Imagine, for a moment, our nation’s schools as places of real enjoyment and stimulation, as proud civic institutions where all children – black, white, rich, poor, Jewish and Muslim – could be educated together. Imagine a school system free from the influence of business interests and corporate values.Utopian dreaming? The Coalition – and many on the Labour front bench – would certainly have us believe so.
The Government are currently reforming state education at breakneck speed, posing as a radical administration acting in the interests of poorer families while, in reality, returning us to some very 19th century notions: schools as places of strict discipline and rote learning, increasingly run by private interests, encouraging the separation of children on grounds of faith, wealth and so called intelligence.
It has no electoral mandate for many of these changes, just as it has no mandate, beyond the flim flammery of opinion polls, for the current dismantling of the benefit system or the National Health Service.
This diminution of democracy – a growing threat throughout Europe, as the economic crisis grows – is reflected in the host of speedy, sham consultations taking place around the country as schools are bribed or bullied into becoming academies
Comprehensive reform
But, just as in health and benefits, there are alternative visions of a reformed welfare state, one which does not reward the already strong or profit-seeking or diminish the potential of the vulnerable.
Michael Gove is right on one thing: history is a vital key to understanding the present and the future.
Free universal education was introduced in the UK after the Second World War as an attempt to rationalise and transcend the unequal patchwork of provision that characterized the pre-war years.
But the 1944 settlement was fatally flawed in one important respect. It divided our children, aged eleven. The so called ‘clever’ minority were siphoned into the grammars while the majorities were shipped off to under-resourced and lesser regarded secondary moderns, a division that mostly followed class lines.
Changing attitudes to intelligence in addition to massed parental revolt led to the slow implementation of comprehensive education. Indeed, the more idealistic and economically buoyant Sixties and Seventies produced many positive developments in primary and secondary education and much rich experimentation.
But comprehensive reform was never consolidated thanks to the ambivalence of successive governments, both Labour and Tory, and intense media hostility to ‘all in’ schools that has only intensified.
The private schools were never dealt with, a significant minority of grammar schools remained, and faith schools and other forms of subtle and covert selection were encouraged.
All this ensured that inequality remained inscribed in the system, slowing educational advance for poorer families.
21st century inequalities
As a result, our school system is more unequal than ever. Elite private schools, some charging up to thirty thousand pounds a year per pupil, continue to thrive.
The eleven plus still exists in some parts of the country, with thousands of poorer children beginning their secondary school life officially told they are failures, while children from better off families are often heavily tutored to get through the test.
Now the arrival of the so called ‘free schools,’ the rapid growth of the academy programme, the rupturing of the link between elected local authorities and local schools, and the growth of powerful educational chains, are further disfiguring the landscape.
So that although we have many great schools, teachers and students, our school system is likely to become more segregated than ever. Local authorities and community schools are increasingly struggling with severe funding cuts while the new free schools and academies take valuable revenue.
Education PLC
If we want to see where this is leading we only have to look to the USA where the growth of charter schools, backed by powerful “philanthropic capital,” has led to increased testing, a dangerous narrowing of the curriculum, yet more social and ethnic segregation and an aggressive assault on the public (state) school system.
For the Tory-led Coalition, many of whom were educated privately, schools seem to be detached from their communities, places that exist largely for the acquisition of credentials, including many currently low status vocational qualifications – one reason for the supposed success of many academies – and worker-ready presentational skills. For the more affluent child, meanwhile, school serves the social purpose of fostering useful or even elite networks for the future.
It is a depressingly limited and short-term view of human potential.
A return to the values of 19th century schooling – complete with ex-soldiers instilling discipline in classrooms in poorer industrial areas – will not revive our flagging economy, or enable us to compete with China or India. In these countries, educational and economic success is predicated on a form of dawn till dusk slavery.
Alternative visions
We need to draw, instead, on a deeper vision of human and economic potential. Here, we could learn from some of the best systems in the world which are admirably simple and yet entirely non-selective, such as Finland, or the province of Alberta in Canada, where an excellent school in every neighbourhood gives each child a rich, rounded education.
Not only do all children go to school together, it is also made sure that no child, particularly those from a poorer background, is left behind.
The private sector and market values cannot deliver a fair, high quality, stable system. This depends on a thoughtful, democratically accountable national and local state.
National government should ensure fair distribution of resources, aided by increased taxation, and set the terms of a minimal curriculum, thereby ensuring maximum autonomy for each area, school and teacher.
Local bodies should ensure that schools have fair admissions policies, do not unfairly exclude children, and foster collaboration, not competition.
Teachers should be highly trained, encouraged to take regular breaks to reflect on their subject knowledge as well as their teaching skills. No class in the country should be bigger than 20, and substantial resources should be directed to schools in poorer areas, and to poorer pupils.
Of course, every child should be literate and numerate. But the acquisition of such skills should be a prerequisite of schooling in the 21st century in what is still one of the most affluent countries in the world.
Broader horizons
The key to a good education lies not in narrowing down the curriculum but in opening it up. Finland, which has a far broader, more imaginative and personalised approach to learning and the measurement of learning, has some of the best results in the world.
Schools should be places full of constant enquiry and spirited debate. They should foster the understanding and enjoyment of all forms of art, music, literature, other languages and cultures and be a place of artistic and scientific experiment.
Qualities such as inquisitiveness, tenacity, creativity and risk-taking should be developed and celebrated. Young people should be encouraged to deepen their own intellectual and practical enthusiasms, not merely be drilled to pass exams.
Parents and students would respond far more positively to a system that did not rigidly categorise a young person by the time of puberty but instead recognised her/him as a unique complex moral being with enormous potential. The individual and social rewards would be untold.
By Melissa Benn – Melissa Benn’s School Wars: The Battle for Britain’s Education is published by Verso.