Shaping Ideas.... Shaping Lives

Upwardly mobile John Dunford	Expectations: The impact of current educational policies on vulnerable young people Cynthia Bartlett	A Quiet Revolution: placing positive values at the heart of the curriculum Dr. Neil Hawkes
New routes to headship Maxine Evans	Childhood is safe in our schools Roy Blatchford	Aspiration 'on the slate' Sir Iain Hall
Pedagogy and Values David Taylor (HMI)	Twenty-first Century Schooling Sir David Winkley	A new alignment for secondary schools and colleges Dr John Dunford
Celebrating the profession of teaching Keith Bartley	The 3Es Ian McNiff	The Best of Times, the Worst of Times Bill Laar
Making Choices Sir Iain Hall	After OFSTED Mervyn Benford	Postcard From New York Roy Blatchford
A Vexing Question Sir Iain Hall	Training teachers Geoff Barton	Take your partners for the Ruskin Waltz Mervyn Benford
Foundation stones for the next Prime Minister Roy Blatchford	A fleeting history of happiness: children's perspectives Professor Cedric Cullingford	SMSC - Optional extras or hidden opportunities? Dr Tony Eaude
The new school leader Sir Iain Hall	Are there words to describe the best teaching? David Shakespeare	What is education for? Dr Nicholas Tate

Extract from Handsworth Revolution, The Odyssey of a School by David Winkley. Reproduced with grateful thanks to the publisher, Giles de la Mare.

Of all our traditional institutions schools have perhaps changed least, stubbornly clinging to ancient traditions, old ways of working. Children still crowd into classrooms at the ringing of an antique school bell, and attend to the teacher who wields the chalk.

State schooling was set in place in the nineteenth century to give basic competencies to the masses. My story shows how disillusionment with schooling in the 1970s slowly shifted us back to focus on the time-worn basics and equated our economic failures as a nation with our failings in schooling, especially in literacy and numeracy. The consequence has been a radical shift in authority from the Local Authorities to the centre, accompanied by a raft of legal reforms aimed at imposing an authentic national voice on what was seen as a dislocated service.

We are in the age of the supermarkets, when every high street in the land seems to look much the same, with its W.H. Smith, its Boots, Marks and Spencer and its Next. Standardization and standards are all the rage, and commentators on education constantly make comparisons between the unevenness of schools and the wondrous reliability of the chain-store. Every child in the land is now expected to be taught to an acceptable level of competence - to be taught the same things, and if possible in much the same way.

Teachers are exhorted to return to 'whole-class teaching', school uniform, formal discipline. Parents, too, are given guidelines and advice on how to manage their children. The national political mood mostly favours control and command. Deviation from the norm is to be highlighted and punished, with constraints being imposed on irresponsible parents ever more rigorously through the threat of legal sanctions. The standardized society has become the audit society, in which traditional notions of trust and local cultural norms of behaviour are replaced by national guidelines and directions. And all this passes under the banner of improved choice and 'responding to market forces'.

The good contemporary school is the formulaic school. The key is commanding leadership, good test results, quality lessons based on clear blueprints. It is possible now to grade every product, every lesson, every child, every teacher, and every school according to a formula based on numerical scales, like Radio Times assessments of films. One day I take amusement from watching a retired BBC Producer employed as an Ofsted Inspector spending the best part of the day counting our attendance registers to see if we're a percentage above or below the national average. (We're below as I told him for free.) He also walks around the Upper School playground with a notebook and counts the holes in the fences and the uprooted hedges. 'Look,' he says, like a latter-day King Lear, 'look there,' as though I haven't already noticed it a hundred times.

How successful has this vigorous politicization of education been? By the end of the 1990s, it looks as if there has been some demonstrable raising of standards, as reflected in test results. But more wary commentators have pointed out that there are a number of statistical and other extraneous factors that might account for this, and its certainly the case that if you practice tests with sufficient energy, children naturally tend to improve their pass rate. Such improvements, defined by limited test data, don't necessarily reflect cleverer or better educated children, and in the USA (the model for our standard attainment tasks testing regime) there are clear signs of a downside to testing, both in narrowing the curriculum and demotivating schools. Moreover, for all our efforts to equalize opportunity and standardize school cultures, differences between the most and least able performers are evidently as wide as ever.

The proportion of failing children has remained stubbornly constant at 20-25% for decades, and this is a phenomenon in education systems in most large urban conurbations in the Western world. Only countries with high levels of cultural and economic homogeneity, like Japan and Finland, seem to have cracked the problem of the underachievement of the urban poor. Despite all our efforts and good intentions, our difficulties remain. Winson Green prison, no more than a mile from here, is full of neglected, academically slow youngsters, many of them with mental health problems, and mostly from poor backgrounds. If creating equity of provision for the mass of the population through standardization of procedures is the main purpose of public education, then we have transparently failed.

It is a failure which can be accounted for in different ways. One is our inability to link social and educational policy. There is a view that schools can carry the main load, and can on their own make all the difference; but this, on the evidence, is misconceived. In fact, school league-table performance can be determined by the Micawber-like formula:

Hence a school with relatively well-off parents, well endowed with a selective intake, will invariably figure at the top end of the tables. Conversely, a school in a poor community, with little in the way of financial assets and with a non-selective intake, will figure at the bottom.

Other minor variations can be accounted for by local cultural factors. There are subtle differences between ethnic and cultural make-up in school catchment areas that help predict local variations in league-table performance. Our school, for example, gets a relatively high proportion of children to grammar schools (10-15%), a fact that results from the disproportionate number of the out-of-the area middle-class parents who send their children here, although this is not sufficient to distort the overall league-table performance. Levin and Kelly, after a rigorous examination of the evidence, summed the matter up succinctly:

Standardization of schooling in a pluralistic society, in which the variations and gaps between haves and have nots are widening, seems unlikely to touch the problems at their core. Schools are, in the event, not supermarkets. We can pile children into classrooms, but they are never as predictable as tins of baked beans piled on supermarket shelves. If one child in a class of thirty decides to throw a pencil during an Ofsted inspected lesson, this will lower the lesson grade. Baked-bean tins, when weighed and counted, will not move, or have moods, or cry.

Set against the larger picture of international comparisons of the effects of spending on improving teacher-child ratios, then, policies in the UK over the last three decades have looked more to the low-cost options of exhortation and control than to serious attempts to address funding needs in rational ways.

I have argued all along that resources have not been aimed at those who most need them: surely the most rational and effective way of achieving equality of education provision is to put extra resources into primary education. Yet pupil numbers in the classes at our school are as high at the end of the century as they were twenty-five years ago when I first walked into this hall, although a new Labour Government is showing a determination to bring down class sizes in infant schools to a maximum of thirty, and an increasing awareness of the importance of pre-school provision.

This is, ironically, a moment in time when great commercial chains like Marks and Spencer and Sainsbury's are suddenly facing a downturn, and smaller niche competitors are starting to make inroads into their traditional markets. Similar problems may face the standardization model for schools, with the appearance of new, radical possibilities on the horizon. Information and communication technology is to the twenty-first century what electricity was to the nineteenth. Old-style classrooms will start to look out of date in a world in which every child has a laptop, and can access the internet and access distance-learning opportunities and video links with teachers across the globe. It is possible that the whole school building as currently constructed may go the way of the abandoned church next door and become redundant in the age of new technologies.

Even for young children, schools will look more like universities, with pupils attending courses for a range of different subjects that are run at different ability levels. We will be required to focus much more specifically on the needs of individuals, and we will have to become increasingly sophisticated in the business of diagnosis as a means of analysing pupils' needs and potential.

More refined diagnosis and awareness will lead institutions to rethink their traditional ways of working in order to respond to the diversity of pupils for whom they are responsible. More complex organizational arrangements involving small-group teaching, tutorial teaching, large-scale lectures are likely to become the norm. We will certainly be expected to offer a much wider range of learning experiences to children in response to the growing heterogeneity of society and pupils' interest in a growing range of subjects. The consumer-led society will require schools to be ever more responsive to parent expectations. The school will be pressed to extend its activities beyond the school day, and to offer extra-curricular activities in more structured ways, with children having more of a say in what they choose to do, and with more systematic ways of identifying and developing skills and talents being adopted.

We will need to employ a greater diversity of people in the teaching-tutoring business, and to make more use of specialists to work (especially) with children with particular talents or needs. The 'class teacher' will increasingly become a 'learning manager' with responsibility for the overview of, and support for, the broader needs of each individual pupil. Schools will need to ensure competencies in basic skills, but this is likely to demand a much more vigorous attempt to tackle the learning difficulties of pupils, with a strong focus on the 0-5 age group, involving parents during the early years before formal schooling.

Children are likely to become increasingly assertive and better educated about their rights and responsibilities. The new idea of pupil entitlement is likely to spread - under which the state has to guarantee that each pupil has access, in or out of school, to a range of appropriate experiences, including, say, learning a musical instrument, participation in a range of sports from an early age, and access to involvement in theatre. Schools will also have the responsibility to offer emotional and counselling support for children who need it, to integrate health and educational issues more closely, to give much more comprehensive support to children with real of potential mental-health difficulties. The services offered to children will be more comprehensive, and involve a wider range of personnel, and ever more sophisticated technical back-up.

There will be counter forces. How shall we now ensure that all this doesn't lead towards a new form of post-televisual anomie - towards the individual who is engaged in personal and personalized pursuits, spending too much time penned up in a solitary environment in front of a computer screen, which results in a diminished social life and a narcissistic life-style? There will be issues for local democracy, for the teaching of the importance of community and civility and the support of local cultures. It will be important to develop children's abilities to analyse, to think clearly, to be inventive as well as appropriately sceptical. There will be the question of how to ensure that the teaching process at its core remains somehow intact; that Montaigne's vision that at the heart of learning lies dialectic, conversation, debate and human encounters, is not lost: that schools remain institutions with a deeply caring, stimulating environment - which is particularly important for primary-aged children.

One virtue of the best independent schools is their ability to protect their teachers from hassle that is unrelated to their work in the classroom, and to retain an emphatic emphasis on the quality of discourse between teachers and pupils. Smaller classes help with this and so does a protective 'professionalism' that allows the teacher the time and space to develop and plan his/her teaching through vastly improved resource back-up and administrative support. Smaller groups allow for much freer and deeper exchanges between teachers and pupils.

The challenge for teachers in the future will be defending and retaining the old virtues of knowing (and loving) their subject and being able to communicate in a free, personal and relaxed way with the pupils. At the same time, they may need to accept that many aspects of the job, especially the teaching of many basic skills, the technical tasks involved in pupil diagnosis, and the management of information technology, can be carried out by classroom assistants or administrative staff, with an increased role being given to external specialist tutors.

Centralism discourages trust and participation. It is an important and difficult question whether political action can succeed in the absence of self-confident professionals who will work closely over long periods with strong local communities. A failure to get the right balance between centre and periphery will lead to the very people you need most jumping ship. Some of the best teachers and heads are at present profoundly disillusioned. Primary teaching is rapidly becoming an almost exclusively female profession, and many outstanding women teachers are no longer interested in shouldering the strains of management responsibility. When I left Grove there were only three serious applicants for my job, in a school now of over 700 pupils. Fortunately one of them was outstanding.

Maybe national standardization will continue for some years to come and traditional classrooms and traditional lessons will also continue as we have always known them. Maybe children will continue to be taught in groups of thirty and mass-tested at intervals to achieve various targets. Maybe the parameters of choice for teachers will be even more constrained by a theoretical blueprint of 'what a good lesson is'. Maybe teachers will be ever more tightly scrutinized and their daily lives prescribed by various laws and impositions. There may be a 'freeing up' of schools in relation to the 'market', allowing them to cherry-pick their pupils, and (at least theoretically) an extension of parental choice through expanding popular schools: an attempt to bring the opportunism and culture of the private sector into state schools.

The battle is on between the standardizers and the diversifiers. Between a national culture struggling to impose national norms and identities and an every diversifying pluralism of cultures. Between a middle class that commands the field, and the socio-economically deprived, who have more challenging and perhaps different educational requirements. Between professionals, instinctively conservative in practice who want to protect old values, and a high tech world that offers radically different ways of thinking about teaching and learning. Between those who think they know all there is to know about good teaching and those who suspect that we have a great deal still to learn. A dialectical war lies ahead between different models, requirements, possibilities, pressures and expectations; between teachers, governments, Local Authorities and philosophers. And in the meantime, information technology rolls in like a tidal wave.

I stand in this old hall a long time thinking about these things. This school is like every other school, on the cusp between the past - a long tradition of formal schooling - and a future of dislocation and change, which will throw up those new sets of demands, issues, problems and puzzles.

'No form of the market economy,' writes the American political analyst Peter Unger, 'will do any good - for growth or for democracy - if it denies space to the individual or the collective entrepreneur who says, "to hell with you, I'll do it my way."'

Coleridge put in a counter-claim for the need to ground civilization 'in the harmonious development of those qualities and faculties that characterize our humanity'.

These are two very different propositions, over a century apart, and they both seem to carry weight. We need both individuality and corporateness; entrepreneurism along with a sense of what it means to be fully human; independent-mindedness together with an understanding of the critical importance of culture and cultivation. The best contemporary teaching is caught between these propositions, expressed in the tension of the drama of the classroom, the quality of the teacher-pupil engagement. Indeed, it is determined by them. Like good jazz, good teaching is both structured and improvised. It makes use of the finest instruments and themes available but deploys them in personal, original ways. Similarly for the headteacher, over and above the daily task of keeping the ship on course, there's the excitement of learning to adapt to the unpredictable, of shaping a personal vision of how things can be best directed in an insecure world, of keeping a weather-eye on the horizon.

I came into this job partly for the opportunities it gave me to explore, to discover. I have learnt that the deep things happen slowly, and that as the journey unfolds you need great patience. Possibility needs balancing against practicality; but for all the slowness of the evolving stages as we travel into deeper seas, there is the undeniable prospect of transformations, new and wonderful.