This is a decent start and to some extents is not questionable, and one could argue that it is rather difficult to summarise the purpose of primary education in one ‘off the cuff’ strap line. However, for me there is one very important word missing in this simplistic summary. The missing word is ‘learning’.
As a teacher, I could be merrily ‘teaching’ in what I consider to be a meaningful and engaging way. I could be enthusing about my subject. I could even be inspiring the odd one or two pupils in my class who are engaged in the subject matter, but unless they are ‘learning’ anything, then I may as well be sitting on my bottom or twiddling my thumbs.
Unless the pupils are inspired to want more, to think about how they can extend their own learning from what I am teaching, then I am not doing my job. Unless there are potential behavioural or attitudinal changes that have transpired from the core values that I have been aiming to instil, then a ‘happy and active’ lesson is worthless.
The key is in the learning.
There is no point in bombarding young people with facts if they have no idea how to transfer that knowledge into an understanding of themselves, others, their world and the world beyond their immediate experience. There is no point in giving them facts if they do not want or know how to do anything with them. Neither is there any purpose in getting them active and engaged in an energetic and creative lesson if there is no learning taking place.
As ever, it is all about balance.
Nobody is saying that we need to eradicate all factual learning – far from it. Nobody is saying that there are not times when some key facts and processes need to be ‘taught’ but having an emphasis on learning has got to be the crucial component, and one has to ask, why the hell we are even commenting on such a concept.
Surely to goodness, it is the ‘learning’ that is the entitlement of every young person, and for that matter, the entitlement of any person of any age who wants to expand their vision, understanding, attitudes and values.
Sir Jim Rose’s quote on the radio was incomplete. Looking at the BBC website, there is, I hope, a more accurate reflection of his intentions.
“The touchstone of an excellent curriculum is that it instils in children a love of learning for its own sake.
From what I have seen on my visits, the best schools demonstrate that these priorities - literacy, numeracy, ICT and personal development - are crucial for giving children their entitlement to a broad and balanced education."
One could quite understandably turn around and say to Sir Jim that if he had always felt this way, then why the hell has he been so quiet over the last few years when schools have been mindlessly charging forth with a standards led agenda which almost disregards learning and wholly concentrates on what is being taught, i.e. the straightjacket of the National Curriculum and Strategies, with their tedious and disputable (or should that be despicable) pedagogy?
One could understandably say to Sir Jim that if he thought that the curriculum was “too fat” then why did he not notice this despite the fact that he has been a key player in educational strategy since his heady days as the co-author of the “Three Wise Men” report?
One could understandably ask whether Sir Jim has had a Damascus experience upon receiving a letter of instruction from Ballsup himself inviting him to review the primary curriculum (incidentally, simultaneously with another Wise Man deciding to take the bull by the horns and provide an extremely intensive and thorough review of the very same subject) whereby he suddenly realised that some of the recommendations from the aforementioned 1992 report had been misconstrued?
And at this point (oh dear, failed my Level Four by using a conjunction at the beginning of a sentence), I would like to return to that Wise Men report. Sir Jim Rose, Sir Robin Alexander and the other one who shall not be named did not completely contradict some of the key elements of the Plowden report but that was not the conceived opinion at the time or indeed afterwards.
There was a clear focus on three elements of teaching (and learning); whole class, group and individual. They did not go along with their Education Minister at the time who was keen to introduce streaming to every class in the country. They acknowledged the “understandable aspiration” of individual teaching.
Let us consider some of the key pointers from the report with some comments from yours truly to illustrate a subsequent point. Please note, I could have chosen many other quotes but I wanted to comment on these in reference to where we are seventeen years on.
This was extremely detrimental to all professionals who realised the importance of developing a programme of teaching that was centred on the individual needs of the child. Child centred education was never supposed to be a free for all. Plowden didn’t suggest it was and neither did these three men. There were practices that were questionable but the question was in people passing off their poor teaching as a doctrine or pedagogy that had been recommended by Plowden. No such recommendation of losing sight of teaching and learning ever existed in the Plowden report.
However, the extent of subject knowledge required in order to teach the National Curriculum is more than can reasonably be expected of many class teachers.
Sir Jim, these are your words. The argument at the time was that there should be more specialist teachers, particularly in upper Key Stage Two but this thankfully didn’t happen. However, the inescapable “fattiness” of the curriculum remained and appears to have gone unnoticed by Sir Jim until this moment in time.
The organisational strategies of whole class teaching, group work and individual teaching need to be used more selectively and flexibly. The criterion of choice must be fitness for purpose.
And here is what the Plowden report says.
Whatever form of organisation is adopted, teachers will have to adapt their methods to individuals within a class or school. Only in this way can the needs of gifted and slow learning children and all those between the extremes be met…………..We recommend a combination of individual, group and class work and welcome the trend towards individual learning.
And the difference please? Both the Plowden and the Three Wise Men reports clearly advocated a variety in teaching methodology and allegedly did so in order to consider the needs of the individual child and their ‘learning’.
Effective teaching, regardless of the strategy used, requires the teacher to deploy a range of techniques. It is particularly important that the potential of explaining and questioning is realised.
And Plowden? 'Finding out' has proved to be better for children than 'being told'.
Something that Sir Jim is returning to in his current review.
Standards of education in primary schools will not rise until all teachers expect more of their pupils. Assumptions about pupils' abilities should be treated as working hypotheses to be updated in the light of new evidence.
Return again to the Plowden report, this is exactly what she said too. Now Rose is still pushing forward the notion that we must consider the individual child. But here is a key issue in this quote. Of course we need to understand where pupils are in their learning. The Wise Men report continued to say that the “working hypotheses” continues and fluctuates. Children learn at their own pace and need to be guided and extended but the hypotheses change according to the needs of the pupils. What this is saying, for me, is that pupils should be tracked and that the teaching should come from knowing where children are and where they could or should be. What this was interpreted as of course, is that there was a single significant form of “new evidence” being the outcomes of SATs.
The National Curriculum Orders should be regularly reviewed to ensure that they make appropriate demands on pupils of different ages and abilities and, individually and collectively, are manageable in terms of the time, resources and professional expertise available in schools.
Again, I have to ask the question, where has Rose been? Has he not seen the vast difference between this statement and what has actually happened? When has the National Curriculum with its thousands of statements ever been manageable? When have the National Curriculum orders been reviewed to consider the needs of the child other than instructed more didactic teaching through the tedium of the Literacy Hour and subsequent trendy literacy techniques? And that is before we even get onto the question as to whether the curriculum has ever been reviewed to see if it is relevant and interesting to our children – the last review being nine years ago, and even that was hardly giving any life shattering changes to content.
Well, apparently standards have been raised so the first level has been dealt with (question marks indeed) but where did this “wider concerns” disappear to? Placing no statutory requirements on the teaching of quality personal, social and health education certainly didn’t help, and because schools and teachers are now so used to core learning outcomes that are measurable immediately, it is going to take a huge shift in the understanding of what quality education is about to raise the importance of this key second level from the Wise Men report.
The reporting on the television today is indicitative of this very point. We have become obsessed with knowledge and cognitive development so that these are seen by the media, and therefore parents and carers, as the be-all of education. On reporting about the Rose Review, the emphasis was, to some extent correctly, on bringing the curriculum into the 21st century with an emphasis on computer technology. However, there was another key area about the health and wellbeing of pupils that, as ever, got slightly sidelined. Please see the quote below……
Parents and employers alike continue to place considerable emphasis on the development of values and socially responsible attitudes, and this is an area where the vast majority of primary schools are markedly successful.
Ask a parent what they want for their child, and the very first statement that comes out of their mouths is that they want their children to be happy. They, like many teachers around the country, have been indoctrinated into believing that the attainment of average or above levels in Literacy and Numeracy is the crucial and in some cases only purpose of education. Can no one see the hypocrisy and contradictions that have been taking place in our education system in recent memory? The Wise Men report clearly indicated that there are concerns about the wider concerns of demands for living in a modern world and this is rightly being addressed by putting wellbeing ‘up there’ with the bog boys. But again, in 1992, this phrase was interpreted as “preparing pupils for adult life”.
IT WAS A WRONG INTERPRETATION – borne out in the fact that Rose has clearly stated that the primary curriculum should have, as one of its six key components, an emphasis on health and wellbeing, and one’s interpretation of health should not be limited to the physical. This is clearly talking about the social, emotional, spiritual and physical development of the child and there is a huge urgency to ensure that we are not just preparing children for adult life but we are working with them, encouraging, guiding and supporting them in being children and all the “demands of life in modern society” that this entails.
The first, and longest established, focus of enquiry is the empirical study of how primary pupils develop and learn. To teach well, teachers must take account of how children learn. We do not, however, believe that it is possible to construct a model of primary education from evidence about children's development alone: the nature of the curriculum followed by the pupil and the range of teaching strategies employed by the teacher are also of critical importance. Teaching is not applied child development. It is a weakness of the child-centred tradition that it has sometimes tended to treat it as such and, consequently, to neglect the study of classroom practice.
There we have it – a simple paragraph that has shaped the way our education has evolved over the last seventeen years, totally forgetting that key underlined statement. This was the excuse that the Tories and the subsequent Tories in rouged clothing required, interpreted according to their political needs, ignoring the plight of needy children.
So why have I included some of these comments?
I think there are a few reasons.
Firstly, I suppose it is to show that interpretation is so significant. For decades we have allowed the layperson to dictate the content and philosophy of education. They have been allowed to interpret key reviews of primary and indeed other education according to their own political mantra. These reports have been manipulated in the way that any statistic can be. It is not the recommendations from the report that have formed policy. It is the interpretation thereof.
Secondly, I wanted to consider the cyclical nature of educational thinking, and that it isn’t really that cyclical at all. There will be people saying today that Rose is considering some namby pamby 1960s teaching methodologies. He has already been criticised for not emphasising subject teaching sufficiently despite his protestations to the contrary. The ideas in this review are not returning to an unfocused child centred education. Sadly, they are not as progressive as to even warrant the label of child focused education, but it is a start. He has emphasised quite strongly the needs of the individual and the fact that this need is not wholly a cognitive need. But he, like all of us, has to be very careful about how this entire report is interpreted by Ballsup and his colleagues. They should not be allowed to be dismissive about some key findings here and within the Alexander review. This is not a time for ‘slipping back’ in time but for moving forward with the significant and essential elements of 21st century, outlined in books such as the New Learning Revolution.
We are in different times, and this requires different learning. Unlike the esteemed colleague from the Campaign for Real Education, who said she was concerned that children would forget how to communicate with one another, the use of computers in learning is not scary and will not create a generation of automatons because they will not be sitting at computers all day. They will interact as well in other activities – remember, balance, variety?
Finally, although there are many more reasons for looking at these documents, there is the issue about the authors themselves and what they have been doing since 1992.
I am delighted that Alexander has been forthright and opinionated in his review. Ever since 1992, he has pleaded that his views within the Wise Men report have been misconstrued, and even if they weren’t everyone has the right to change their opinion with emerging “hypotheses ….. updated in the light of emerging evidence”. Looking at his website, you can see he has been working over the last decade or so on considering and re-evaluating decent pedagogy.
The Wooden one, well we all know where that opportunistic wally went. He decided to go along with all the conservative interpretations of the Wise Men report, challenging the very nature of individual learning. He swallowed the standards agenda as the key to quality education and I don’t really want to talk about the man any longer.
Which leaves us with Rose.
He has been the middle man – neither positively revolutionary in his thinking as Alexander, but strangely quiet when Woodentops was spouting his sick and deeply flawed interpretation on the value and purpose of education.
He has been the middle man, middle of the road, middling in thought and action, middle ambivalence, middle
He appears to have lost interest in being proactive. He has been around. He has been working in education all of this time but he has also played a slight opportunistic role too.
What he hasn’t done is either stand by or deny the views and interpretations of the 1992 report. To some extents he appears to be rather like the Fast Show character in the pub who cannot make his mind up and is swayed in his affirmation by the two contrasting arguments of his mates, constantly contradicting himself.
And it is this that rather worries me.
The Rose Report itself has some positives, many of them. There is an acknowledgement that the curriculum is over crowded, that too much emphasis has been placed on knowledge, that IT should be more prevalent, that wellbeing is as significant in the development of the whole child as to their literacy and numeracy capabilities. But as soon as critics commented on the fact that the report was placing the curriculum in six key areas rather than subjects, he emphatically denied a return to topic based learning. He emphatically pleaded that this was not the end of subject based learning. When others concerned themselves with a dilution of factual information, he emphasised the need for children to know their facts.
He has to be very careful that he doesn’t sit on that fence so often that people begin to wonder what he actually stands for, what he believes in, what he is advocating as quality primary education.
Despite all of this, I remain hopeful. I feel that there is a tide turning and I look forward to the interpretations in tomorrow’s papers to see how the review has been received.
I suppose it will be most interesting to see how the Tories interpret this for by the time this is to be implemented; I think Ballsup and his cronies may be on the other side of the house.
