Schooling 2020
What should we look for in the political parties' education manifestos?
Roy Blatchford
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The futurologist Richard Watson identifies five key trends in the world for the next 50 years: ageing; power shift eastwards; global connectivity; GRIN technologies; the environment. Those in the know will at once recognise GRIN: genetics, robotics, internet and nanotechnology.
Should we expect to glimpse any of these themes in the party political manifestos? Perhaps indeed we should when thinking about the education of the young, for the UK child entering school in 2010 will likely live into the next century. She will certainly witness in her lifetime China and India overtaking the USA as the biggest world economies, and all kinds of power shifts to the Middle East. She may or may not remain in the UK through adulthood: 13% of the world's population now live somewhere other than their country of birth.
She will work in a society where down-loading human intelligence into a machine is commonplace, and adding human consciousness to that machine will follow. And of course natural resources as we know them will have been exhausted or severely depleted, requiring a profound shift in attitudes and human behaviours.
In reality, political parties hunting a mandate for the next five years are focused on the here and now. So in the absence of grander schemes for preparing our children for an unknown tomorrow, and against a backcloth of constrained finances, here are eight potentially provocative assertions against which we might debate politicians' pledges for the future of UK Inc. Schooling.
- Education and schooling should remain free at the point of need, for all children and young people. The public purse must provide the funds. But the public system need not provide the service. All schools should be recast as 'independent state schools', run by not-for-profit foundations, individually or in clusters or chains. The democratic control of the school system needs to pass to the schools themselves, each child of five or fifteen funded similarly whether in Sunderland or Southend.
- These independent state schools must be freed by government of burdensome regulation, and be free to shape their own conditions of service for teachers (including high quality and regular in-service training), the length of school days and school terms, how they teach, and how they secure great outcomes for their children.
- The panoply of regulatory bodies and quangos needs dismantling, and quickly. Initiatives, strategies, pilots and transformation agendas need to be schools-led. We shall secure the best teaching force for our children when primary and secondary schools, in partnerships, assume responsibility for the training of teachers and teaching assistants.
- The current inspection system needs significant simplification, with a focus on pupils' outcomes, teaching and learning, and leadership. That is all. Successful schools need a health-check every five years or so. Less successful schools need nurture, change and to be partnered with others so that they know what 'great' looks like.
- Linked to this must come a dumping of Raiseonline, Fisher Family Trust and the rest of the value-added data industry which serves only to depress expectations. A common set of minimum outcomes must underpin our system: all children in the nation's maintained schools will achieve Level 3 by age 8; all will achieve Level 5 by age 12; all will achieve grade C in GCSE maths and English by age 16.
- So many of our pupils currently bump their heads against the low expectations of the National Curriculum. An International Curriculum needs to be embraced which brings into happy balance the acquisition of core knowledge, vital skills and aptitudes relevant for the world envisaged above by Richard Watson.
- Our children and young people are to be in education and training now until at least 18. Schools and Further Education Colleges must come together to create a dynamic set of courses that will motivate all students, burying the 'academic' and 'vocational' divide. The assessment and examination industry must lift the relentless burden of testing, and, as a society, we need to take a different and more mature approach to how often we test pupils and students.
- Above all, no one involved in education and schooling must any longer collude over unsatisfactory practice. That includes governors, headteachers, teachers, unions and local authorities. Sameness is the enemy of greatness. Collusion with incompetence is the enemy of good. It remains the case that just about 30% of the nation's schools tick over as being satisfactory, in Ofsted terms. For the sake of all who are destined to live into the 22nd century, their school beginnings must surely be better.
Ask a politician near you what she or he is going to do over the next five years to challenge a few orthodoxies so that, truly, every school in the land is a good school or better.
Roy Blatchford is Director of the National Education Trust |
