Steve Rollett, Deputy CEO, Confederation of School Trusts
If we lift our eyes to the horizon, though, we might wonder what the education landscape will look like when – or if - the dust eventually settles, whatever flavour of government we have, say, 3-4 years from now.
The two main parties appear to have quite different educational philosophies, or at least that is what the discourse tends to demand of them. There is an inevitability about this of course; our political system pits each against the other in a battle that is largely carried out through pithy slogans and emotive rhetoric. Such conditions hardly lend themselves to reasoned debate and sensitive policy making. More particularly, however, they don’t easily lend themselves to cumulative knowledge building.
As each new administration takes over, whether that be of the same party or a change altogether, there is the opportunity for a new philosophy to play out across the system. And with it, the risk that what was built before that is good is torn down.
So, what is the alternative? Some have argued that education policy should be removed from the political cycle altogether so that policy is arrived at mutually, thus binding all players to a common position. I’m not entirely convinced this is possible, or indeed desirable. Even if parties were able to park the pressures of our political system that demand institutional contrarianism, I wonder how the electorate would respond to a potential severing of the accountability that should exist between the government of the day and the voting public: "You can vote us out but the plan remains!” Who do they hold to account when things aren’t working?
And more fundamentally still, I wonder if the profession might live to regret putting its faith in cross-governmental policy formulation to solve its challenges. I worry that, perhaps counterintuitively, this might lead to an erosion of the important principle that those who best know how to run schools are those who are running them – not ministers and civil servants.
For these reasons I’m not sure the answer is to seek to take policy out of politics. Rather, I wonder if we need to consider how we better insulate the education system from the bumps and scrapes of political change. Perhaps it would be more fruitful to consider how we bubble wrap what’s precious, so it’s not broken on transit in the removal van when governments come and go.
What might be done? I think one thing is to position professional knowledge building as part of the profession’s central responsibilities. We ought to be leading the way in constructing knowledge about what we teach and how we teach it. Some of this is already happening. For example, the emphasis on evidence informed practice is providing a framing and lexicon to help us place some ‘best bets’ in relation to particular issues.
But not everything can be evidenced in this way. Matters like deciding which texts we read in English literature or how best to sequence the history curriculum are unlikely to be illuminated and resolved through an RCT. A meaningful answer to this is unlikely to be found on the EEF website.
But does this mean there are no better/worse answers to such questions? Are all choices equally valid? No, I don’t believe they are. Because in practice we tend to navigate these issues through a different kind of knowledge building, one that relies on debate, on building on and challenging the works and thoughts of those who have come before us. To borrow a phrase used by Bernstein and Maton, we ‘cultivate a gaze’ – through interactions with others in the field we form an understanding of what is held by the field to be a valid position (this does not mean, of course, there is always one answer or that the field agrees uniformly). Maton invokes the notion of an ‘invisible tribunal’ of the field who, in a metaphorical sense, sit in judgment over what is held to be valid. This is something we learn, we add to, and we reform over time. It’s essentially a canonical approach to building knowledge, but that doesn’t mean the canon has to be fixed; it can be changed over time through productive critical engagement.
This sounds messy, doesn’t it? But the reality is that it can’t be escaped, particularly in areas where answers are arrived at through ‘feel’ more than science. Governments can’t override it (try as they might), and professionals shouldn’t ignore it. Much better, I think, that we dig into it, that we learn how to challenge, how to evaluate and – significantly – how to build on it. And if all this sounds a bit fantastical, be reassured that it’s already happening in places.
One of the best examples I have seen is through the work of the Historical Association. The journal Teaching History is effectively a textual record of the process I described above. I should say here that even the HA is not flawless – and that’s the point – there are people within the field who critique and challenge the work of the HA. But it’s remarkable how effectively the community of professionals, or at least those engaged with it, have illustrated how professionals can acquire a strong understanding and a sense of self-efficacy and confidence in relation to their field.
And if you doubt that to be the case, I would ask you to spend some time with a group of historians debating the curriculum. It may feel like the hours of wrangling is unproductive but that is to miss that the debate is itself the product as much as the schemes of work and lesson resources that might flow from it.
It’s worth reflecting here on rumours that the history field was successful in resisting attempts from previous governments to act in ways that were not in keeping with the discipline.
We are likely to need more of this, whatever the government of the day. And this is something the profession has some control over.
But it’s also something government can support too, if it is so minded, by providing the funding, time and support that makes it easier for schools to facilitate teachers’ engagement with their fields of practice. Imagine the potential that could be unlocked by a government which actively seeks to connect teachers to this process of collective knowledge building and the scholarship that underpins it. How might universities and schools be better connected in deeper partnerships which assist the transfer and recontextualization of knowledge from one to the other? And what might it look like if a government undertook some proper theorisation of the principles that underpin its treatment of educational knowledge so that the phrase ‘knowledge rich’ comes to mean being ‘rich in our understanding about knowledge’ rather than simply ‘more knowledge’?
It would be truly uplifting to hear a government, or prospective one, make it a priority to engage teachers in this work rather than seeing it as their responsibility to short-cut the beauty of the debate itself by merely imposing its own (often superficial) position.
The CST Blog welcomes perspectives from a diverse range of contributors. The opinions expressed in blogs are the views of the author(s), and should not be read as CST guidance or CST’s position.
