When we had finished with mental arithmetic, we did ‘practical arithmetic’ and then we had tests. Every day we had tests and at the end of the week the test scores were averaged out and we were given positions or placings in the class and we all changed round. This way we could see which kids were brilliant, which kids were average and which kids were rubbish, in our class that was already selected. So there was a special built-in class streaming going on because you only ever worked with someone who was about the same placing as you in the week’s tests. Then we all sat down and did the eleven plus exam which about half of us passed. This left the other half in our class and all the rest of the other class who were failures. Whenever I meet any of this majority, they can always tell me that they always knew that they were failures. And then an exam came along that told them they were failures. And then they went to a school for failures. It’s an alluring prospect. Tell me I’m wrong, but I have a general feeling that it’s something like this that’s on its way back. Oh yes, it’ll be called all sorts of different things, the way the particular segregation, selection, streaming and setting will take place will all have user-friendly well-spun names but in essence, the system will be the same.
But I’ve strayed somewhat from David Cameron’s little masterpiece. I had a few more thoughts about phonics. The original Clackmannan research by Watson and Johnston concluded this:
Is synthetic phonics teaching the way forward?
Synthetic phonics is not an exclusive approach - teachers may include synthetic phonics alongside their own programmes to boost the teaching of reading. Our purpose in carrying out these studies was to discover which aspects of phonics teaching are the most effective to ensure that as many children as possible become competent readers, but we recognise that this is only one aspect of effective teaching.
ACCELERATING READING ATTAINMENT:
THE EFFECTIVENESS OF SYNTHETIC PHONICS
Joyce E.Watson and Rhona S.Johnston
School of Psychology, University of St. Andrews
Which is what you might expect from a cautious researcher. After all, there are limits with all phonic methods of teaching reading. Just to be technical for a moment, a phoneme is the unit of sound that some linguists think our language can be broken down into and a grapheme is the letter or group of letters plus twiddles (accents and the like) that we use to represent a phoneme. English is often thought to have forty four main phonemes. However, some of these phonemes can be represented in two, three, four or even more ways. Consider ‘ow’. There’s o,w in ‘cow’, there’s o,u in ‘sound’ and there’s o,u,g,h in ‘bough’. No worries, says synthetic phonics, these are our building blocks. Bung the building blocks together, (and already the wagons of educational suppliers are circling the schools offering jolly little phonic blocks to buy), and you make words. The snag with this is that we don’t have exact grapheme-phoneme correspondence. That o,w of ‘cow’ can also give us the o,w of ‘row’ or even the o,w of the poet Cowper. The o,u, of ‘sound’ can also give us the o,u of ‘you’ m and o,u,g,h can be found in tough, cough, through and thorough. Whatever glories and successes synthetic phonics will bring us, it will never bring us total reading. As Watson and Johnston make clear, other methods will be needed. But the complexity involved in saying all this, won’t fit a party leader’s speech, a policy overhaul or a manifesto statement. In other words, education takes the back seat while politics takes over.
So how come we’ve got to a point in history where the day-by-day, minute-by-minute concerns of a year one or year two teacher are the building blocks (!) of a major political speech? I’m not sure there can have been many other times in the past when this has been the case. If we were living in 1902, then we would perhaps be having a heated conversation today about what Bonar Law had to say about elected school boards versus local education authorities. In 1918, we might be arguing about why Lloyd George had not made the raising of the school leaving age to 14 compulsory. However, between 1921, when it did become compulsory and 1944, (educational historians please correct me if I’m wrong), but I don’t think you’ll find many party leaders talking big about education in schools - a bit about training and apprenticeships, as far as I can make out, but no headline-grabbing stuff about reading schemes or the need for rigour in nursery schools. Then, the whole debate surrounding comprehensive education reached party HQs in the sixties and seventies but at party leadership level, this was about structure and the consequence of this or that kind of structure on the social fabric. For decades, what was taught and how it was taught was given a steer by groups of people who were chaired by the people whose names adorn the famous ‘reports’ – Plowden of 1967 Bullock of 1975and before that people like Hadow and his reports of 1926 and 1931. That was how political all this stuff got.
So what was wrong with that? How did we get from Plowden, Bullock and Hadow to David Cameron? And why?
It’s not a mystery, but we got there via the phenomenon we call Thatcherism. The group of people who brought about that political upheaval and transformation was and still is, absolutely certain that education has a political outcome in two senses: one, in that there is a social and economic outcome to whatever structures and processes education policy puts in place and two, if you make certain political noises in public about education, there will be a favourable election outcome. Some people will remember Margaret Thatcher saying in her address to the Conservative Party Conference in October 1987:
"Children who need to be able to count and multiply are learning anti-racist mathematics, whatever that is."
Clever, wasn’t it? Whoever wrote that could have spent two minutes finding out that some people thought that learning that algebra and the zero weren’t all part of the seamless brilliance of western civilisation might be something worth discovering about the world. What am I saying, ‘could have spent two minutes finding out that’? They probably did. But that’s not the point. The whole point was to pretend you didn’t know in order to suggest that there was some kind of conspiracy going on. Education had been taken over by fanatics who were preventing children from learning. Education had to be saved from people in education. There was, it was said over and over again, an “education establishment”, which was so powerful, so menacing, so entrenched in these kinds of ideas, that it would have to be seized and taken over by…er…an educational establishment. This wouldn’t be powerful, menacing and entrenched. It would be on the side of the people, delivering stuff that works, like synthetic phonics and streaming. And Academies.
Yes, take Academies. I live in Hackney. Thanks to this on-the-side-of-the-people educational policy-making, London’s education body, the old ILEA, was abolished and education was devolved to the boroughs. This meant in Hackney that one of the world’s most incompetent and corrupt local authorities was suddenly in charge of a stack of schools. Partly because of the way the old boroughs’ map was drawn and partly because of this incompetence, it was only a matter of months before Hackney was chronically short of secondary school places and thousands of children were being bussed out of the borough. As time went by, and various audits discovered that Hackney had lost tens of millions of pounds no one knows where or how, its powers of running education were taken from it by central government and handed to a quango called the Learning Trust which it turns out can’t be trusted and learns nothing. With no local accountability and minimal consultation procedures, the Learning Trust closes and opens schools as if they were tins of cat food. Then, the great solution to the lack of secondary school places appeared from heaven. The political harmony between Tory and Labour over the establishment of Academies, has handed Hackney the mandate to invite in any old millionaire to help provide us with the kinds of schools none of us asked for. Stand by for forthcoming photo ops.
So where does this leave us in the political process? I was travelling on the train back from Birmingham the other day with an old friend and colleague, John Richmond. We worked together in the 1970s in a girl’s comprehensive school in south London called Vauxhall Manor. An interesting time, an interesting place. I was a writer-in-residence and looking back on it now, I can see that there was an immense amount of self-generated staff activity, producing policies, research documents, teaching materials and teaching methods. Some of it appeared in a book called appropriately ‘Becoming Our Own Experts’. What a dangerous and subversive title that sounds today! I think, naively, we thought that it could be a model for every group of teachers everywhere: becoming their own experts and sharing that with others. Indeed, wasn’t there a moment in the eighties when something called LINC appeared? Language in the National Curriculum. Here there was a structure whereby teachers researched their own practice, shared with others what seemed to work, which in turn was shared with advisers and inspectors and academics and bit by bit the whole profession would both be developing itself professionally and learning what seemed to be best. Well, that didn’t last, did it? Someone somewhere saw it for what it was: a dangerous, autonomous, self-driven kind of an outfit that could well end up with something that most certainly would not make good election fodder for party conference speeches. So it was dropped and twenty million quid vanished into thin air.
But back to my train journey with John Richmond. We had just been filming a programme for Teachers TV. I present a show called ‘Reading Aloud’. A simple concept, I talk to teachers about how they make books enjoyable for their children they teach and then we have a chat about some books that they enjoy reading themselves. On the train, I got to asking John about how it is that decisions are now made in education. How is policy made and implemented? I realised that I didn’t know. How interesting. Here am I someone with more than a passing interest in the subject. I come from a background steeped in education biz. Since 1979, every year has seen at least one of my children or step-children going through the state system, one more has just joined a Reception Class and there’s one more about to go to a SureStart Nursery in six months time. Assuming that he stays on at school at till he’s eighteen, and I stay alive, I figure that I will by then, have been a school parent non-stop for forty-four years. Even so, I stand before you as someone, prior to my conversation with John Richmond with no real idea of how it is that education today is run.
Perhaps at this point you’re looking at me with faintly supercilious smirks on your faces. You mean you didn’t know the relationship between the QCA, SIPS, the TDA the GTC and the PM’s unit in Number 10? Are you really saying that you had no idea that SIPS are private? They’re run by Capita, the same people who run the congestion charge? And you didn’t even know what SIPS stand for? The school improvement Partners Strategies which are making sure that standards are being achieved. And there was me thinking that I knew what’s what because I thought that that was the sort of thing done by the QCA because doesn’t the Q stand for quality? Well it seems that it might just as well stand for Quidditch now because it seems that they’re feeling a bit sore about Capita muscling in on their patch. But hold on, wasn’t Ofsted supposed to be rushing about doing what SIPS are doing? No, they’ve been pared down while the GTC, are getting a bit muscly themselves and wondering of it can get in on the whole curriculum development thingy. But if that’s all true, what goes on in a room in Number 10?
The bit of it that concerns you here in tertiary ed. is apparently called the Prime Ministers Strategy Unit
Here’s the explanation of what it is:
The Strategy Unit (SU) was created in June 2002 as the result of a merger between the Performance and Innovation Unit (PIU), the Prime Minister's Forward Strategy Unit (PMFSU) and part of the Centre for Management and Policy Studies (CMPS). The Strategy Unit hosts the Government Chief Social Researcher's Office (GCSRO).
But apart from that I’ll admit I’m floundering. After about half an hour on the internet, I’ve managed to glean that various people have floated through number 10 making policy and apparently delivering it, people like Michael Barber who it seems has passed straight from there to McKinsey plc via a knighthood. I think people like Lord Macdonald and Lord Birt have been involved but to tell the truth I couldn’t figure out who it is or how it is that someone who is called the Secretary of State for education will now learn what policy he will bring to the House of Commons next month. I am quite serious. Will we ever know how it was decided that synthetic phonics was made government policy? Are there minutes somewhere that will reveal how the Clackmannan project was evaluated?
So, yes, clearly education is highly politicised but that word political is a complicated creature. When, in the sixties, some of us walked about saying things like: ‘the personal is political’ or ‘everything’s political, man’, I don’t think we had in mind that this meant that everything I do or think should have a number 10 policy unit considering it. So when educational sociologists like Pierre Bourdieu, Michael Apple and Henry Giroux started looking at what they called the politics or sociology of education I thought this was about things such as the political significance of how a school is structured, or the politics of how the curriculum is divided into subjects, or how it is that the social structure of a society reproduces itself through the education system. So, in a way, I’ll admit it. I feel that we’ve been hoist by our own petard. When we said that politics had a lot to do with it, there was what might you call a “professionalist” approach that said, no, education is just education - which some people took to mean that education is a way of imparting skills and knowledge and others said, yes, it is all that but you should add on some stuff about turning out decent human beings too. The Thatcher-Blair-Cameron consensus seems to say over and over again politics has everything to do with it and we’ll control what goes on though a set of committees, think tanks, quangos, exams, testing, inspections, selection procedures, compulsory curricula and prescribed teaching methods.
This, we are assured over and over again, will deliver anything from social mobility, to freedom, via achievement for all, leading to greater competitiveness in the world market and therefore more prosperity for all in the UK. Of course much political banter of the politicking kind can go on over whether this or that test or method will deliver more, but in essence these are struggles over who looks more like they’re on the side of parents who want the best for their kids – as if there are any parents out there who don’t want the best for their kids.
The rhetoric around education as delivered by politicians has become a shorthand way to talk to people at their most vulnerable. It talks to those people who are parents and who are therefore anxious about the small human beings in their charge. The politician who talks caringly about education and critiques the status quo is the politician who’s on my side. He or she will be making a contribution towards lifting one of my many anxieties about my children off my shoulders. It also talks to those people older than parents who feel in any way that things are getting worse. At several removes from schools, the political rhetoric can confirm that these older people came from a golden age before things went to the dogs. For younger people without children, politico-educational talk can sound buzzy and techno. It can be all enterprisey and Bluetoothy. In other words it’s become a bottomless pit of connotation, a resonant signifier without a signified, a glory-hole and a catch-all. What a gift we are to the people who rule us.
But I’m not by nature a pessimist. Teaching is done by human beings. The past twenty years has seen a steady rise in the ways in which teachers have been controlled. It’s the only model that politicians seem to have for getting things done. Command and control. In its origins it’s a military model which brings to mind that poem by Bertolt Brecht:
GENERAL, YOUR TANK IS A POWERFUL VEHICLE
It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men.
But it has one defect:
It needs a driver.
General, your bomber is powerful.
It flies faster than a storm and carries more than an elephant.
But it has one defect:
It needs a mechanic.
General, man is very useful.
He can fly and he can kill.
But he has one defect:
He can think.
(From A German War Primer)
I have always thought that teachers can think. In the particular segment of education where I mostly work, with literature and language for primary age children, I’ve come to the conclusion that literature and reading have become so reduced, dissected, cross-examined, abridged, chopped-up and tested that the most subversive, exciting and political thing to do now is to rush about creating moments in schools where the children will know for certain that all that they’ll have to do with a book, a poem, a story or a play is enjoy it. No questions, no tests, no learning outcomes.
Yesterday, five poets: myself, Francesca Beard who’s Chinese Malaysian in origin, Jared Louche from New York City, John Agard from Guyana and Valerie Bloom from Jamaica read, performed, danced and sang to nearly two thousand primary school children at the Barbican Centre accompanied by a band with art and photos playing on a huge screen behind us. The children themselves joined in the poems, sang and danced; they heard about Windrush, Singapore, New York cabs, Chinese names, Yiddish rhymes, migrations, birth, lullabies; they heard raps, free verse, chants, couplets, street cries, calypso and quatrains, boogy woogy and klezmer. Next term at the London Metropolitan University a pair of us are hoping to set up the first of many conferences that will be devoted to nothing more nor less than making literature fun. Anyone anywhere who’s ever found a way of introducing the stuff we call literature to children and students in such a way that means that they have a good time and want more of it, will be welcome. I could spell out the politics of this. I could go in for some whole disquisition on let’s say the jouissance of the text, the politics of ambiguity, the utopian imperative, the cultural significance of heteroglossia, subversive laughter, the art of the possible and the possible of art, rendering the unfamiliar familiar and the familiar unfamiliar, the raised status of the implied reader raising the status of the real reader, and the intertext in all of us. But do you know? I won’t. To my mind, the premium in this time, in this moment, is literature is fun, eh? Which I think makes the acronym L, I, F, E. which is something I’m rather in favour of.
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