About the only upside I can see to the covid pandemic is that it has thrown a lot of things up in the air and forced us to reexamine some long-held assumptions. Nowhere is this more the case than in education. For instance, with home-schooling, millions of parents have been confronted with the reality of getting students through the post-Govian National Curriculum, and have come to see what a soulless task it is in some areas. It is no coincidence that fronted bloody adverbials have come under such attack and ridicule over recent months.
Even more significant though is the way that the GCSE fiasco last year caused many people to ask themselves quite fundamental questions about the whole purpose of that tier of national examinations. There have been those who have been posing those questions for years of course, but until the pandemic they were dismissed as soft liberals seeking to avoid accountability for schools. Now, at last, the question is being seen as a genuinely valid one - should we have GCSEs at all?
I do not propose to weigh into that debate here, because who cares what an ex-Head thinks anyway? Instead, I would like to pose an even more fundamental question: is it time to take the focus off weighing the pig entirely? I recognise that this is a rather radical question, and easily pilloried, because for as long as a national education system has existed, the idea of testing, and ranking, the children within it has been central. Indeed, tests are often seen as the end product or even the purpose of education. Each key stage (or, Key Stage, more recently) has always been defined by some sort of terminal assessment that sorts the wheat from the chaff and determines subsequent progress, whether these be the 11 plus, O-levels/GCSEs or A levels. And it is important to remember that, in the UK at least, these tests are not seen as diagnostic (used to determine the sensible next stage) but hierarchical (used to decide who deserves to progress to a higher tier of the next stage and who does not). Tests are there to be passed or failed.
This thinking permeates all of our attitudes about education, so that judgements about schools and teachers depend on them as well. These judgements too have become hierarchical rather than diagnostic: an inspection of a school determines whether it has passed or failed, and its place on exam league tables decides whether it is better or worse than others. And that, of course, determines the popularity of the school and hence the nature of its intake, because the market is king.
But surely this is inevitable, isn't it? Life is about success and failure, and education exists in the real world, not in a Utopian fantasy of lets-be-nice-to-everyone, doesn't it? Hence the need for those Govian watchwords: toughness and rigour.
That is a reasonable argument in a sense, and it derives from a fundamental human competitiveness that has driven progress for centuries. The problem is, it is an approach to both education and life itself that is becoming more and more problematic, and is being increasingly questioned. It is not just that the price of failure within such a system is becoming more of an issue - endemic drug addiction, the creation of an underclass, and right-wing populism might all be traced back to some people's sense of having lost the race, and the bleak life-chances for those who fail within the education system certainly can be - it is also that people are beginning to understand that competitiveness and meritocratic hierarchies don't always yield the best results. Forward-looking and successful businesses now put far greater emphasis on collaboration, teamwork and creativity than on goal-driven competitiveness.
There is another grave price to be paid for the competition-focused approach to education, namely the effect it has on the curriculum. I used to work in ILEA, and was part of what now seems like a renaissance of thinking about education. The focus shifted from a knowledge-based curriculum (recite the dates of accession of the Kings and Queens of England) to an enquiry-based one (examine these historical sources and ask how reliable and/or biased they might be). An enquiry-based curriculum was much harder to test, and so this approach led to the development of innovative approaches such as Assessment for Learning and 100% coursework GCSEs. However the problem for Gove and his like was that systems like AfL were no good for putting the screws on teachers or 'bog-standard' comprehensives, so back we went to a nice, simple, factual (and in my view largely pointless) knowledge-based curriculum that could be tested in 'rigorous' exams and Key Stage assessments.
I wrote a post some time ago posing the question of whether education should be 'tough', and I think it is even more valid now. Another lesson that the pandemic has taught us is that notions of winning and losing are often illusory and unhelpful in this context. There have been, for instance, surprisingly few reports of people cheating or jumping the queue to get vaccinated. Why? Because it is largely irrelevant where you come in that particular race: nothing much is going to change for anyone until everybody else gets vaccinated too. It's an analogous situation to a group project in school, or a small start-up company in the real world: the performance of the group as a whole is far more important than any individual's position within that group.
And the point is, that sort of focus is actually much more likely to yield concrete beneficial effects in the real world than a dog-eat-dog, competition-focussed one. What is the point of beating your co-workers in every conceivable test, if your company goes bankrupt because of the whole teams' dysfunction?
In a sense, too, this is a pretty uncontroversial view for most teachers. There are very few who believe that the most effective learning comes when students are pitted against each other. Ask any teacher, or any inspector, to pick a lesson where learning was at its best and I can almost guarantee that they will choose one where students were working collaboratively rather than competitively. Not that there is anything intrinsically wrong with competitiveness (it is a natural impulse in young people), but we learn best when we spark ideas off other people, and we do that best when we are working with, rather than against them. The controversy comes when we start thinking about ways to measure how successful teachers (and schools) are being, and whether they are enhancing or damaging students' life chances. We need assessment for that, don't we? And assessment means competition, surely. Which means tests of some sort and establishing of rank orders.
Well no, not necessarily. In the last paragraph I actually referenced an assessment that teachers and inspectors carry out all the time: the assessment of the quality of learning. Because that for me is the crucial measure of success of any education. And note, I said the quality of learning, not teaching. Where students are empowered with the ability to learn, to question, to be creative and to work with others they are given a gift that is of incalculable value, not just to themselves but to society as a whole. If you were setting up an innovative start-up, would you prefer somebody with those skills, or somebody who had used more fronted adverbials in a piece of creative writing than any other student and scored nineteen out of twenty in a test of the dates of accession of the Kings and Queens of England?
