by Christopher Winch. (April 1987)
One by-product of an eventual solution to the long-running teachers' dispute will be greater government control over the setting of teachers' salaries. A new Education Bill which will be introduced if the Tories win the next General Election will have the effect of putting the main decisions on what should be taught and when (known as the curriculum) in the hands of central government.
It is by now well known that the Government also seeks to set up a number of "City Technology Colleges" in the inner city areas whose main aim will be to stimulate the interests of inner city children in the process of education by providing a more relevant and interesting curriculum to that at present afforded by mainstream secondary schools.
These various centralising initiatives will continue a political process that started in the Heath era with the creation of the Manpower Services Commission (M.S.C.) and the responsibilities that fell to it for education and training. The Training Opportunities Scheme (T.O.P.S) was an early example of this movement, and the process continued during the Wilson and Callaghan years with the Youth Opportunities Scheme.
Subsequently, the Conservatives set up various initiatives designed to cope with the two related problems of low educational achievement and youth unemployment, notable the Youth Training Scheme (run by the M.S.C.) and the Technical and Vocational Educational Initiative (T.V.E.I.), both ultimately controlled by the Department of Employment rather than the Department of Education and Science.
What was happening in the schools during these years? The 1944 Education Act gave local authorities control over finances and the curriculum, as well as the employment of teachers. In addition universal compulsory secondary education was to be provided by local authorities.
Following the recommendation of the Norwood Report of 1943, selective education was recommended on the basis of the view that there were three types of children with different kinds of minds. There were those children who were academically able, those who were technically able and those whose interests were predominantly practical but were essentially rooted in their immediate environment. Respectively, these children were to be educated in grammar, technical and secondary modern schools.
Norwood was cautious about the nature of the sorting process, preferring selection to wait until 13, and being somewhat suspicious of the claims of the "science" of psychometry or intelligence testing, recommended long term assessment which would include reports from teachers as well as the administration of tests.
In practice, however, assessment was carried out at the age of 11 and was based very much on formal tests that bore the stamp of psychometric ideology. Basically, children were sorted into grammar and secondary modern schools, with very few technical schools being established. There just did not seem to be a demand for them; parents wished their children to go to grammar school if possible and did not see technical institutions as an equally valuable alternative.
The post-1944 system of selective secondary education caused a lot of resentment among the working class since it was seen to be unfair for a number of reasons. First, it was obvious that a lot of able children slipped through the net of secondary education and went to secondary modern schools, when their later careers showed an obvious ability. Second, because provision lay in the hands of the local authorities, different authorities made available different numbers of places in the grammar schools. This led to great variation in the number of places available in different parts of the country, and therefore to a sense of injustice in those areas that were comparatively badly served.
This sense of injustice was compounded by the fact that due to a population bulge during the 1950s and 1960s, the number of children who were eligible for selection for grammar schools was rising, but the number of grammar school places made available did not keep pace with the increase in population in all local authorities.
Third, a few local authorities had, with apparent success, installed systems of comprehensive education since the 1950s, notable Leicestershire and Anglesey. The Labour Government of 1964-70 compelled local authorities to re-organise their secondary education on comprehensive lines, although a few still manage to hold out (as does Northern Ireland).
Fourth, the idea of psychometry, which was so influential in the theory and practice of secondary education, was coming under increasing attack from liberal and egalitarian-minded scientists. The revelation in the mid-1970s that one of psychometry's leading gurus, Sir Cyril Burt, had engaged in massive long-term fraud in the production of corroborative evidence for the theory that intelligence was largely an inherited rather than an acquired characteristic, hastened the departure of "IQ" as a serious actor on the educational stage.
The installation of comprehensive schools had profound consequences for primary education. Now that the primary school no longer had to coach children to pass the eleven plus, they were free to experiment with different forms of primary education if they so wished. In particular, with forms of education which were no longer tied to grammar school curricula and which were more "child centered".
The Plowden Report of 1967, influenced heavily by romantic theorists of childhood like Rousseau and Froebel, and given apparent scientific support by the researches of Swiss child psychologist, Jean Piaget, led to something like a "revolution from above" in the field of primary education, with the revolutionary forces of Her Majesty's Inspectors (H.M.I.), academics and all manner of "experts" in teacher education and the para-educational services seeking to impose the new doctrine on the mass of school teachers and teachers in training.
The abolition of the eleven plus and the installation of a national system of comprehensive education should have increased the confidence of the working class in the education system. But the opposite seems to have happened, with all sections, including those in the literate section of the population as well as the more traditional elements of the working class, apparently united in their dissatisfaction with the new regime.
Above all, there appears to be a deep distrust of the post-Plowden, post eleven plus way of educating children. It is evident that the changes that were made were not explained sufficiently (or, indeed, at all) by their protagonists in the D.E.S. for parents to understand and accept the new regime in the schools. This is one factor which has led to the discrediting of teachers as a profession within the population at large.
To a large extent, this situation is not of the teachers' own making, since (as the H.M.I. survey of 1978 showed) the Plowden revolution has only gone skin deep and most primary teachers continue to practise their trade on fairly traditional lines. The levels of inspection, administration, research, teacher-training and advice above the level of the classroom do exercise an influence on teachers' careers, and this influence cannot be discounted.
There is no consensus about what should go on in primary school classrooms. Very often, the fairly traditional work that goes on is not approved of in teacher-training colleges and in the advisory bodies of the local education authority and the H.M.I.
On the other hand, parents very often feel that the education their children receive post-Plowden is not something that they properly understand and they have the obscure feeling that the children are somehow being sold short. Very often, this is due to ignorance and a lack of trust on their part, but there is more to it than that.
If the Plowden "revolution from above" failed to make a full impact on the teachers, it would be surprising if it did on parents, particularly when there was little or no effort on the part of successive governments to explain to parents the changes that were supposed to be taking place in the schools. Teachers find themselves caught between "progressive" superiors and "traditional" parents, neither of whom seem fully to trust and support them.
A similar situation exists in the secondary schools, which are now largely comprehensive. The demise of the eleven plus has led to the spread of "non-elitist" forms of school organisation, again under the influence of educational experts. Prominent among these is the extension of mixed ability teaching from the primary to the secondary school.
While this removes the "stigma" of being in a low ability stream, it means that teachers have to accommodate a vast range of ability in their class without being able properly to do justice to more than a fraction of the class. Once again this situation earns teachers neither the respect nor the trust of parents; nor are their superiors impressed when schools fail to deliver the goods.
The above problems are all self-imposed difficulties which those responsible for education have brought upon themselves. The working class demand for justice could have been met without the move towards romanticism and egalitarianism which has now become the ideology of the state school system.
There are, however, other features of changing attitudes towards bringing up children which have big implications for the way in which schools are run. In the past, say thirty years ago, it was broadly true to say that there was parental consent for a fairly tough disciplinary system within schools, which fulfilled the minimum requirement of maintaining the order necessary for education to take place. Nowadays there is a more indulgent and hedonistic attitude towards children which tends to see discipline as, at best, a necessary evil.
It is important to distinguish between the expressed attitude of parents on discipline and the attitude they take to the disciplining of their own children. Many parents find it hard to accept even the minimal disciplinary measures that are imposed in today's schools, and are quick to complain if their child has been punished at school. Naturally children who are aware of such a reaction on the part of their parents are not slow to exploit it to their advantage.
They have their allies in various quarters. There are educationalists who, not actually having responsibility for a class themselves, pretend that discipline is nothing more than a by-product of good organisation and interesting lessons. There are pressure groups like the Society of Teachers Opposed to Physical Punishment. There are the Conservatives with their populist rhetoric of "parent power". There are "anti-authoritarian" Labour councils which go to extraordinary lengths to undermine the authority of teachers. One such was Manchester, which provoked the long-running dispute at Poundswick High School by refusing to back up the staff and governing body in expelling children who had written obscene graffiti concerning some of the teachers in the school.
The liberal press seems only too eager to pander to cranks and malevolent people who bear a grudge against schools and teachers. The Guardian even went to the length of publishing an article which accused teachers of being responsible for all criminal activity through their nefarious practice of victimising children.
On the Right, teachers are branded as subversives, on the Left as reactionaries and sadists. On top of this, they are low paid. Since status in a materialistic society depends very much on how much you earn, it is not surprising that teachers enjoy a low status. Years of being rubbished on all sides have put them in a stubborn frame of mind that explains much of their persistence in carrying on with the current dispute against an intransigent government.
Money is by no means the only issue, although it is part of the issue. Equally important is the feeling that people need to see the importance of the work of teachers through being deprived of part of it.
It will be said in reply to this, that some teachers are incompetent and that they should be "weeded out" of the profession. Then the teachers would be able to earn the respect of society once again. This was the view favoured by Sir Keith Joseph when he was Education Secretary and fitted in well with the ideology of "parent power". If you put parents on the governing bodies of schools, preferably in a majority, then they will be in a position to monitor and control the teachers.
The question of teacher competence has been treated in a demagogic way by politicians on the look out for a whipping boy. Actually, if looked at closely, it goes close to the heart of what we expect from the education system.
You would think that the question of how competent teachers are has to do with how well they teach what they are supposed to teach. But judgements of teachers are not made that way in this system.
In the first place, it is not always clear what teachers are supposed to teach, particularly when they are not working to a syllabus of one of the examining boards. Normally, the curriculum is controlled by the Local Education Authority and the governing body of the school. In practice, it is shared between the authority and the staff (particularly the head) of the school. In a badly run school, it will be individual teachers who construct their own curricula and hope to God that they work.
Secondly, since the days of Plowden, it is important not only what you teach but how you teach it. Someone who wishes to gain the favour of the advisors and inspectors would be wise to adopt (or at least seem to adopt) a "child-centered" approach; that is a non-authoritarian, discovery-based technique, based on the child's rather than the teacher's interests.
Any assessment of teachers that was in any way fair would need to deal with these points; there would have to be a consensus about what is to be taught and what are the acceptable ways of teaching it. At the moment, there is not. Assessment in the present set-up would be a kind of "creep's charter", encouraging teachers to fawn over and to flatter whatever individuals and whatever prejudices happened to be responsible for assessing them.
This would be a corrupt system leading to extensive networks of power and patronage over classroom teachers. Those who did the job according to their own lights, even if these did not coincide with those of the head, inspector or advisor would find themselves in danger of being labelled "incompetent".
If you are going to have a national system of assessment, it would be wise to have a national system of education. Then you could have a national curriculum and an agreed set of guidelines as to teaching methods. Then everyone would know what was expected of them, and it would also be possible to calculate what resources were necessary to make the programme work.
We would then know who was responsible for what in education - something that we do not know at the moment. Teachers would be responsible for delivering the goods, as laid down by society. Society, as represented by the government of the day, would be responsible for providing the resources and training necessary for the effective delivery of those goods.
Come to think of it, this sound like quite a good way of running an education system, quite apart from the issue of teacher assessment. A lot of the problems faced by teachers would no longer be there, since they would only be responsible for carrying out what they are employed to carry out, and to tender advice as to what is and what is not practicable with children in a classroom or, for that matter, outside a classroom.
The sorry state of the dispute over teachers' pay is symptomatic of another failure of the labour movement, not to mention the Tories; that is, the need to find a rational way of determining wage levels according to social need and to sort out material disputes within the working class; namely some form of incomes policy.
One would not expect the Tories to be interested in this, of course, so they can hardly complain if public sector pay bargaining is in a mess when you have a powerful and determined group like the teachers determined to see some form of justice available to them when no other methods than sanctions are available. To its credit, one of the teaching unions, the NAS/UWT, has seen this clearly and has for some years argued that only an incomes policy will secure a just means of remuneration for teachers.
The implication of what has been said so far is that someone needs to take education by the scruff of the neck and sort it out properly. Parents are not competent and not interested enough to do the job. It is not the responsibility of teachers; anyway their material interests and their prejudices will not necessarily coincide with those of the society.
Business and industry make noises off stage but do very little; for instance, Baker's initiative in providing City Technology Colleges with funding partly from private sources has been met with a deafening silence from the captains of industry. Local authorities are incompetent and in some cases megalomaniac in their treatment of education which is, after all, their main responsibility.
That leaves the state as the only body in society with the interest and the resources to develop education. The Tories partly recognise this, but do not relish the fact. They do not like the state education system, and would like to run it down. The Assisted Places scheme is a good example of their ideological attitude . It is a way of rescuing able but poor children from state education and putting them in independent schools. In practice it has tended to benefit the children of "fallen" middle class parents who can then give their children the kind of education which their class background says they should be entitled to, but which their pockets says they should not.
The state has taken over large chunks of post-sixteen education and has intervened within the state school system to develop particular projects on which the government has been keen and which it has not trusted the local authorities to develop on their own. The Tories do not like state education enough to do anything really good for it, though we are likely to see more moves towards centralisation if the Tories remain in power after the next election.
A lot of the impetus for this comes from Mrs Thatcher's dislike of the abuses of the education system by some Labour-controlled local authorities, rather than from the desire for a nationally-run education system which is, essentially, a socialist idea and therefore anathema to her. The Labour Party's spokesman on Education, Giles Radice, has also promised that Labour will introduce a national curriculum and curriculum development body if the party forms the next government. Now only the "decentralisers" of the Alliance are left out in the cold on this one.
There are many socialists who will deny that it is a socialist idea and will point out the dangers that will result from a nationally controlled education system. In particular, there is a danger that state control will make schools even more effective purveyors of "bourgeois ideology" than they are already. There is an irony in this complaint; it is, after all, the attempts by some councils to indoctrinate children with what passes for a socialist ideology that prompted Mrs Thatcher to support calls for a national curriculum which were then taken up by Mr Baker.
A national curriculum need not and should not imply a curriculum written in Whitehall or Number 10 Downing Street. What it implies is a consistent and coherent framework in which education can develop and in which the lines of accountability and responsibility are clearly drawn. This can be achieved through a national curriculum council drawn from the various interest groups in society and subject to oversight from a parliamentary select committee.
Such a body, with a plurality of interests represented on it, would do much to prevent the harmful "revolutions from above" described earlier which depend on influential informal networks of people holding fashionable, but not necessarily well founded, ideas about education, who are then able to exercise an influence on education out of all proportion to their merit.
The Scots have had a central curriculum for decades and they reap the benefits of efficient response to change, consistency and justice for pupils, clear lines of responsibility and a greater respect for education in society at large.
If a national curriculum, controlled in the way suggested, could cure our educational system of the galloping neophilia * it has suffered from for so long, and introduce instead serious and practical reforms where necessary, then the country and its children, not to mention its long suffering teachers, will all have been rendered a signal service.
The Trade Union movement could play a significant part in shaping the education system by setting out the priorities for a system which would seek to tap the full potential of the working class while accepting and rejoicing in the diversity of talent (not necessarily "academic" in nature) which lies within it.
One way in which it could do this would be by taking advantage of the Tories' attempts to revive technical and vocational education by getting involved in sponsoring some of the City Technological Colleges that have been proposed. It is clearly in the interests of the working class to have an education system which is responsive to its needs and which can help in the development of the working class in a fast changing world.
If the woolly egalitarianism so dear to the hearts of some socialist intellectuals could be set aside for a moment, the trade union movement could assist in an important educational experiment which would not involve massive disruption of the education system but which might help to provide the effective technical education system for the working class that has been absent from this country since the Tories under Balfour abolished the technical and vocational functions of the elementary board schools under the 1902 education act.
In this way, trade unions could show in a practical fashion that it is they rather than capital which is the force in the society apart from the state which has a serious interest in developing education. That would do wonders for public perception of the trade unions and their role in society.
(* Neophilia - an irrational love of new things, for no better reason than that they are new and different - and without regard for their worth or for who (if anyone) is likely to benefit from them. A dedicated neophiliac will run through a whole series of ideas, discarding each as it ceases to be fashionable. Neophilia is at home in the Paris rag trade. But it is now rampant in the London Labour Party, with predictable results. Ed.)
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