Sam Freedman wrote an interesting blogpost about Dominic Cummings recently. It’s well worth a read if you have an interest in policy making. Both Freedman and Cummings worked for Michael Gove during the intense period of policy change in education during the early 2010s. It still seems very recent, because those changes (development of academy chains, ending grade inflation in exams, abolishing quangos, the phonics check) are the ones the education establishment are still most keen to reverse.
The key point in the blogpost is the following:
…. he [Cummings} assumes most people running existing institutions aim to frustrate change because they want an easy life and to maintain their powers. So, for instance, the civil service (and the EU) continually block reform because the status quo suits them.
This leads him to the conclusion that the problems with most institutions in Western democracies is that a) they are full of idiots – who in particular lack numeracy or the ability to get outside the bubble of trivia which dominates day-to-day debates – who are b) in organisations which benefit from blocking positive change. Having defined the problem in this way he then proposes solutions which involve finding a bunch of geniuses who are intrinsically motivated to do the right thing and then giving them maximum latitude, with no restrictions on their behaviour.
Freedman suggests that there are not enough geniuses to go round and that something needs to be done to change systems that incentivise fools and obstruction rather than simply to create an elite to overpower them.
As someone who was on Edutwitter in the Gove Years, when Freedman was (as he still is) a regular tweeter and there was an account called “toryeducation” widely credited to be, at least partly, the work of Cummings, this seemed to fit my recollections. Having read some of Cummings’ early blogposts when he first left his position at the DfE, I do recall that he did combine a hostility to the work of bureaucrats and vested interests (memorably labelled “the Blob”) with a keen interest in the development of intellectual Übermensch. So who is right here? Do we need an intellectual super-elite to save us from The Blob?
That first point, that the education system is sabotaged by powerful vested interests who are not particularly bright, was probably fair enough. The big change under Gove was that for the first time in my career, those in power actually wanted to know what was going on in schools. Even now, there are no shortage of people employed in education, but not in teaching, who really don’t want anyone to know what is happening at the frontline. Bad behaviour, silly fads, inadequate training, workload, the infrequency of permanent exclusions, the SEND bureaucracy, and the biases of inspectors have all been topics I’ve seen teachers encouraged not to talk about in public. It did make a huge difference in the Gove era that there were people in elected office who actually wanted to know what was going on. Watching the usual suspects (education academics, teacher trainers, consultants, Local Authority officials, trade union leaders, political activists) weigh into debate after debate to insist politicians ignore both the evidence and the experience of teachers is something that’s hard to miss if you are a teacher. If Gove got more done than most, it probably is because his advisers were not easily deterred by those who would deny anything needed to be done.
The second point though, which also fits my recollection of Cummings’s contributions to the education debate, does point to a fair criticism. Faith in the wisdom of intellectual elites is a problem, not a solution in education systems. I suspect we all know of incredibly bright people taking the wrong path and convincing themselves of all sorts of nonsense. Thinking about it, didn’t Einstein have some pretty silly views about education? Conversely, I’ve certainly met people who are far from being systematic thinkers, and who may even lack education, who can spot dishonesty in others with ease and ask people all the right questions. The answer to stupidity and obstruction is humility and transparency, not cunning and mathematically enlightened despots getting their way. Perhaps the education system does need a bit of an injection of brainpower, but mainly it needs an injection of scepticism and less power for people who most probably don’t believe a word they are saying.
More generally, a faith in the potential of the super-intelligent to save us has – and I say this based on some of what I’ve seen from Cummings – resulted in the belief that educating the elite should be the priority. I think this is the wrong priority. The obvious failings of the education system probably don’t affect those at the higher end of the ability scale. While opportunities are far from evenly distributed, I have seen those with the most natural talent and greatest work ethic achieve. Even some of the worst schools I worked in would, over the years, get one or two very talented students into Oxbridge. The conspicuous failures of the education system are all at the other end of the spectrum; those who leave school never learning to read, without basic numeracy, without the knowledge to engage with further study, or the self control to cope with the demands of the workplace. The political right gets certain things correct on education. They are correct to be sceptical about ill-thought out egalitarianism. I have no time for those who think that the ideal education system would “level down” the most gifted, as if that would help everyone else. But the big problem with right of centre thinking on education is the elitism. Too many still care more about maximising the returns for the most able and not enough about giving the least able and least advantaged the best possible start in life.
I’m not completely with Sam Freedman when it comes to systems. Great systems can go completely wrong where those running them are foolish or malevolent. You need good people and good systems. I don’t think the education system can be legislated into wisdom. The debates about structures (LAs versus academy trusts, for instance) can miss the point. However, I believe there are, nevertheless, huge gains to be made in changing the system. Large parts of the system (the civil service, the university education departments, consultancies that work in schools, the LAs, many types of external agencies who work with schools) are completely isolated from reality. More power in the hands of those who actually do some teaching would make a huge difference to the effectiveness of schools.
Anyone who genuinely wants to improve education could do far worse than to start by asking themselves the following.
In the education system as it is, is anyone making a living without there being any evidence their work is necessary or useful? Is there anybody who has power without responsibility? Is there anybody who had a job for life, either because there is no accountability, or because those who could hold them to account never do? Is there anybody who is providing “expertise” that has no actual evidence behind it and if challenged would simply claim they should have their way because they are the expert? Is there anything that seems perfectly sensible and desirable, that people working in schools are scared to do, because of obstructions placed in their way?
When those questions are asked, and a serious look is taken at how policy makers have created many of these situations, then useful reform might be possible. We might also make working in education a better career for those who actually want to make a difference.
Scenes From The Battleground 
Book Review: ASBO Teacher by Samuel Elliott
February 26, 2022ASBO Teacher: An irreverent guide to surviving in challenging classrooms. Crownhouse 2021
One of my new year’s resolutions for 2021 was to read more books and I intend to continue that into 2022. I will be reviewing those books that are relevant to education. Two warnings though. 1) Any links to Amazon will be “associate” links potentially earning me a few pennies. 2) A lot of these books have been sent to me by people I know, so I’m completely biased.
I’m probably more biased about this book than any I have reviewed. I know, like and use the same barbers as the author, and he kindly sent me a copy of the book. I worked in, or visited, many of the schools he writes about including the one he attended as a pupil. Despite his use of pseudonyms for those schools, throughout the book I was picturing him in classrooms I’d taught in. (Although with hindsight I think I was imagining him delivering his history and geography lessons in maths departments.)
This book is written as advice, but the appeal is that the advice, the examples and the description of the author’s own experience is the apparently unvarnished truth, unlike the many books aimed at teachers that make you wonder whether the author has ever met a teenager, let alone taught classes of thirty in a tough school. He has written the first guide to teaching in terrible schools since Paul Blum’s “Surviving and Succeeding in Difficult Classrooms“. Its coverage of school life is not so much “warts and all” as “what to do if your school is nothing but warts”.
It is extremely funny, with a deliberately humorous style, which is what you need to avoid crying, or becoming angry, that schools like these exist. The subject matter, of what to do to get the best for your students, when those in charge are doing everything to make that harder, is potentially grim, so the jokes and anecdotes are needed to avoid traumatising the reader. Despite having taught for years in schools like that, I found myself realising that there is no way I could cope with all that now in middle age.
The book would be most useful to the new teacher in a bad school, best read when approaching one’s first nervous breakdown, as a chance to realise “oh, it’s not just me”. This is good advice on how, through force of personality and a willingness to invent your own systems, you can survive until the opportunity comes to work somewhere else; anywhere else. There’s also a lot of solid advice about how to plan and deliver lessons where children will actually learn, even though they weren’t expecting to. I wish I’d been able to read it back when I was teaching in schools like those represented in the book. I wish I’d been able to read it when I was teaching in the schools featured in the book.
When the author was a pupil, and I was teaching at his school, I remember how I would be told that the violence in the corridors; the repeated verbal abuse, and the fact that kids would occasionally escape through a fire exit, and on to the roof were all perfectly normal for schools. I would be told it wasn’t close to being as bad as the special measures school in another part of the city. Being tough enough to survive without falling apart was just how you get along in your career. Ofsted even declared the school to be “good”, more than once, during the time when it was most challenging. My teaching experience since then has involved working in many much better schools, including those in much more challenging circumstances, so I guess I knew that schools don’t have to be like that. Rereading my blogs about that school (I called it “Stafford Grove“) brings back just how bad it was, and just how unhappy I was there. However, it wasn’t until I read this book that I truly accepted it wasn’t just me. The school was violent, the children were unsafe, and this should never have been okay with anyone.
The most tragic element of the book is that, although schools like that now seem somewhat rarer, they still exist and Sam has been able to find them and work in them even in the 2010s. A lot of debate about education centres on schools that are safe and orderly, and whether they are cruel or make insufficient allowances for SEND. The flipside of that debate is to consider schools like those in this book. Are kids happier when adult authority is limited? Do those with SEND thrive when those annoying little rules are barely enforced? Anyone tempted to think the answer is “yes” should read this book, particularly the sections about the author’s own time at school, and realise that there is no substitute for the grown ups being in charge.
Share this:
Like this:
Posted in Commentary | 1 Comment »