Education White Paper - November 2010

Last week’s education white paper amounts to a fundamental revolution: there will be a much leaner and more focussed core curriculum; a return to rigour in exams – including spelling and grammar; power for teachers to enforce discipline; reform of teacher training to raise standards and, more importantly, to raise the status of the profession; and most important of all, sweeping away the dead hand of bureaucratic control.

The decline of educational standards has been a long and dismal experience. In an increasingly competitive world it is unacceptable that according to the OECD we are ranked 17th in maths, 24th in science, 14th in reading, and our employers complain that our school leavers cannot read and count properly, this despite all the extra money that has gone into our schools.

I have no doubt that it is centralised state control that has blighted our education system, but before we are too critical of politicians of all parties in their attempts to run education from the centre, we should remember why it happened. 

The abandonment of traditional teaching methods and classroom standards was embraced by the teaching profession and its unions.  I recall, as a primary school governor, being told by the head mistress that no teacher in the school could really have any idea of how long any child had spent on any particular subject in any week, because each class was divided into a number of tables, each table would be doing something quite different,  and the children would move freely at will between the tables.  What is more, all the teaching was by theme, and that term’s theme: ‘shiny things’.  For heaven’s sake! The fact that anyone learnt to read at all was probably down to middle class parents teaching their children to read at home.  In that particular school however 80% of the children were on free school meals,  50% spoke a different language at home and 30% were living in bed and breakfast accommodation.  This was their only chance in life, an education to take them out of the cycle of deprivation, and what were they getting?  Shiny things.  With a significant proportion of the education establishment having collectively taken leave of its senses, it is little wonder that politicians stepped in to tell the profession exactly what to teach and how to teach it. 

This approach has now itself become part of the problem instead of part of the solution because it has led to schools being tied up in red tape, stiffling innovation and initiatative. Last year bureaucrats issued 3000 pages of instructions to head teachers.  It is this whole way of doing things that is now to be reversed.  The engine of reform foreshadowed in the white paper is the return of power to schools, headmasters, teachers and parents.  It is now for the teaching profession to rise to this challenge using the new freedom to properly educate our children.