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On a road to nowhere

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Tory education secretaries have been proclaiming their battle for standards since 2010, and yet where has this empty rhetoric gotten us? Nowhere, says Dr Mary Bousted
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Secretaries of state for education come and go – and increasingly rapidly over the course of the past 12 months, which has seen three arrive and depart.

One, Michelle Donelan, lasted two days. Now we have our fourth – Kit Malthouse – who recently spoke to the Conservative Party faithful at their annual conference in Birmingham about his priorities in office.

I was at the conference and hoped to hear a change of tone from Mr Malthouse compared to that of his predecessors. I was disappointed.

He doubled down on the tired old mantra of “standards” – he was second to none in his drive to “challenge mediocrity” and to achieve “excellence in the basics”.

It is as if the Conservative governments of the last 12 years haven’t been in power and haven’t concentrated, almost to the exclusion of all else, on “standards”. Where has it got them? Where has it got the nation?

Not very far it would seem if we look at the evidence. The attainment gap between poor pupils and their more advantaged peers is wider now than it was when the Conservatives were elected (in coalition with the Lib Dems) in 2010. Indeed, the gap is just as large now as it was 20 years ago (Farquharson et al, 2022).

The school curriculum in England is the narrowest post-16 than in any of the OECD countries and is narrowing rapidly pre-16 as schools reduce their curriculum offer because of inadequate funding.

It is clear that a new vision for education is desperately needed.

And yet thinking is not in short supply. Four “commissions” on secondary education have recently reported, including the National Education Union’s Independent Assessment Commission on qualifications in secondary education and the Times Education Commission.

Across these commissions and their reports, we find a common theme: our education system must have wider ambitions beyond the basics if we want to escape the current danger of providing an analogue education for a digital world.

England tops the OECD league table for teaching and learning by rote memorisation (OECD, 2020). This is a method which is fine for lower order thinking but ineffective for the higher order thinking required to develop knowledge and skills – namely, the sort of thinking essential in today’s digital, fast-moving, and complex world. A world in which the ability to communicate, collaborate, cooperate, and ascertain what is likely to be true and what is false will be essential competences.

Previous Conservative education secretaries have not done well by schools and by our education system. They have always preferred to engage in political polemic where teachers are the enemy within who must be coerced and controlled to do the right thing.

I know of no teacher who does not think that pupils must be taught the basics. The problem, which teachers know all too well – and which politicians need to learn – is that the basics are not anything like enough.

If Mr Malthouse wants to prepare pupils for the world they will live and work in, he must argue for a substantial increase in school funding so that all pupils can benefit from a broad and balanced curriculum – with academic and practical subjects readily available to meet the interests and needs of many rather than the few.

We would also have a qualification system which does not, as our system currently does, fail a third of the nation’s pupils at 16 – those students who fall short of achieving a Grade 4 in GCSE English and maths because of our system of comparable outcomes .

Mr Malthouse would do well to listen to the profession before he falls back on yet more empty rhetoric which will get us, and more importantly the pupils we teach, precisely nowhere.

  • Dr Mary Bousted is the joint general secretary of the National Education Union. Read her previous articles for SecEd via http://bit.ly/seced-bousted

 

 

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