There is a genuine crisis within education. The morale in schools and colleges is through the floor. The mental health of teachers and students is a silent testimony to years of cuts and chaos and a system whose philosophy, purpose and direction has long since been reduced to 'getting through the day' A new government faces a big challenge - how to stem the tide of teachers leaving the profession and how to tempt more to sign up to join. The maths are quite simple - there are far less people becoming teachers than are leaving the profession and therefore there are 'recruitment challenges' everywhere. Put simply, that means children without teachers. It means SEND kids lacking support. It means exams teams stretched to the absolute breaking point, it means unfixed computers, it means lunch staff absences being filled by other staff and every bit of that (and every other shortage you can use an example) feeds into crisis and workload.
A new government will need to spend money. There is no question about that. Buildings need maintaining, wages have lagged and infrastructure needs updating. That money is non-negotiable. However, I feel that rescuing teaching from the grim spot it finds itself in is about more than money and it's absolutely essential that a new government listens to first hand experience and looks at the evidence that emerges from the last decade.
It's very tempting to make grand statements about sickly neoliberal pigeons coming home to roost and suchlike but ideological grandstanding is never a great tool to try and make a point. Instead, I want to outline a few things I think would be a) realistic and b) positive and effective starting points.
1) Immediate curriculum reform.
This would initially, (like in the aftermath of COVID) be a simple case of removing some content and therefore reducing the burden of both delivery and assessment. Curriculums are absurdly overfull. I have spoken to teachers at different levels and different subject specialisms who tell identical stories of 'not covering everything' or 'just throwing information lesson after lesson with no time to make sure it sticks'
Vocational subject teachers tell stories of stripping out practical experiences to make sure content can be completed and of literal mountains of pointless box ticking assessment taking the place of visits, demonstrations and hands on work. My own experience is essentially I tell the students more, but they understand less because we don't have time to practice and review skills. There's just very little time for anything but 'the next thing'
A classroom can be a happy place and a group of students can be somewhere that friendships, self esteem, critical thinking and curiosity is formed. A good teacher takes pleasure in engaging with students and seeing their growth, developing their minds and capacity to function in life. Being able to take a break, review, reframe, discuss and from time to time digress shouldn't be apostasy. It should be part of an experience of learning which is both calm and purposeful. Behaviours have to be formed, routines created and practiced. Learning is more than the content. It is the act of learning to learn and that requires development of metacognition and critical thinking.
The atmosphere of learning right now is not this on a national level. It is rushed and fraught and that becomes a self fulfilling negative feedback loop of stressed or disengaged students interacting with teachers who deep down know they aren't really meeting their students'needs. I have spoken with teachers in all phases of education and the story is similar. The students need more than we are giving them and the 'more' isn't more content and more testing.
The debate around what a suitable curriculum for the mid 21st century is will take time. A new government should absolutely be looking at radical ideas and developing new approaches. Some of the subjects we teach have barely altered in form and content since I was at school in the 1990s and we live in a vastly altered world - that is rightly a challenge that mustn't be rushed or ill thought out (such as the shambolic T-level planning) - but an interim adjustment of content and priorities is required desperately and I see no good reason why it couldn't be achieved at pace and be effective almost immediately.
1) Immediate curriculum reform.
This would initially, (like in the aftermath of COVID) be a simple case of removing some content and therefore reducing the burden of both delivery and assessment. Curriculums are absurdly overfull. I have spoken to teachers at different levels and different subject specialisms who tell identical stories of 'not covering everything' or 'just throwing information lesson after lesson with no time to make sure it sticks'
Vocational subject teachers tell stories of stripping out practical experiences to make sure content can be completed and of literal mountains of pointless box ticking assessment taking the place of visits, demonstrations and hands on work. My own experience is essentially I tell the students more, but they understand less because we don't have time to practice and review skills. There's just very little time for anything but 'the next thing'
A classroom can be a happy place and a group of students can be somewhere that friendships, self esteem, critical thinking and curiosity is formed. A good teacher takes pleasure in engaging with students and seeing their growth, developing their minds and capacity to function in life. Being able to take a break, review, reframe, discuss and from time to time digress shouldn't be apostasy. It should be part of an experience of learning which is both calm and purposeful. Behaviours have to be formed, routines created and practiced. Learning is more than the content. It is the act of learning to learn and that requires development of metacognition and critical thinking.
The atmosphere of learning right now is not this on a national level. It is rushed and fraught and that becomes a self fulfilling negative feedback loop of stressed or disengaged students interacting with teachers who deep down know they aren't really meeting their students'needs. I have spoken with teachers in all phases of education and the story is similar. The students need more than we are giving them and the 'more' isn't more content and more testing.
The debate around what a suitable curriculum for the mid 21st century is will take time. A new government should absolutely be looking at radical ideas and developing new approaches. Some of the subjects we teach have barely altered in form and content since I was at school in the 1990s and we live in a vastly altered world - that is rightly a challenge that mustn't be rushed or ill thought out (such as the shambolic T-level planning) - but an interim adjustment of content and priorities is required desperately and I see no good reason why it couldn't be achieved at pace and be effective almost immediately.
COVID also showed us that students lost out when schools were closed. It wasn't, however a simple case of 'lost learning' but loss of life experience - of conversation, of debate, of engaging in behaviours and of life itself. That we have responded to the developmental damage that has wrought on young people by doing basically nothing on a national scale, other than throwing tuition at the problem is a collective insanity. I have spoken with primary staff who say 'the children can't play' - I work with teenagers who flinch when asked for an idea and mutter at the floor in a shame faced way.
A reduction in assessed curriculum content is not lowering standards or narrowing the experience of students. It would be an opportunity to allow reading, visits, events, talks, experiences, discussions, projects, play, socialisation, debate, reflection and much more. All of these are as, if not more important than cramming knowledge for tests. A population of young people who have coped with the toxic combination of childhoods impacted by austerity and a dystopian science fiction pandemic in the midst of a dystopian unregulated science fiction explosion in technology and all that goes with that deserve a bit of head space and lower stakes time to use that breathing space to think a bit more freely and work out how to engage with each other, experience the joy of a game or a song or try out coding or tinker with AI just for the curiosity of it all.
The step above is simple. It could be enacted in weeks. It would see teachers breath a collective out breath and could be sold politically as 'investing in mental health and the happiness of children' - data appears to show that most parents want safety and happiness for their children above the ability to conjugate a verb after all. One of the very best teachers I know is a primary school teacher - an enthusiastic and career minded one at that. Watching them lose faith in what they are doing is an object lesson in where we are going wrong. Seeing their slow realisation that the content they are teaching is often useless information - but knowing that they have to keep throwing it at the children, day after day is like a scene from Kafka. In short, less is often more. A depth of knowledge is valuable. Mastery breeds confidence. It empowers you. The more we teach, the less depth there is. This has been evident for a long time. It's a simple point at heart and a simple fix to enact.
2) Make the system more interconnected and fluid.
This is a little harder to achieve - but it isn't a particularly taxing or radical idea.
Education has adopted many of the behaviours of the corporate world - staff engage in reviews with performance targets, data is poured over for insights, schools market themselves with buzz words and mission statements. Institutions guard things jealously from their competitors. Undoing 40 years of market driven philosophy will not happen in a few days or weeks but there's a definite sense that the system is fractured and broken up into many little islands and that educators are isolated from each other.
When you stop and think about that - it feels really strange. All across the nation, we share similar challenges. We're all essentially churning out the same product. It feels unbelievably wasteful that there isn't far more collaboration between schools.
One thing that struck me recently was a comparison between my pre-teaching experience (working for a large service industry company with businesses spread across multiple sites) and my time in teaching.
Within the first job, I would estimate that in a couple of years, I undertook 6 or 7 separate job roles. I also had the opportunity to apply, whenever I wanted to, for a transfer elsewhere. If an opportunity arose in Scotland or the channel Islands, I could potentially be transferred there if I wanted that. If I expressed an interest in learning a new role - when a chance arose, I was able to shadow and learn from someone doing that. Sometimes I was then able to take on that role if that person moved on.
I've spoken to a number of people from outside of education about their pathways in their careers and many of them describe fluid transitions from place A to B and from job role to job role. One of my closest friends has worked for the same company for about the same time I've worked in education. His career has been far more varied than mine - he has received much more training (and retraining) than I have and he has performed multiple job roles, technical, customer facing, support, front line, back office etc. He 'quite likes' his job. He isn't 'bored, burnt out, frustrated or trapped'
The point here is, that this is absolutely not as easy as it could or should be in education to either refresh your skills or take on new roles. Teachers are leaving in droves. It's never been harder to recruit support staff. Even managerial roles are sometimes being re-advertised because of a dearth of candidates. The system does nothing at national level to try and retain those people who are walking away. There is no opportunity to talk about role change, no opportunity to talk about fresh starts or new skills or retraining within the system. It's not joined up.
I can cite several teachers I have known for decades - who have reached a point in their current roles where they're demotivated and bored - but they are reliable, intelligent, curious, trustworthy and productive people. They have plenty to offer and much experience to draw upon. They are simply people who are ready for a change.
The education system has no function to catch these people and utilise their skills in different ways. A teacher works at a school or college (or perhaps an academy chain) and when they hit a patch of demotivation or discontent then in most cases they need to 'look for a new job' and sometimes that means the system loses their skills and experience completely.
Stop and think about the range of jobs within the education system as a whole. There are multiple forms of teacher. There are multiple forms of SEND support staff and assessors. There are coaches and careers advisors, there are technical staff and technologists. There are writers and creators of content and learning programmes. There are data people, MIS experts, there are PRUs and universities and nurseries and home school tutors and everything in between. We could go on and on and on.
Education is everywhere and an experience in one role is useful in another and yet, the training to transition from one role to another is a disparate and confusing web of uncertainty. I know at least one person in education who has a very valid desire to move from one role to another within the system as a whole. They would be a perfect fit - but no pathway is clear. The institution they currently work at has no interest in supporting that - the institution they would like to work at has no outward facing route into it. Therefore, the person involved is simply left with 'retrain in your own time' (which is limited) as an option and is therefore looking for jobs outside of education. After a certain point in any job, almost anyone will ask 'what now?' and the system has no clear answer for many. It doesn't look after the development, skills progression and career path of those within in anything like as effectively as some large corporations (and indeed some other public bodies) do.
If (for example a teacher wants to become a dyslexia assessor or a marketing manager or change phases or transfer to a different region or look to work in education policy or whatever it may be - it shouldn't simply be down to the individual to fund and plan that change. It shouldn't be as hard to move within the system as it would be to get into the system from an external position.
The fluidity of careers in other sectors speak of an understanding that companies need to retain people they trust and value and that they must understand that boredom and stasis will result when those people haven't got new challenges, stimulus and opportunities and a sense of control over their careers. Education has adopted many corporate mantras but it must learn that the success of any large scale operation of any kind relies on a) the workforce actually being there to do the job and b) the workforce approaching the job with some kind of enthusiasm. If (as is happening in the education system) people are walking off the job at a large scale and not being replaced - then that will undermine the project fatally and the exodus of education staff is something that should be of national concern.
Education could do far, far better in this respect and giving people the prospect of more flexible development and different pathways to progress down is as much a question of philosophy (is the system a whole or a series of separate entities?) and organisation (central hubs where opportunities, training and guidance can be found) as it is of huge funding. None of the above is to suggest that funding doesn't matter. Funding does matter and so does pay. Public sector pay should be pegged to inflation (indeed, all pay should pay) and all jobs should provide a basic level of dignity and quality of life. The fact some support staff in particular are paid miserly sums for an increasingly stressful life is a disgrace. What I'm trying to express however, is that discontent isn't solely a matter of finance. 'Fixing' the system is about more than just teacher pay. Investment matters for multiple reasons - the best education systems put in a much greater proportion of GDP than the UK does and that shows in their outcomes and the stability of their education system. I would also balance that by saying that investment matters beyond education. Society itself is in desperate need of investment in housing, transport, industry and so on. Throwing endless money into education alone will not improve circumstances very much because the idea that education alone can banish hunger, poverty, apathy and disaffection is a complete myth. Education can contribute to society in a myriad of ways - but it can't fix it.
I'm also not suggesting that the two ideas above will be a panacea - I do however, think they would be useful steps in going someway towards addressing deep seated problems (and perhaps buying the space and time to develop more long term and nuanced ideas about what education is) - my closing though is this - Neither idea seems particularly complex or difficult to achieve. If the UK system can't reflect on itself and develop some solutions like the above and apply them quickly - then it leaves you asking - what is the DFE actually for? I was struck, during COVID by the inaction and torpor that characterised the muddled, slow and contradictory response from the government.
If enacting and directing simple system change and putting in place some rudimentary structures that would help engage and retain staffing isn't the job of central government - then what is their job and why do they retain control of education?
We need action. We need ideas. We need to demand better of the system we work in. If we don't, who else will?
