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Tuesday 3 December 2013

(The Leaning Tower of) Pisa

For me, one of the most startling aspects of todays House of Commons debate about the latest Pisa data - apart from the turgid mud-slinging, point-scoring and planted questions from the government benches - was the language that was used. Almost universally now, the debate around educational attainment centres on our children "falling behind" or being "left behind" in the "global race". I counted several uses of this kind of imagery, but it is ubiquitous among politicians and policy-makers on all sides.
Education seems to have shifted its core purpose during my career as a teacher. Without for one moment denying the self-evident need to equip children and young adults with the skills and knowledge they need to succeed in the workplace, a vital part of education is being ditched, slowly but surely.

We have made mistakes in education policy-making because we've allowed ideology to fashion it. There were ill-feted experiments like ITA spelling and teachers who took the 'real books' or 'whole language' philosophy to such ridiculous lengths that they refused to teach phonics at all, as though children would learn to read by osmosis. Sometimes, these failed education policies have been based simply on prevailing cultural aspirations. But the current trend for viewing education simply as a means for creating a suitable future workforce is the result of a much deeper, political consensus; one based on the assumption that neo-liberal market economics must direct our lives.

I believe this is a profound mistake. Education has a deeper, more subtle capacity to alter our lives, to draw out of us what we might become. And we as a country must have higher aspirations for what we want to build. Whilst a significant majority of the UK electorate are in favour of nationalising (or mutualising, to put it another way) the railways and the utilities, the government presses ahead with the further de-mutualisation of the education system and the opposition have no real alternative vision. They would tinker, but they accept the consensus.

A high-stakes accountability system based on test results will always cause a narrowing of curricular opportunities despite what some people might argue, simply because everybody wants to be seen to be 'successful'. If we really just want to ape other countries' educational systems then maybe we'll simultaneously have to give up the idea of education as a way of transmitting shared values and culture or as part of the way we look after our most vulnerable children.

Of course, 'global races' have to have winners and losers. If we allow education to be seen purely through the prism of that kind of imagery, then we might as well tear up the 1959 United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child and accept that sub-standard or non-existent education is all right for the losers.