Sir Chris Woodhead Blog: In the run up to the election …
6 May 2015
Does it really matter that there has been very little discussion of education in the run up to next week’s election? Does it matter that none of the political parties has had anything radical and exciting to say about raising standards in the nation’s schools?
I don’t think it does. It is not government policies which determine how teachers teach and how much, therefore, pupils learn. The ideas which teachers pick up through their initial and in service training matter much more. Let me give you two examples which have caught my eye as I have browsed through recent press cuttings.
The first concerned the marking of pupils’ work. Dr Rebecca Allen, who is the Reader in Economics of Education at the UCL Institute of Education, believes, apparently, that we need to explore the possibility of teachers reducing their workload through the outsourcing of marking overseas. She has told a conference that outsourced marking has been proved to be extremely reliable and that it would only cost £2 to £3 an hour.
It is hard to think of a more ridiculous idea. Marking is one of the teacher’s core responsibilities, and for obvious reasons. Pupils need to know that their written work is being read and taken seriously. They need to have their mistakes pointed out and their achievements praised. They need to know that this is being done by the teacher who teaches them because the relationship between teacher and pupil is crucial to the progress the pupil makes. Teachers, for their part, need to see for themselves how their pupils are thinking and the problems they are having in their understanding so that they can plan new lessons and offer extra support to those who are having difficulty.
This is so obvious that it should not need to be said. But we have an academic occupying a senior post at a prestigious educational institution who does not, it seems, have the faintest idea about the realities of teaching.
The second news item I noticed was a story about how Mark Dawe, the Chief Executive of the OCR Examination Board, thinks that students sitting examinations should be allowed to use search tools like Google. He believes that this would help examiners assess the ability of students to apply knowledge. It is not, he is suggesting, the knowledge pupils have mastered that matters so much as the use that they can make of it and the opinions they have about it.
Beyond the fact that he is suggesting a major change to how examinations are conducted, there is nothing particularly new about his argument. For the last twenty to thirty years, many educationalists have suggested that nobody really needs to know anything about anything. We can look up what we do not know on the internet and it is thinking and learning skills upon which teachers should focus so that the young can find out things for themselves and become ever more proficient at problem solving. The truth, of course, is that if you don’t know much about the subject you are trying to research on the internet you are likely to drown in a sea of often irrelevant information. More fundamentally, the discovery of a solution to a particular problem or the expression of an opinion which has any credibility or meaning depends upon the knowledge you have about the subject under consideration.
What relevance does this have to the importance of the policies politicians promote? It is, and the history of education in the UK over the last forty years shows this very clearly, that political initiatives come and go. They are frighteningly ephemeral. What is frighteningly resistant to change is the intellectual and ideological climate within the world of education. This climate has been created by people like Rebecca Allen and Mark Dawe, educationalists who promote a particular and pernicious view of what the educational enterprise should involve. The climate or culture within which teachers teach eats political initiatives for breakfast.
Professor Sir Chris Woodhead was formerly Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools from 1994 until 2000. He is author of Class Wars and A Desolation of Learning. His areas of expertise are education and leadership, accountability and the drive to raise standards; his research interest currently is the involvement of the private sector in raising educational standards. He retired at the end of 2013 from the chairmanship of Cognita, the international schools company he established in 2004.