One of the things that working with Dr. Caroline Whalley has taught me is the value of revisiting old ideas. The below are ideas for a think piece I put together for the Times Ed just over a year ago that got forgotten about and never saw the light of day. Although the angle on the ideas is now 'out of time', in that the parallels with WWI don't work, the ideas are still relevant.
Ideological trench warfare
December 2018
More than a century after the end of the, “War to end all
wars” it is alarming to note the increase in trench warfare. Although today’s
trenches are metaphorical, the degree to which political debate has descended
to the defence of positions in defiance of reason is entirely analogous. We no
longer sacrifice the youth of a continent in the mud of no man’s land, we
merely sacrifice truth and morality in the grime of ignorance, dishonesty and
self-interest.
That’s a grandiose opening. How the hell am I going to
relate this to the UK’s education sector? Well, if we wish to save the
enlightenment, we need to get out of our trenches. To get out of them, we need
to recognise that we are all digging them.
Ideological Trench #1 - There is never enough money
There will never be enough money to provide the quality and
diversity of education that most educators believe all children deserve. But if
the noise in the sector is anything to go by, we are about to compound this
problem by having a big fight about funding when no-one has any money.
It is disingenuous of the government to maintain its current
position that we currently spend more on education than we ever have or that
per pupil funding is more than twice what it was in 2010. Yes, we do spend more
in total but only because there are more children in school than ever. Yes, it
is true that we spend more per pupil than in 2000 but unfortunately it is also
true that we spend less per pupil in real terms than we did in 2010.
But for the unions to choose now to fight this battle is equally
disingenuous. The impact of Brexit is guaranteed to be negative on the public
purse, the only thing that is unsure is how big the ensuing recession will be.
This is a pointless fight unless someone wants to make a big political leap and
reallocate money from the Defence, Environment or Justice departments to
education, which I suspect is not on the cards.
If we reframe the question as, “Can we find efficiencies in
education without sacrificing pupil outcomes or breaking teachers?”, then we might get somewhere.
And in the spirit of getting out of my trench I will venture that this is what
Lord Agnew was trying to say, albeit failing gloriously, when he recently bet
the profession a bottle of champagne that he and his team could find savings in
any school. But it should go both ways, I bet I could find efficiencies in the
DfE and ESFA and I wouldn’t need a team to help me find them. You could start
with regulatory overlap and the duplication of audit and ESFA costs.
Ideological Trench #2 - Burn
the straw men
If I may be permitted to mangle a metaphor, ‘The Blob’ was a
straw man. Together with ‘the enemies of promise’ it was the exaggeration of an
opposed position for rhetorical purposes. The Blob didn’t actually exist any more
than evil Tories slashing funding for education exist. The problem with using
straw men in debates is that we end up fighting enemies who simply aren’t
there. They also antagonise those with whom one might otherwise work to improve
a system.
Despite my disagreements with politicians to the right and
to the left, I do not doubt their commitment to improving outcomes for
children. But we often expend too much energy being angry at people with whom
we don’t entirely disagree.
Your enemy is not your enemy.
“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it
so.” [Hamlet 2.2]
Improving outcomes for children is hard work. In
disadvantaged communities it can feel like a Sisyphean task. Every September
the boulder has rolled back down the hill and each of us is 'another year older and
deeper in debt'. It can be easier to bear if one has someone to blame for this
unfairness. I’ve lost count of the times when I have railed against a faceless
bureaucrat-jobsworth and found some comfort in the idea of an evil plan to
frustrate all the good I have convinced myself I am trying to do.
But that evil plan does not exist either. Between cock-up
and conspiracy, you should always favour cock-up. It is simply more human. Even
if you don’t get the satisfaction of self-righteous anger.
Ideological Trench #3 No
battle plan survives contact with the enemy - Nothing is that simple
I don’t know Nick Gibb MP, although I have met him once. My
instinct is that his mental model of the education system is oversimplified. In
my head, his persistent championing of synthetic phonics and Singapore maths is
an oversimplification of a terribly complex problem. My Nick Gibb homunculus is
on a grail quest for the perfect text books. Get these text books right and he
will scaffold weak teaching in a way that all the CPD and training in the world
could never achieve. He has copied and pasted approaches from Singapore without
understanding the context in which they appear to work. Consequently, he
mistakes better practice for best practice and stretches it beyond its domain
of applicability. This will only lead to an absurd concentration of power and
risk at a ministerial level that ultimately fails the poorest in society.
Because when the minister choses the text book, what happens when he picks the
wrong one?
I like to believe that my approach is better. Keep expertise, money and
decision making as close to children as possible. Manage education as a complex
adaptive system....
But here’s the thing. People whose opinions I respect have
told me that Nick Gibb is not like this at all. This is deeply inconvenient for
my mental model. Maybe I’m the one who is oversimplifying, projecting my own
bias onto someone who is equally committed to improving outcomes for children.
