After our OFSTED inspection was, typically, foisted upon us this week – it is literally the most stressful week of my career every time, and I’m convinced each time it’s been worse than the last, I have spent the weekend doing nothing. My marathon training is on hold until tomorrow. I haven’t touched any work. I haven’t really followed the football. I did complete my column for the Non-League Paper, but aside from that, I’ve done very little.
So today I took a trip to the Newsagent and bought some papers. I was reading the Observer, and I came across this article by Dr. Anthony Seldon.
I’m a fan of Seldon, largely since I saw him talk at a conference on teaching happiness in Belfast a while ago. I didn’t dismiss his ideas immediately because he is Tony Blair’s biographer or the Head of a private school. And I was glad I gave him a chance. Anyway, you can read more about that in the link above.
When I read the title, and there was a longer article in the Observer printed version discussing it, I thought “my word, we’ve just changed the curriculum at Key Stage 3, we’re trying to develop students’ Personal, Learning and Thinking Skills, and we’re making good progress, and now we need another change in direction?” Of course I believe in a constant debate on education – that’s why I have this blog and it’s a part of what interests me about education generally, but that’s not what I presumed that the article was going to be about.
So if you’re reading this, you’ve probably read the article by now, and if you’re like me, you’re thinking “what’s the big deal?”, because I read it and thought “there is nothing new there”. And there isn’t. It did still annoy me though.
Because it says, flippantly, that “the national curriculum has become more prescriptive”. While I accept this is true (and I fear for Australia, where it seems they are siding towards establishing a National Curriculum based on ours in the UK). It has become more prescriptive since the 1976. But that hasn’t been a uniform progression. There have been a lot of changes and developments since then. And actually, I think it’s recently become less prescriptive. And I also believe that’s as a result of a recent debate!
And seriously, league tables? Isn’t that debate lost? The teaching unions, including the Head Teachers’ union, can claim some credit for the undermining of SATs over the last few years that has led to their scrapping at Key Stage Three, but the whole accountability regime (I mean OFSTED) is predicated on attainment, and comparing a school’s attainment to National Standards. I’m not saying that’s all we’re accountable for, but it’s importance has recently been magnified (in the new OFSTED Evaluation schedule – on the OFSTED website something now I’ve been through the most recent version of OFSTED I recommend any Head or Senior Leader actually study and use to complete their SEF). Seldon seems to be saying what teachers were saying when I joined the profession. So we’ve moved largely, and wrongly towards teaching students to pass exams, but Seldon seems to be saying that’s very recent. It’s not, by any stretch.
I do think that we need to combine the ongoing developments in the curriculum – moving towards developing students’ skills for the 21st century and their over-arching understanding of concepts rather than delivering a load of content – with a refocus on what we as a society think is important. If we want to develop students’ skills, then lets stop the arbitrary measurement of schools and of individuals on a written exam. Seldon says this, but I think that in a commentary in a national newspaper he missed a key opportunity to link some of the more promising developments in our curriculum with the archaic method of measuring students’ education and schools’ effectiveness.
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