to out-tough Mr Gove: and for the Lib Dems, Vince Cable managed yesterday to offend the entire teaching profession when he announced blithely that "teachers know absolutely nothing about careers". I've tried to hide that particular headline from our own Mr Downie!
The media are now full of daft education stories. In print today in the TES (Times Educational Supplement), there was an amazing headline. Apparently London's private schools are riding high as demand intensifies: the headline read, "You could open a school in a cowshed and still fill it".
I hope that headline was tongue-in-cheek, rather than deliberately insulting. There are lots of reasons why London's independent school market gets bigger all the time, mainly because London keeps growing: but at least at the RGS we can promise parents and students alike something better than a cowshed when our current building project is complete.
There's a serious point to all this, though. Given instantaneous digital transmission of opinions and headlines, particularly if they are outrageous, we teachers need to treat what we read with care and, indeed, do what we're always telling our students (and I hope parents are telling their children) to do: not to take anything at face value, but rather to read critically and evaluate.
That's something that happens far too little when politicians and policymakers develop their latest pet theory which is generally built up from a few cherry-picked facts and figures that suit their own personal bias. Last week children's minister Liz Truss was writing passionately about how they've got everything right in Shanghai, and how we should emulate Chinese schools particularly in the teaching of maths.
What I love about our RGS link with China is how much we can learn in both directions. But we're not going to adopt their methods wholesale: to do so uncritically would be crazy and irresponsible. I recently wrote a piece about politicians' obsession with both global statistics and practice in other countries: it was published in last Friday's TES. Accordingly I think it fair to reproduce it below.
Bernard Trafford
Headmaster
Emulating Asia risks
crippling childhoods
(published in the TES 28th
February 2014: click here)
Lazy,
politicised use of global comparisons is dangerous - and looking to Shanghai
for the educational holy grail is a grave error
A few weeks ago I read a piece in this publication that went beyond the headlines about the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) and asked some probing questions.
The
article reported on an analysis by Cambridge Assessment researcher Tom Benton
that looked at whether Pisa’s vast data set provided any evidence for or
against the idea of school autonomy.
There
was, Benton found, “no statistically significant association between the amount
of freedom given to schools over how to spend their budgets and their academic
results”.
Tellingly,
England’s Department for Education - which loves the idea of giving more
freedom to schools - refused to comment specifically on the details of Benton’s
conclusions, simply restating “the importance of school autonomy”.
As the
headteacher of a private school, of course I believe in giving school leaders
as much autonomy as possible. But just as importantly, I don’t like dogma.
I most
certainly agreed with another senior Cambridge Assessment official, Tim Oates,
when he said: “There is not much point in people bashing [each other] over the
head over the top-line Pisa findings…it doesn’t really work.”
In
essence, it is time that policymakers stopped cherry-picking nuggets from
international studies to prove their pet theories.
Politicians
the world over, upon publication of the latest Pisa figures, insisted that we
learn from the East and South East Asia, lauding Shanghai teachers who visited
children’s homes in the evenings to set yet more homework. Move over Finland,
former educational envy of the world, there’s a new kid on the block.
The
politicians who promote the simplistic idea of mimicking the Chinese and Far
Eastern systems overlook several things. First, education leaders in those
countries don’t claim to have all the answers. Their maths scores may be
stellar but there’s widespread concern about their young people’s lack of
childhood. All too often, Asian students go from school to evening classes,
finally getting to bed at 2am before rising at 6am for the next school day.
Is this
really a great educational success worthy of admiration and even replication?
It has
been suggested that if we in the West only grew a bit of backbone we could work
our children and teachers as hard as our Asian competitors do. In rejecting
that notion, I am not pleading cultural difference: I am saying that it is not
the right way for children anywhere.
Second,
many education leaders in China worry about a lack of creative teaching and too
much chalk and talk. Chinese colleagues I meet are eager to learn from us about
reversing that situation. They are very clear that they don’t have all the
answers any more than we do.
Third,
there seems to be an undercurrent in much of the West that the teaching
profession in the developed world is not up to the challenge of catching up
with higher-performing countries.
Scarcely human.
This
picture is at odds with what I see at this time of year, interviewing students
for their first teaching posts. I am amazed by the candidates I meet: they are
well-prepared, enthusiastic, highly and broadly skilled and very professional.
Among
my own children, nephews and nieces there are several teachers. I meet their
friends and colleagues, too. There is no lack of resilience. But too many have
a growing sense of despair. They want to teach. They want to instil discipline
in the classroom. They want to inspire and give life chances to young people.
What demoralises them is the feeling that they are not permitted to deal with
children as children.
Politicians
insist that poverty (or any other home circumstance) is no excuse for
underachievement. They are right. But that ruthlessly reiterated message means
that, where schools are remorselessly pursuing the standards agenda, no
allowance is made for the fact that the learners are children, bringing to
school a whole host of experiences, problems, ambitions, fears, worries and
obstacles.
To be
sure, some exceptional schools manage to avoid this paradox. But teachers under
pressure for any reason (and there are so many) would be scarcely human if they
did not give in to fear and anxiety - and these are the enemies of creativity.
Scarcely
human: that’s the point. Young teachers want to make a difference, to treat
their students as individuals and help them to develop according to their own
needs and abilities.
I risk
being attacked as a dinosaur, a remnant of the 1970s and of what is currently,
cynically, portrayed as misconceived child-centred idealism.
But
education is about children and must be centred on them. I’m angry that the
idea of starting with the child is so frequently caricatured as being
anti-standards - of pandering to ill-discipline and to low achievement. It is,
apparently, the reason we are unable to keep up with our global competitors.
I know
about standards. Having run schools for more than 20 years, I’ve worked
consistently to render those institutions more creative, more imaginative and
above all more humane, while simultaneously raising aspirations and attainment.
We forget all that when we
allow data to drive us. Data should certainly inform us, so by all means
analyse the Pisa numbers. But please remember that those figures tell us only
about measurable outcomes. They communicate nothing about children’s
characters, fears or aspirations. And, when the data is used clumsily or
simplistically, it does real harm.