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GTC Chief Executive Keith Bartley spoke in a debate on ‘What is Education For’ at the Battle of Ideas, a two-day festival of debates about big themes facing society, run by the Institute of Ideas.
The GTC was supporting the festival for the third year running. The other debaters on the panel were Professor Malcolm Grant, Chairman of The Russell Group, Frank Furedi, Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent and David Willetts MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills.
The full text of Keith’s presentation follows.
We meet in anxious times. Britain’s children have been described by UNICEF as the most miserable in the developed world. The Leader of the Opposition says we need to mend our 'broken society'. We have the Primary Review and the Childhood Inquiry - parents, teachers, academics churches and universities engaged in collective soul searching and inquiry into the nature of childhood and the part that education can and should, play in creating strong communities and helping young people to succeed, achieve and thrive.
The Government has already provided its own answer to the question 'what is education for?'.
It has set five outcomes for education, within the wider context of children’s services
These five 'Every Child Matters' outcomes may be regarded - even derided - as utilitarian or instrumental understandings of the purposes of education. They certainly don’t have the aspirational ring of Robert Browning’s Andrea del Sarto :
Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what’s a heaven for?
But for me they are an important and compelling set of aspirations – because uniquely in public policy – they express what children and young people actually said they need and expect from education and from children’s services. They don’t separate education from other services, and they intuitively understand the dependencies between, for example, well being, achievement and enjoyment.
I am sure that today’s debate will range across the whole field of education – from womb to grave.
In case we end up focusing our debate on standards of teaching and learning at sixth form and university level – I am going to bang the drum briefly for the humble GCSE.
A young person who leaves school with even just one GCSE has very different life chances from those who are lost to our education system by the age of 16. Disengagement from schooling by 16 leads inexorably to unemployment, to high levels of involvement with the criminal justice system, to substance abuse and to higher levels of mental health problems.
We also know that young people who are also in public care are even more likely to end up in gaol, in hospital or in a mortuary.
So, I definitely believe that one of the purposes of education is to open opportunity and combat disadvantage.
It should also foster aspiration and ambition.
As teachers, we lament it if parents have low expectations of the education system – but often reproduce the fault ourselves.
I was very struck by the evidence from the Sutton Trust that state school teachers are failing to encourage their sixth formers to apply to Oxford and Cambridge. Also by a trenchant critique by Johann Hari in the Independent arguing that two occupants of the Big Brother House – Brian and Chantelle – were bright and sparky but had been let down by their schools – which had conspicuously failed to encourage any curiosity for learning or aspiration in those young people.
Clearly the purposes of education are far broader than the purposes of schooling, which this week seem to be primarily about combating obesity!
But, as Chief Executive of the General Teaching Council for England – my remit is for schools and teachers. So what are schools and teachers here for?
Supporting pupil achievement is a big part of the answer.
We asked teachers what should count as “achievement” and what tools, which pedagogies, they find effective.
Their answers reveal their own professional values and underlying beliefs about the purposes of education.
Surprise, surprise …. teachers conceive of achievement very broadly, with a strong commitment, particularly from primary teachers, to helping children to become life long learners and to developing their social as well as their intellectual skills. That is why, unlike many other Government initiatives, the Every Child Matters agenda is generally supported by teachers.
It chimes with their own values. Over and over again, teachers tell us– “this is what brought me into teaching”.
Some say it will be difficult to reconcile the broader Every Child Matters outcomes with the pressures created by high stakes testing.
But I have met many inspirational head teachers who see efforts to raise achievement as absolutely central to the every child matters agenda – not as twin tracks or contradictory drivers.
The testing and league tables regime is a separate problem – and a big one.
Someone, some time, somewhere in Whitehall must have misread Socrates. For the 'unexamined life is not worth living' has been substituted 'the unexamined topic is not worth learning'.
We also asked pupils, parents and governors what they believe to be the purposes of education. We did this as the start of a longer term dialogue.
As with teachers, the purposes of education were quite broadly defined by parents and governors - though pupils placed strongest emphasis on academic achievement and the acquisition of subject knowledge and examination success.
However broadly we may wish to define the purposes of education, we cannot avoid the elephant in the room. ~ the major challenge of inequality and that long tail of underachievement ~ the longest tail in the Western world.
It’s persistent, apparently intractable and hugely influenced by social class and poverty.
We seem to have reached a plateau in the improvement of standards of literacy and numeracy.
I have my own explanation for this.
The single biggest leap in standards of literacy in our primary schools was achieved the year before the literacy hour was introduced – but when teachers and schools knew it was coming. Their attention had been directed to the problem – a legitimate action for Government – and teachers and schools devised their own solutions – and these made a greater impact than what followed.
I would argue that what works for teachers – devising your own solutions, applying your own creative powers, working collaboratively on a shared problem – also applies to pupils.
And tells us something important and enduring about the purpose of education…. It asks us to find the right balance between stimulus and support, between knowledge and inquiry; and to encourage self directed learning, because knowing how to learn requires both discipline and creativity.
That is what education should be about and, helpfully, it points us to what it should be for.
