An article in the Evening Standard by Headteacher Martin Stephens levies a call to action to ministers to look at the big picture of school change, not just fiddling at the edges on some of the big topics such as exam reform. Yet, as much as I found myself in agreement, I also found myself asking whether Mr Stephens himself is too close to the page to see the picture?
Thousands of English schools are being asked to transform the way they deliver teaching and learning as billions of pounds of investment are put into creating the next generation of school buildings. Schools are not just evolving their building, but seeking to evolve the learning experience too, and are asking themselves fundamental questions about the future. What do we believe about the nature of knowledge, skills, and how best you can learn them? What should a citizen in the 21st Century know and be able to do?
There are two key barriers to this changes that are brought up by school leaders constantly as a constraint to innovation: the national curriculum, and the exams and standards agenda.
The curriculum can be looked at as a mixture of content – what we learn – a model – how we learn it – and assessment. As Martin Stephen notes, this is a mess, but solving that should not start from a question of which exams to take. Schools want to innovate in a variety of ways to create more meaningful learning experiences where learners come out with a greater understanding of what they have learned, not just a greater ability to remember it. Can I create more interdisciplinary experiences to help my learners create a more complex and holistic view of the world? Not if my focus is on passing an exam.
Tomlinson’s proposals, defeated by poor political timing, would have cleared up a good deal of the mess and were broadly accepted by teachers and educationalists everywhere: no mean feat. They addressed personalised experiences whilst retaining a focus on core skills, and supported both academic and vocational pathways.
I agree with Stephen that this still needs clearing up, but we need to take a step back and clear it up from a bigger perspective.
When a school tells me its vision is to increase its percentage of 5 A*-C achievers, I wince. This should be an outcome of creating great learning experiences, not an aim in itself. We need to find ways of removing the fear and focus on the numbers and restoring it to a focus on individuals and their learning. Denmark has led the way: it has abolished league tables and has restored an element of freedom to schools in its approach to the curriculum, and is increasingly viewed as successful.