“Teachers Don’t Know How Different Things Once Were”
Professor Richard Pring explains how government education policy underwent a complete transformation four decades ago – and why the top-down decision-making we’ve seen since isn’t doing Britain’s schools any favours… You don’t have to look far these days for professional and academic writing that takes issue with the general direction of education policy within the […]
Professor Richard Pring explains how government education policy underwent a complete transformation four decades ago – and why the top-down decision-making we’ve seen since isn’t doing Britain’s schools any favours…
You don’t have to look far these days for professional and academic writing that takes issue with the general direction of education policy within the last two to three decades.
Among the latest is A Generation of Radical Educational Change. Co-edited by Richard Pring (Professor of Education at Winchester University and former Director of Educational Studies at Oxford University) and Martin Roberts (formerly head of The Cherwell School and presently on the Academic Steering Committee of of the Prince’s Teaching Institute), it brings together 16 essays that explore the changes that have taken place in England’s education system over the past 40 years.
The book’s contributors include former Education Secretary Lord Baker on the relevance of scientific and technical education to industry; journalist Peter Wilby on the harms caused by the ongoing ‘Progressives vs. Traditionalists’ media narrative; and TACTYC president Wendy Scott OBE, on the demoralising effects of a widespread blame culture.
Here, Richard Pring shares with us the motivation behind producing the book, why 1976 marked a watershed moment for politics and education in England – and the kind of school system he’d ultimately like to see himself…
Why publish this particular book now? One reason is that it’s exactly 40 years since James Callaghan gave a speech at Ruskin College Oxford, which was the first time that a Prime Minister had ever said anything about education ‘off his own bat’, as it were.
The 1944 Education Act had given ministers very few powers, beyond the responsibility to ensure there were enough places in schools for all children and enough teachers to teach those children – but what we got from the Ruskin speech onwards was increasing interference from policy makers into the substance of what went on in schools.
Many people now teaching in schools and training to be teachers don’t know how different things once were. They’re the inheritors of a massive change in the politics and organisation of education, which we wanted to address through the voices of those who had been working across the system while those changes were taking place. We’ve seen an enormous amount of change in the last 40 years, and an undercutting of the principles of the 1944 Education Act.
Undercutting in what sense? After 1944, education was seen as a national system that was locally administered. Power was devolved in that local education authorities (LEAs) provided the schools and the teachers, and there were no legal restrictions on what was taught in schools – that wasn’t seen as a job for Westminster politicians.
In ’44 we were still fighting against Nazism, under which there had been a great deal of centralised political control over schools and what went on in education. One of the things the 1944 Education Act tried to do was ensure that we never put that sort of power into the hands of politicians ourselves.
I knew someone at Oxford who went on to be appointed to the Central Advisory Council (CAC) for Education set up under the Act in 1947. She once asked the Permanent Secretary what the duty of the Central Advisory Council was, and he replied, ‘It is to be prepared to die at the first ditch, as soon as politicians get their hands on education.”
How did you go about recruiting contributors? We broke down the different aspects of the system – primary, early years, secondary, further education and teacher training, then the exam boards and inspectorate – to form different categories, which would combine to paint a fairly comprehensive picture of the changes that have taken place. It obviously depends a bit on who you know, but there were certain people who were pretty crucial in each of those areas.
Sir Peter Newsam took up the challenge of writing from the perspective of having been responsible for one of the largest education authorities in the world. For secondary education, we chose Martin Roberts, a distinguished headteacher, and Kenneth Frederick, whom I had got to know through education research I’d previously done in Tower Hamlets. Tim Oates we got, because for a long time he’s been the person with perhaps most influence across three major examination boards and overseen a number of changes.
Are there any common themes or observations that emerge from the book’s various essays? One is that despite how complicated it is to affect change in education, we’re seeing newly appointed Education Ministers – and there’s been a huge number of them in the last 30 years – immediately come in with some new policy or set of ideas that have never been tested out. One thinks in particular of the constant changes we’ve seen in the examinations system.
If you go back to the days of the CAC – and even before that, to the 19th century – any major changes were the product of reports that would have taken two or three years to produce, in which time the authors would have tried to look at the issue from every conceivable angle before drawing their conclusions.
One thinks of the 1978 Waddell Report on school examinations, or the Newsom and Plowden reports in relation to primary education. Those days have gone.
A second theme is that due this constant testing, inspection, hitting of targets and so on, one is now seeing an increasing shortage of teachers. The figures really are quite terrifying; a crisis is now emerging, particularly in secondary education, due to a shortage of qualified teachers to teach the various subjects of the EBacc.
If you treat teachers in a particular way and forego your responsibility for ensuring there are sufficient teachers to go round, you get into real problems. In many parts of the country, local responsibility for planning has now been got rid of – and what one is seeing with the growth of academies and free schools is a maldistribution of school places.
We have to give more responsibility to teachers, while ensuring they are able to access appropriate forms of professional development that enables them to carry out their duties, though one needs to be a bit careful of being too enthusiastic about teachers taking charge, because there were some exceedingly bad examples in the 60s. There was the William Tyndale affair and others, all of which we mention in the book, so there needs to be proper accountability – but what we want is more respect for the profession, in terms of shaping that accountability, and limits on role of central politicians in determining the minutiae of curriculum and assessment.
Longer term, would sort of education system would you like to see? One in which there is professional co-operation and support across the system itself and within schools. I first came to Oxford in 1989, and over the 14 years I was director I was in a school each week. What I really admired was seeing this incredible co-operation between schools in meeting the various problems they encountered.
Another area that’s a particular bugbear of mine is careers support. What we have at the moment is a very neglected and fragmented system that’s seeing young people making decisions at 14, which affect their decisions at 16, which affect their decisions at 18, without the independent professional advice that comes from having a good careers service.
Visit most large sixth form colleges and you’ll find they have independent careers advisors; you often don’t get that in schools, because they can’t afford to have somebody with that kind of professional knowledge, who knows about local apprenticeships and the combination of qualifications you need to pursue a particular career.
A Generation of Radical Educational Change is available now
