Playground citizens
Just a little bloggette to tell you all about the start of what we hope will be a fantastic initiative – the RSA School Governance Network.
The way we govern our schools and colleges is going through a period of upheaval. The DCSF are holding a national review of how English schools (and colleges) are run throughout this year. We’ve also just seen a report into the future of school governance from Business In The Community, following the Joseph Rowntree Foundation report last year.
There are already many models for governing schools emerging as schools become more diverse – academies, trust schools, comps… Many are arguing that governing bodies’ purpose should be holding school heads to account, giving them a narrower focus on academic performance. Earlier indications are that the review may recommend governing bodies should be smaller, with more of an emphasis on skills rather than community representation.
There’s never been a better time to ask what education governance is really for, who should have the right to do it and what practical activities it should be involved in. We’ve had many people say to us that what’s needed is a space for people involved in running schools to exchange ideas and experiences of improving what’s already out there, or even doing something completely new.
That’s the ambition behind the RSA Governance Network. We invited Fellows to tell us what they thought school governance is for, and on the 18th of October a group of volunteers came together to write a vision statement for the new initiative and set its priorities.
Although the network is looking at governance in schools and colleges and very much draws upon the RSA Education Campaign’s Charter, we know governing isn’t about micromanaging classroom teachers but about shared vision and community leadership. What’s really exciting about the network is it’s looking at how we can all get involved in making our local education institutions better at responding to our changing society. It’s about being active citizens.
I’m writing up the workshop’s priorities as a full project proposal at the moment. I’ll share my ideas here very soon. In the mean time, do read the network’s vision statement and have your say here.
Cheers, Rosie
Beginning not to be afraid
I’ve just got back from Stephen Heppel’s annual Be Very Afraid event at the BAFTA building in Picadilly.
The event allows students and teachers from schools, colleges and universities to showcase their innovative uses of IT in and out of the classroom to an audience of policy makers and media.
There were several really exciting projects, but one in particular caught my attention as one of those really simple ideas that has huge potential in all sorts of ways.
Students at Lampton School in Hounslow have created a website that shows profiles of people aged from one to one hundred, with simple facts about them, comments and lifestyle information . To create the site, students at the school had to go out into the local area and interview lots of people – asking what they had for breakfast and where they were born.
What was so brilliant about the project was how many ways it had had a positive on the young people and the community at large. The Year 7 students presenting the project today said they found out loads of things like how the ethnic make up of the area differed by age and how older people they thought were scary were actually nice to talk to. They feel more a part of their local area and told me that there was a greater respect between students at the school and other people in the community.
One of the students told me how he used to get shouted at by one local resident who didn’t like him and his friends playing football so near his house. The students all thought he was scary until they interviewed him for the project. Now they voluntarily try to keep their football game away from his house and no longer get shouted at.
The same project is being carried out in Goa and the students at Lampton are communicating with their Indian counterparts about the challenges they experience and comparing the profiles from the two countries.
The students’ teacher told me that they would like nothing better than to have other schools email them to ask for an account on the website and to start adding their own local profiles of people of all ages. In an era of an ageing population and increasingly rapid technological and cultural change, we all have something to learn from anything that begins to reverse the trend of alienation between generations.
- Louise Thomas
Education for consumerism…
Matthew Taylor’s recent post about the impact of the recent economic downturn on our national character had me reflecting again upon the relationship between teachers and consumerism. Matthew’s point is partly that a failure of our political leadership to push us to reflect on our part in creating the current crisis will have negative consequences in the long run – pointing out that greed was not the monopoly of a group of bankers but shared amongst a whole class of people.
Consumerism and the market have infused so much of our lives, and to such a degree, that if a time of new austerity does come we will have to question the basis of many of our aspirations and our identities. To the degree that wisdom implies long-term thinking over short-termism, and being other-regarding rather than self-centred, education could have a particular role to play in helping our culture adapt.
First, however, there is some soul-searching to do about the influence of the market within education.
Anna Craft reflects on the nature of teaching creativity in Britain in her recent book of essays, Creativity, Wisdom and Trusteeship which she co-edits with Howard Gardner and Guy Claxton. In her essay she concentrates on how our view of creativity in schools is so often infused with Western consumerism – creativity which serves the market. She argues that when we talk of creativity we place our emphasis on novelty, the individual perspective and the individual vision, and the creation of cultural products. This has its advantages (promotion of freedom of expression being one), but also important limitations.
What, Anna asks, is the role for creativity away from innovation and change for its own sake. Where is the room created for example, for collective expression of existing cultural values. In a time where we live with the real prospect of scarce resources, what about the ‘perspective which says “make-do-and-mend”‘. And what is education’s role in fostering wisdom?
I’m no expert on creativity but it struck me as a timely warning, and one that resonates throughout education.
In the UK where absolute poverty is very much an exception, wealth does not equate to happiness, though relative poverty tends towards profound unhappiness (check out the presentation from Ipsos MORI’s Ben Page at the recent ‘Can we learn our way to happiness’ event at the Campaign for Learning). Yet we know that young people are increasingly instrumental about education. Children tend to read not for the joy of reading, but to gain ‘level 4′; more young people learn in order gain qualifications to get a job. This is a perspective at least acquiesced to, and even encouraged by, schools.
SATs have just gone for 14 year olds. There is doubtless zero connection between that decision and the widespread crisis in the markets. Still, will this global crisis be the reference point which forces us into a real re-consideration of what school is for, and how it fosters wise citizens not good consumers?
Ian McGimpsey
Virtual childhood
A quick note after attending two events recently where both speaker and audience attitudes towards children and technology struck me as worth a comment. A compelling presentation by Sue Palmer, author of Toxic Childhood, at the Campaign for Learning’s ‘Can we learn our way to happiness?’ conference, and a panel debate on youth and social exclusion here at the RSA both addressed the demise of outdoor play and the adverse affect of changes to childhood on children’s development.
We know that the space allowed to children – both literally and figuratively – to play and to learn by themselves is severely curtailed. Children are less active, they learn less about risk taking, socialising and independence. There are innumerable reasons why the loss of outdoor play and the freedom of children to explore unsupervised is to be mourned, and anyone that knows me would tell you that I would be the first to advocate the great outdoors – for children and for the rest of us.
That said, it seemed to me that many of the delegates and speakers at both of the events I went to seemed to accept an unproblematised characterisation of outdoors = good, computer games = bad. This was to the extent that I felt such a judgment was an emotive one based on a certain amount of nostalgia for more traditional idea of childhood, and an uncertainty about new technologies and their impact on children.
Such nostalgia could get us stuck, when what will benefit children are pragmatic and progressive approaches.
We need to be pragmatic and accept that unsupervised wholesome, educational outdoor play is not going to be a reality of for many children now and in the near future for many reasons, including poverty, home location, parental fears and changes in childhood culture. And, we need to deal with the reality that interaction through ‘virtual’ interfaces is often more a reality for some children than building a den in a wood ever will be. While it is important to maximise the potential of the real life worlds of these children, we must not in doing so deny the validity of virtual interactions because of their failure to live up to adult nostalgia for idyllic childhoods of the past.
Secondly, we need to be progressive in our attitudes towards children and technology, and recognise the opportunities. A number of organisations (see Consolarium for example) are looking at the educational potential of video games in developing risk taking, strategy and even citizenship. BECTA have done work on the advanced communication skills picked up by children who are interacting daily with hundreds of others through online networking sites and interactive online games. It is important that the potential opportunities offered to many children by the internet and other new technologies are embraced, understood, and maximised, because we all want today’s children to have the skills and knowledge that they will need to thrive in the rapidly changing 21st century.
If adults don’t engage in a balanced manner then we run the risk of allowing our fears about obesity, internet predators, unwholesome content and the rest limit the potential positive impact of technology on the lives and development of many children; just as fears about traffic, abduction, paedophilia and accidents have led to a reduction in otherwise fêted outdoor activity.
Knowledge vs. habits of mind (oh, and how many spokes does the London Eye have?)
I finished Guy Claxton’s new book – What’s the point of school? a couple of days ago, just in time to chair a panel debate yesterday at the RSAat which he was the main speaker (the audio will be on the RSA site in the next few day).
This past few weeks’ convulsions in the banking system have illustrated that the modern world is full challenge and uncertainty, as well as opportunity. Against this backdrop, Guy argues convincingly that if the primary job of education is to prepare young people to thrive in that world, then practitioners, parents, and the public at large need to think again about school and how it is practiced. It is perverse to watch the effects ripple out from a breaking economic system so complex that none know how to fix it, and then to keep our thinking about school stuck in the old ‘dead metaphors’ of the monastery or the factory.
To make the change we need, Guy says we need to focus less on the reverence and passivity to authoritative knowledge implied in these old ways of thinking, and more on learning and the processes which awaken a desire and capability to learn in everyone.
At the panel, there was a dangerous outbreak of consensus in the room.
That was until one important point of doubt was raised by Dylan William, Deputy Director of the Institute of Education. He picked up a point similar to the one I raised in my previous post about knowledge and subject disciplines. Dylan asked the audience to close their eyes and picture the London Eye. He then asked for suggestions about how many spokes it had. The answers ranged from four to two hundred.
Dylan then cheerfully announced that he hadn’t a clue either, but what was interesting is that trained mathematicians always gave an answer that was a multiple of four. They are, he says, incapable of suggesting it might be thirty-seven, or an equally random or odd number. Meanwhile, historians would probably be off looking for a source of bias to the question.
His point being that a discipline like maths can profoundly shape the way we see the world. More than collections of information, these bodies of knowledge, theoretical frameworks, skills mould our minds, our intuition and the ways tend to think.
More than ever we will need these disciplines to lead us intuitively to the important, reliable knowledge we need in an ever more complex world. In a media age where so many can amplify their voice, they can tell us what kinds of answers to our questions we should be picking out in the cacophony.
Again I was left asking questions we don’t seem to have good answers for just yet. In a future which rightly emphasises generic competences and habits of mind, what is the role of such subject disciplines? How do we make sure we lead the next generation to the point that the young student in class today is an amazing all-round, lifelong learner, but can also specialise and be a physicist if that is what she wants?
I look forward to carrying on this conversation here, and at future RSA events.
Moving on from Knowledge vs. Skills
As we get to the end of the party conference season, it is clear that the Conservative’s message of increasing schools freedoms and championing of the Swedish system is beginning to resonate with teachers.
There is a second half to their message which gets less coverage, but is of just as much importance. I sat on a panel with Nick Gibb, Shadow Minister for Schools at a Conservative Party fringe event held by the New Statesman, and supported by Edge. Nick argued passionately that we needed to ensure an academic curriculum for all, and to counter the progressive ideology he perceived as driving knowledge out of the curriculum in favour of, amongst other things, teaching ‘soft skills’.
I was there advocating the approach of the RSA’s Opening Minds curriculum which is now used by over 200 schools to explicitly teach a range of competences around such things as learning, and relating to people. The RSA remain committed to the idea that schooling must change if it is to be relevant to the lives of students and the challenges we face – for a quick overview, check out the first paragraphs of the RSA Charter for Education in the 21st Century (and please do sign up!)
I must admit, I wasn’t the most popular guy in the room, which is a shame as I was trying to sound a conciliatory note.
Nick has a point. Progressives must find a better response to the problem of knowledge. Up to now, many have argued that in a connected world where knowledge is generated and spread so quickly, it is useless to emphasise traditional subject knowledge and disciplines. By the time students leave school the world will have moved on, so what good would it do them to have learned this stuff? Better instead to teach the skills so they can run to keep up.
Well, sort of. This kind of thinking must be tempered by the observation that the main theoretical frameworks, the core ideas and skills within a subject discipline don’t change quite as fast as progressive rhetoric has asserted.
That doesn’t mean that progressives have been wrong to emphasise the importance of a more learner centred approach, taking account of student voice about what and how they wish to learn, and of engaging students by immersing them in practical and experiential learning. Quite the opposite. The OECD reported just a few weeks ago that, going by international comparison, our top-end students do very well academically. Where the UK falls down is with its middle and low performing students who go through the motions of testing but don’t appear to learn a lot, and drop out early.
This indicates schools, who have had to push a content-heavy, test-focussed curriculum taught in a traditional didactic fashion, have struggled to respond to the needs of many students.
We need to move this debate on.
- Ian McGimpsey
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