SISL: Do the boundaries between education and politics need to be redrawn?

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Do the boundaries between education and politics need to be redrawn?
Kate Dethridge

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I write as someone who has worked in schools for more than 20 years and in that time have been on the receiving end of every big new (possibly faddish) idea in primary education.

There are a number of things that I think politicians have got right over the last few decades:

I am happy that politicians have seen education as a priority, and there is no doubt that education funding has increased in schools and made a huge difference to the educational experience of our children.
I'm delighted that the National College was established and that teachers and leaders have been given such fabulous opportunities to study and develop their craft.
I think it was absolutely right that teachers be given training and materials which demonstrate some of the very best methods of teaching children to read, write and become numerate.
And, through inspection, schools should of course be held to account for what they do in terms of academic standards and pupil progress.

I have no argument with politicians who seek to further any of these ideals. What I find less palatable is the way in which we have had the means dictated to us, instead of just the ends.

Under the watchful eye of OfSTED, Local Authorities, National Strategies and the Department for Education we have, at times, been manipulated into practice that we were told was 'best'. If we conformed to it, we would be judged kindly; if we did not we wouldn't. In this way teachers adopted practice not necessarily because they thought it was good, but because either they knew it would gain approval or they were put under considerable pressure to do so - even though it might go against what they knew to be right.

A good example of this would be the introduction of the literacy hour in 1998. Whilst the idea of a structured three part lesson was a good one, teachers were made to focus as much on timings as content. Introductions and plenaries had to be exactly 10 minutes long or they were judged unfavourably. Inspectors would be as interested in your timings as the quality of what children were doing. You would regularly witness children being torn from a really valuable discussion not because the discussion had run its course or because the children were losing interest, but because ten minutes had elapsed.

And what about the establishment of the Foundation Stage profile? Again, it was absolutely right to create a benchmark against which to judge progress for our very youngest children and use this to collect evidence of their development. But I'll neither forgive nor forget the ridiculous national training that suggested teachers wear a tiara whilst observing pupils so that the children knew not to disturb them. I still have the video. It caused all sorts of problems with our male Early Years staff!

To some extent we probably have ourselves to blame. We should have been more assertive in establishing boundaries. We should have ensured that politicians, and the organisations they fund to develop and monitor school practice, were kept at a distance from the day to day workings of schools rather than allowing them to insist that one size fitted all.

We have lived through an era where compliance was more valued than initiative and innovation. Over the years, I have found that the only way to survive such control is to circumnavigate it.

When I was asked to set end of Key Stage 1 targets for children who had not yet started at my school I simply asked my LA adviser what number he would like in the box. He told me, I wrote it; we were both happy. Yet it had no value at all, except to give the government data that it required and get the LA off my back. I was fairly confident that by the time these two year-olds were at my school and doing SATs as seven year olds, the requirement would be changed and the data I had given rendered useless. I was right.

The examples given so far are fairly harmless and dated. More seriously, I have huge concerns about the way politicians have shaped the current testing that 11 year olds have to endure just before they leave primary school.

Where, for example, is the logic or fairness in keeping these tests in England and not Wales, Northern Ireland or Scotland?

Why is it that if you are 16,17 or 18 you can take exams with some course work element and have a choice of essay questions in test papers, but as a primary pupil your coursework counts for nothing and you have no choice about which questions to answer. You have 45 minutes and one shot to demonstrate your attainment. That is brutal, and along with some very questionable marking can lead to a false picture of attainment being reported.

If politicians' prime concern is really to discover how well children are doing and how much they know, they would not use this method of finding out. Schools should assess children's attainment, along the same lines as the Key Stage 1 model. In adopting this method, we would gain a far more accurate and comprehensive picture of children's progress and abilities at 11+.

So, if I had the power to redraw boundaries between education and politics, where would I put them?

We need to establish a greater distance between the work of politicians and the work of educators. Politicians have a duty to hold schools to account. Government gives schools huge amounts from the public purse and needs to ensure that teachers do their jobs well. However, politicians should not involve themselves in micro-managing how schools are run nor how the curriculum is delivered. That should be left to those that know. Having said that, I am not in favour of teachers being the sole arbiters of curriculum content.

I would like politicians to facilitate the work of educators but not interfere with it unless there was a real cause for concern about the effectiveness of a school. There is no greater incentive for school improvement than thinking you will be ignored and left alone if your children consistently do well!
I'd like to see politicians making available and endorsing a range of methods and programmes that schools would have the freedom to adopt or reject, without fear of favour.
I'd like to see the continued investment in education, resources and training of professionals but without an obligation on the part of schools to follow a particular ideology or scheme. That must be left to our professional judgement.
Politicians should hold schools to account but should leave the work of improvement to those, in schools, who know how to do it.

The most effective teaching uses the principles of Assessment for Learning: you find out where the children are, you develop a plan that supports them, you check to see if it is working. Who knows? A new government may just wish to adopt that approach to its schools.

Kate Dethridge is Headteacher of Churchend Primary School in Reading, and Associate Director of NET. This article is based on Kate's response to Estelle Morris in the May 2010 Oxford Education Debate.

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