I think there’s been more plans and initiatives to shake up education during my life time than I had hot school dinners back when I was a kid. I’ve seen GCSEs replace the old GCE/CSE split, the expansion of Universities and introduction of tuition fees. During my life time, we’ve bounced between child centred learning approaches and so called traditional approaches.
We’ve seen City Technology Colleges and Grant Maintained schools introduced by Conservatives and then immediately abolished by Labour. Not long after that, Tony Blair’s government introduced Academies which seemed very similar to Grant Maintained schools but with a different name. The Tories then added in Free Schools. One of the aims of academies was to give schools greater autonomy from local authority control but apparently you can have too much of a good thing and so academies were banded together into Multi-Academy Trusts, some with lots of schools from across the country in them. We’ve also had a national curriculum introduced and a Baccalaureate too. We’ve switched from exams to course work and then back again. We’ve also introduced league tables and SATS so that children are regular tested and schools evaluated and compared.
Now, that’s not to say that there’s been anything wrong with specific changes. Some will have been effective, others less so. However, you do get the impression that there is so much chopping and changing. It must be hard for teachers to keep on top of things. Remember too that any change in philosophy affects how schools are inspected and how children are examined.
Not only are there the actual changes that have come through whilst school ceilings crumble and Head teachers have had to respond to pandemics and the like but there also the things that politicians have proposed that have never come to fruition. Every so often someone will talk about brining back the old ii plus and Grammar Schools. Meanwhile those on the left talk about abolishing private schools whilst those on the right dream of voucher schemes to give more young people access to places like Eton and Harrow.
I mention this because yesterday, Rishi Sunak announced plans to shake up the education system again by abolishing A-Levels and offering a new qualification incorporating a wider range of subjects. Now, we might observe that this feels like another example of bouncing between extremes. We’ve only recently seen a move away from using AS levels to widen the curriculum . Now the pendulum seems to be swinging back the other way.
My concern here isn’t with the specific proposal itself. Rather, it is the way in which, once again we have the appearance of policy made on the hoof. Once again, pupils and teachers find themselves caught in the middle of a political football game. Instead of there being careful consultation and evidence based decision making, it looks like the Prime Minister needed something big to reveal in his party conference speech for today’s headlines and so here we are. That’s no way to treat our children’s futures.
What schools need is consistency and stability. What matters is that there is sufficient funding to make sure that buildings don’t crumble and teachers are paid. What is more important than competing, headline grabbing policy initiatives is a relentless focus on raising and maintaining standards.
My appeal to politicians from all parties and all spectrums is to please stop kicking education about like a football.
Faithroots 