If you'd told me 10 years ago that I could walk into 3 schools and an adult education classroom in one week, and find good standards of teaching, excellent resources, polite and well managed behaviour and staff with the time to have a chat at break time and make you a cup of tea, I would not have believed you. This week would have been the absolute dream when I entered teaching 10 years ago. In a 3 hour class on Monday evening with adults, and with 3 classes at KS3 on Tuesday, every single learner had access to a computer. With an internet connection that worked. And not once did a technician have to be called to fix something. Amazing - and made the lessons run like clockwork. This week I saw adults, many of whom had been out of education for several years, learn to research and reference, and enjoy it too. I saw GCSE students engage with contemporary poetry and a group who were inspired enough to make their own videos about it. Some of them showed me the poems they had written themselves. I held a mature and sensible discussion with 13 year olds about pet ownership and welfare and helped them to edit a leaflet about it that was frequently better than published material I have seen. I saw 5-6 year olds investigating the poles of a magnet, but more importantly I could see them learning about how to treat others, under the watchful eye of the 4 adults in the classroom. 4 people who really cared about their needs and patiently set good examples over and over. Every lesson set challenging yet achievable targets, made good use of ICT and engaged learners - so OFSTED would have been happy. But what amazes me about this week most of all is that there was nothing special about this. I've had a few bad experiences in my time, but I'm willing to bet that if you walked into schools or education settings anywhere around the country, the majority of them would be like this.
So I was a little surprised on Wednesday evening when Gove 'leaked' his plans to return to a two-tier education system. Apparently GCSEs haven't worked. BASED ON WHAT EVIDENCE? Ok, these points I concede, but I see them as simply indicators of where reform could happen (as opposed to, just press the undo button and start again): 1. Perhaps we do need a higher level of challenge for more able pupils, especially in the academic subjects. Fine, but we tried doing the GCSEs early to give pupils chance to do something else, the system couldn't cope, the kids were stressed, the parents complained and ultimately Gove stopped it (not that I'm giving him any credit for that, someone else would have had to anyway). And what happened to the EBACC that was meant to give a gold standard for this within the existing system? It's not even been around long enough to judge yet. 2. People have looked to countries like Germany to compare the standards of England and Wales. Fine, but in Germany children begin their formal education at a later age and stay on longer. I qualified as a teacher at age 22, but in Germany I would have been in at least my mid to late 20s to do the same. Perhaps if people in Britain were willing to give that amount of commitment to their education, we would have engineers who were competing on the same level. Germany still holds a system similar to the old secondary modern/ grammar school system we had here. That only operated for about 20 years and so I think we can assume the reasoning behind the comprehensive system still hold. To stream kids at a fairly young age is unfair and gives no choices, no aspirations and therefore no social mobility. Although I rather suspect this is what the Tories want to achieve. 3 There's no incentive to stay in education after GCSE. In fact, the government have gone to some length to take it away. So either you want a school leaver's criteria test (the GCSE, O Level or Standard Grade), or you don't - in which case you need something additional or alternative. But why abandon what you have.
As far as I can see, there's nothing wrong with the system. This morning, I constantly heard government ministers and industry bosses saying young people lack skills and aren't ready for work. Again, address what needs to be reformed. I don't think ever before so many 16-18 year olds left school with qualifications such as 5 A-Cs at GCSE. That doesn't make them automatically able to work in the career of their choice - though this could also be a part of their education. I also heard over and over, the voices of pupils, their parents and the teaching unions saying what everyone who works in education already knows. Messing about with exams, curriculum, standards etc is messing with children's futures. When the National Curriculum was introduced, I was at primary school. I had great teachers (that's not an opinion, it's a fact). Yet the obvious atmosphere of change and uncertainty did rub off on us as pupils. I am now able to look back at gaps in my own education as a result, although at the time it was no more a feeling of something being a bit off and repeating the same things over and over for quite a few years. Remember those 4 adults in the primary school class I observed this week? We didn't have them in the 1980s. Our teachers were just muddling through those changes. I don't think the first pupils to do GCSEs had it any different, and now we want to inflict it on another generation? Every time a government changes the system, that's a set of textbooks a school has just bought and can't use. Every change to an exam board is millions of pounds. Fiddling with something you don't understand is dangerous, whether you're a secretary of state or not. Fixing something that ain't broke at a cost of millions and millions of pounds in a country that appears to be on the breadline in more ways than one is patently ridiculous and can't be allowed to happen.
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