by Guy Claxton
The London Challenge is perhaps the best-known example of how clusters of schools can join forces to change the way they do things. Led by Sir Tim Brighouse, a highly experienced and inspirational local authority leader, it was conceived with a strong moral purpose: that every young person in London should receive a good or better education than they were receiving then (in 2003). The London Challenge had a powerful focus on leadership, teaching and learning, and pioneered the use of data (information about every aspect of children’s learning and achievements) for the sole purpose of improvement not punishment. The idea of a clear challenge, coupled with a well-defined programme of action, will be apparent as we go through this chapter, and it is one that we return to in the last chapter of the book, as we believe it can be adapted for our purposes as a call to action.
Employers
If the necessary changes are going to happen, though, there is a strong need for support – and pressure – from outside the education system as well as within it. We mentioned the main employers’ organisation, the CBI, and their publication, First Steps: A New Approach For Our Schools, in Chapter 1. As well as saying the kinds of things which we might expect an employers’ organisation to say – for instance, bemoaning the low levels of literacy and numeracy of English school-leavers compared with many other countries – First Steps laid out a different set of demands, prefaced by this powerful statement:
Change is possible – but we must be clearer about what we ask schools to develop in students and for what purpose.
You could imagine, just for a moment, that employers had been secretly studying the kinds of books and papers we have been reading (and writing) over the last two decades. But they may perfectly well have come to the same conclusions by themselves. Here are three of the things they called for:
1. The development of a clear, widely owned and stable statement of the outcomes that all schools are asked to deliver. This should go beyond the merely academic, into the behaviours and attitudes schools should foster in everything they do. It should be the basis on which we judge all new policy ideas, schools and the structures that society sets up to monitor them.
2. The adoption by schools of a strategy for fostering parental engagement and wider community involvement, including links with business.
3. The Department for Education should accelerate its programme of decentralisation of control for all schools in England. This should be extended to schools in other parts of the UK, freeing head teachers to deliver real improvements.
First Steps is really a manifesto for a radical change to the way we currently organise schooling. Its central demands chime strongly with our own long-held views. The first of their suggestions – that we should go beyond the subjects on the curriculum to think more profoundly about what it is we think the outcomes of schooling should be – aligns most strongly with the agenda we have laid out. Their second recommendation – that we should empower parents to engage with schools – is the focus of the next chapter.
In our research for this book we have spoken with hundreds of parents, students, teachers and head teachers. In the course of our conversations, we were struck by the letter below as an example of exactly the kind of thing the CBI is calling for.
Letter from a parent to her child’s primary head teacher
Dear Head Teacher,
I want to write and thank you for recently running the parent workshops on how to support our children in ‘Building Learning Power’. Your talk has given me a vocabulary to use when talking to my children to help convey some truly important values that I have always believed to be vital to both success and happiness. Specifically that ‘effort is more important than ability’ and ‘mistakes are part of the learning process/to succeed you have to be prepared to take the risk of failing’. I loved the analogy you used of the brain being a muscle that has to be exercised and made fit for learning. I have been talking a lot about overcoming adversity with my children.
As you know, we are lucky enough to have a talented child in your school, but her aversion to challenges and her sometimes rather thin skin regarding mistakes have worried us. However, after the workshops we now feel more resourceful in dealing with her reticence and we have the start of a language that we can use to help her. We have seen an immediate impact on her from the school’s initiative to build a positive attitude to learning; we have seen our daughter fight back her immediate inclination to want to give up on things when they become tricky and we have praised her for it.
We realise it is still early days and we will have to work hard not to fall back into old bad habits of rescuing and reassuring her! Well done though; you have opened the debate, set us a challenge and given us some very useful tools, ideas and initiatives to go forward with as a family. Thank you for a very important beginning.
All the best,
Teresa, Year 4 mum
At the end of 2014 the CBI published an ‘end of year report’ on their First Steps agenda. On every aspect they rated the government poorly using marks that ranged between B- to D! The D went for the first of their suggestions, that we develop a clear statement of the outcomes that all schools should deliver:
The eco-system of a school should foster academic success, but also go beyond it to the development of the behaviours and attitudes that really set young people up for adult life.10
In language which even more strongly echoes our own, they go on to specify these behaviours and attitudes:
Characteristics, values and habits that last a lifetime
The system should encourage people to be This means helping to instil the following attributes
Determined Grit, resilience, tenacity
Self-control
Curiosity
Optimistic Enthusiasm and zest
Gratitude
Confidence and ambition
Creativity
Emotionally intelligent Humility
Respect and good manners
Sensitivity to global concerns
The message is obvious. Many employers have a clear vision of what the desired outcomes of school should be for young people, but so far the government is not listening. Hence the D grade awarded to the Department for Education. But the pressure will mount. Employers in the UK are a powerful group, not to be idly dismissed by governments. They are helping to create a climate in which our balanced approach can and will flourish.
Professional bodies
Two teacher bodies are currently asking and answering the kinds of questions which we have been posing. In the UK, the Association of School and College Leaders and its ‘Great Education Debate’ have stimulated useful thinking. The debate takes as its starting point this statement:
We believe that it is time for everyone with a stake in education to have a say about the future of our schools and colleges policy – employers, parents, young people, academics, politicians, teachers, school and college leaders. We want to create a vision and a plan that everyone can sign up to.11
The Great Education Debate recently published a summary of its conclusions.12 These centre on the idea of a school-led, self-improving system. Now, this may sound like jargon to some readers, but read on a little more in this document and you will find many recommendations that mirror those we have been suggesting. Here is a flavour, some echoing the CBI suggestions we have been exploring:
In an ideal world we would debate these issues and reach a shared view on the purpose of education. We would determine the relative weight to be accorded to the differing drivers. That would then inform the framing and the content of the curriculum … This is not as farfetched as it sounds: other countries such as Singapore do precisely this.
We need to facilitate systematically the professional development and lifelong learning of existing teachers.
Any definition of the purpose of education would surely include maximising the life chances of all young people by making them work-ready, life-ready and ready for further learning.
The unique ch
allenges of the world in the 21st century require a better understanding of the underpinning personal capacities that are the difference between the success and failure of otherwise identical young people.13
The last of these opinions speaks poignantly to the comments of many of the young people we have quoted in the book.
A second initiative called ‘Redesigning Schooling’ has been stimulated by a professional body called The Schools Network.14 At the heart of Redesigning Schooling is a plea for the teaching profession, especially school principals, to take charge of the debate about the future of education. They say:
These are tough times for school leaders but we know as a profession we have to change. Surely we have to have the courage of our convictions and put in place those opportunities that we feel equip our students most appropriately for life in the digital age and for taking their place in the global workspace?
Do we always have to follow the Government line, or can we as a profession take more control of the future of education and the steering of our young people towards global citizenship? Redesigning Schooling is a campaign lead by SSAT and its member schools, leading thinkers and academics to shape the teaching profession’s own vision for schooling.15
Precisely because it is seeking to develop debate and innovation within the teaching profession itself, Redesigning Schooling is necessarily taking time to build its point of view. But, through its events and publications, it is encouraging school leaders to articulate with greater confidence their own vision of education. In the next chapter we will look at ways in which we can all accelerate the changes we want to see.
We’ve also referred to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (see Chapter 2). The OECD is the organisation which runs the Programme for International Student Assessment, home of the infamous PISA tests which all education ministries are keen to do so well on. (How educators love their acronyms!) The man who runs PISA is a German statistician called Andreas Schleicher. Many countries (including the UK) have become so mesmerised by the international league tables to which the PISA data gives rise that they can think of nothing more inspiring, as a goal for education, than to beat Finland or Shanghai in these tables. Many have argued that the very existence of these tables has driven education systems around the world in a regressive direction. Some countries – Wales is cited as being one – have even started to tailor their education systems specifically to improve their PISA rankings.16 It’s not that it’s a bad idea for countries to know how they are doing in teaching maths, English and science; it’s just that, if these paper and pencil tests are given undue weight, they start to eclipse other good educational goals – like the habits of mind – that can’t be so easily measured.
Schleicher himself is all too aware of this danger. In fact, his own model of education is a well-balanced one (see the figure opposite). It is easy to see how the things we have been arguing for in Chapters 1–4 can be fitted into his four rectangles. He is trying to broaden out the PISA tests so they do actually assess things like students’ capacity for collaborative problem-solving or creativity. This is not easy to do, but the OECD is leading the research in this area.17
Dimensions and challenges for a 21st century curriculum
Knowledge
Balance conceptual and practical and connect the content to real-world relevance Skills
Developing higher-order skills such as the 4Cs: creativity, critical thinking, communication, collaboration
Character
Nurturing behaviours and values for a changing and challenging world: adaptability, persistence, resilience and moral-related traits (integrity, justice, empathy) Meta-layer
Learning how to learn, interdisciplinary, systems thinking
Source: Andreas Schleicher (ed.), Preparing Teachers and Developing School Leaders for the 21st Century: Lessons from around the World (Paris: OECD Publishing, 2012).
Two examination boards have also been actively seeking to broaden what it is that schools do; they are City & Guilds and Pearson. City & Guilds have been promoting research into the practical learning and apprenticeships which so many young people want, in order to help schools and colleges provide more effectively for the many students who do not choose an academic route. As contributors to this research, we have been vocal in suggesting that, as with schools more generally, we need to think about what else, other than routine skills, young people should be learning. In particular, we have suggested that they need to learn to be resourceful (able to deal with the non-routine), to develop pride in their work (thinking like a craftsman, never accepting the slapdash and always striving to do their very best) and build a set of wider skills beyond the particular vocational pathway on which they are embarked.18
Pearson has contributed to the debate by commissioning research into young people’s views of school.19 The central conclusion of this study was that it was “difficult for them to understand the relevance of school learning to their future work aims”.
There appeared to be three causes of this disconnection:
1. Little association between lesson content and career preferences.
2. Teachers not knowing their pupils’ hopes and dreams.
3. Inadequate opportunities to gain foundation ‘life skills’.
Students also express the need for learning that relates to their goals. They are hungry for that connection, and speak easily and specifically about what they want to do with their lives.
Here are some of the points the student interviewees made:
Once we leave school we’ll need to be much more independent, so we should learn things that will help us later on.
Teachers shouldn’t just be at the front – they should interact in the classroom.
Schools need to let us know more about the future, jobs and help us to know more about careers, relating learning and work …
I have never been asked about my hopes and dreams.
Teachers could make their classes more relevant to my future goals by asking what I wanted to do in the future and help me try to achieve those targets by helping me in the areas I need help in.
Whatever these students’ schools, backgrounds and ambitions, their voice is not one of hostile disaffection. They are thoughtful and articulate, and the points they make are important and thought-provoking. If the groundswell for change is to gather momentum, students themselves will be powerful participants in the process.
The third sector
Finally in this chapter we shouldn’t forget the role that is being played by charitable bodies. Of course, some of them are quite capable of campaigning for versions of education which are narrow and backwards-looking. But most are motivated by big moral ideas – social justice, increased well-being, cohesion, better care of our planet and lifelong learning. Some undertake research. Others produce resources. Some are funding bodies. Others lobby for the changes they desire. Although it is somewhat invidious to mention just a few examples, nevertheless we are going to do just that!
The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (or the RSA as it is more widely known) has a long history of educational innovation. In 1980 it published a manifesto called Education for Capability which made many of the same points we are highlighting in this book.20 More than a decade ago, the RSA suggested that we could organise what teachers teach not into subjects but into ‘themes’ and ‘competencies’. They called it Opening Minds.21 Some 200 schools have now adopted its principles.
When Opening Minds was first introduced most schools organised what they taught according to subjects. So your child might have a lesson of English, then one of geography or science and so on. Look at a typical secondary school timetable and, odds-on, it will still be organised in this way, with five or six different subjects in roughly hour-long blocks each day. The RSA turned this on its head and asked a different question. What would school look like if we organised it in terms of the competences we wanted students to develop rather than by su
bject area? They came up with five such competences: citizenship, learning, managing information, relating to people and managing situations. These kinds of things are much closer to what we called utilities in Chapter 4. Here’s an example of what they thought might go into managing situations:
● Time management – students understand the importance of managing their own time, and develop preferred techniques for doing so.
● Coping with change – students understand what is meant by managing change, and develop a range of techniques for use in varying situations.
● Feelings and reactions – students understand the importance of both celebrating success and managing disappointment, and ways of handling these.
