Don’t Be Fooled By The DfE’s U-Turn On Academisation

The government's latest White Paper will still see children’s education sold out to corporate restructuring

- by John Yandell

Buried deep in the recent DfE White Paper, Educational Excellence Everywhere, is a reference to an interesting piece of research.
A group of American middle-school pupils read an account of a baseball game, and then had to re-enact it using model figures. Some pupils showed they understood exactly what went on in the game; others struggled. What made the difference was not whether they were good readers, but whether they were interested in baseball.
Bizarre justification
There’s nothing very surprising about finding that children (and adults) learn best when interested in the subject. So why is a government that is desperate to inflict a battery of SPaG and phonics screening tests on children quoting this research? Doesn’t this study suggest an entirely different approach to reading – and maybe to learning – might be worth considering? An approach that takes the interests of learners seriously, and allows teachers to develop the enthusiasms of the children they teach?
Apparently not. Bizarrely, it became a justification for ‘a knowledge-based curriculum as the cornerstone of an excellent, academically rigorous education’.
This isn’t, of course, the aspect of the White Paper that has commanded attention. Following an outcry, the government has abandoned its plan to compel all schools to become academies. But it would be a mistake to imagine that this U-turn signals the end of the government’s educational project.
Amidst all the rhetoric of the White Paper – all the talk of ‘great’ schools, ‘great’ leaders, the breathless vacuity of a piece of badly-written advertising copy – it’s easy to dismiss it as just a hodgepodge of half-baked ideas. But don’t be misled. There is a coherent vision hidden amongst the waffle – one that involves not only a fundamental restructuring of the school system, but a radically different vision of what education is, and what it is for.
The business model
What the White Paper promises is the wholesale commodification of education. Each part of this redesigned system conforms to a business model. Multi-academy trusts – which will figure increasingly prominently – are not loose coalitions of schools set up to enable collaboration; they are corporate structures, with rigid managerialist hierarchies.
Within these structures, a different model of teacher formation and development is imagined. Teachers will aspire not to be better teachers, but better managers, eventually rising to become CEOs. No wonder, then, that in this new model the accreditation of teachers should be a purely internal matter of compliance and quality control, a simple managerial judgement.
What matters is efficiency. There is no room for dialogue, for reciprocity, for the messiness and complexity and human warmth that have, most of the time, characterised professional relations in real schools.
Trending
This drive for efficiency is also why the role of parents and carers has been reconfigured. The new regime has no place for parents as governors. Not just because they are assumed to lack specialist knowledge, but also because that’s just not how the system works – parents are consumers, not partners. They are entitled to information about the product that the MAT is selling – and are entitled to complain if the commodity is deficient in any way – but the ideal is that they know their place and leave the producers to their work.
Ripe for commodification
And what of the product itself? This is where the ‘knowledge-led curriculum’ comes in. It isn’t enough to corporatise the delivery structures of schooling; the actual content of education is also ripe for commodification.
Learning, in this model, is to be reduced to the acquisition of ‘core knowledge’. And in the interests of efficiency and reducing teachers’ workload, the present government is keen to extol the virtues of textbooks as vehicles for the delivery of this knowledge.
This is a streamlined system indeed – even more so when those textbooks will be produced by the same multinational edubusinesses competing for lucrative franchises in the testing market. A perfect circle of commodification awaits us. What is learnt is what is prescribed by the textbook; what is in the textbook is what is tested.
In this brave new world there doesn’t seem to be much space for children’s own knowledge and enthusiasms – baseball-related or otherwise – nor opportunity for teachers to work with these interests; and certainly no room for the human flourishing that might be regarded as the purpose of more liberal conceptions of education.
Dr John Yandell is a senior lecturer of education at the Institute of Education, University College London