Wednesday January 26 2022
the times4 TIMES EDUCATION
COMMISSION Interim Report
off at the gate. The day
begins with literacy and
numeracy drills in small
tutor groups, ending with
the mantra: “Work hard,
be nice.”
Stuart Lock, the chief
executive of the
Advantage Trust, which
runs the school, said
children needed
boundaries and
consistency. “When you
have pupils with special
educational needs you
often talk about how
they need a routine,
knowing what’s going to
happen, and I think
that’s the case for
everybody,” he said.
“The phrase ‘zero
tolerance’ makes people
recoil and I understand
that. It’s a misused
phrase. Young people
make mistakes and we
tolerate them making
mistakes. We just make
sure they learn from
their mistakes.”
The school prefers to
talk about “purposeful”
rather than “silent”
corridors and Lock
insisted that the ban on
talking was practical
rather than “cultish”.
Pupils move so quicklymobility had stalled. Although 83 per
cent of schools have been declared
“good” or “outstanding” by Ofsted, there
are still 306 areas in England where
every primary is rated “inadequate” or
“requiring improvement”.
Education has fallen down the list of
Whitehall priorities. According to the
Institute for Fiscal Studies between 2010
and 2025 health spending will have
increased by 42 per cent but education
will have risen by less than 3 per cent.
There have been six education
secretaries in ten years but no coherent
long-term plan.
The schools network is an incoherent
jumble of multi-academy trusts, free
schools and local authority institutions,
each with different funding mechanisms
and regulatory frameworks. Further
education colleges are still treated as the
poor relation and universities are bogged
down in culture wars. Education has
failed to keep up with changes in the
workplace or developments in
neuroscience and machine learning. The
way we shop, work, travel, listen to music
and watch television has changed utterly
in the past decade but schools have
altered little in more than a century.C
hildren walk
silently in
single file down
the corridors of
an old office
block before turning into
classrooms and settling
down to grammar and
trigonometry. A poster
reminds them of the
STAR code they must
follow: Sit up straight,
Track the speaker, Ask
and answer questions,
Respect others.
This is Bedford Free
School, which has a
reputation for rigorous
discipline and
outstanding academic
results. As one of 22
schools chosen to lead
government behaviour
hubs across England, it is
also helping to raise
standards.
The mantra is “warm
but strict” and there are
clear rules. Every
morning pupils line up
while teachers check
that they have the
correct uniform,
equipment and books.
There are sanctions if
they forget a pen, wear
the wrong shoes or
arrive late. Mobile
phones must be switchedCase study
Perks of silent
corridors and
sound of music
skills shortage, are increasingly vocal
about the shortcomings of an education
system that sometimes seems to have
been designed more for the 19th century
than the 21st. The spiralling mental
health crisis among young people has
made teachers and parents wonder
whether pupils’ wellbeing is being
ignored in the race for grades.
The rapid rise of online schooling
during the pandemic showed the power
of technology to boost learning but also
highlighted the fact that British
education is still in many ways an
analogue system in a digital age.
According to a Yougov poll for the
commission almost two thirds of people
think the system does not adequately
prepare young people for either work or
life. A survey of businesses by the
professional services firm PwC found
that 75 per cent of companies had had to
give recruits additional training in basic
skills including literacy and numeracy.
Even teachers, who might be
exhausted by the thought of more
change, yearn for a new approach. A
survey by Oxford University Press found
that less than half of secondary school
teachers think the curriculum is “broad
and balanced” and 82 per cent say the
accountability system is overly
concerned with academic achievement.
The inventor Sir James Dyson told the
commission that there was an urgent
economic need for reform to produce
the entrepreneurs and engineers of the
future. “Children are creative: they love
building and making things... but as
they get closer to GCSEs and A-levels all
that is squashed out of them,” he said.
“It’s all about rote-learning not about
using your imagination.”
Scientists warned that the innovative
thinking that led to the development of
the Covid-19 vaccine was being
drummed out of children. Sir Richard
Sykes, chairman of the vaccine task force
and the Royal Institution, described
GCSEs as an anachronism that were no
longer fit for purpose.
The venture capitalist Dame Kate
Bingham, who oversaw the successful
vaccine procurement programme, said it
was a mistake to force students to choose
between humanities and sciences at such
an early age. “There is too much
specialisation... and I think a lot of
science teaching is not very interesting.”
Leading culture figures lamented the
downgrading of music, drama, art and
design in favour of traditional academic
subjects. The sculptor Sir Antony
Gormley pointed out that his own
successful career had been forged in his
school art room. “It’s not the acquisition
of knowledge that is going to create the
future, it is the learning of skills, of
communication, collaboration, creativity
and critical thinking,” he said.
The Oscar-winning film director Sir
Steve McQueen described being inspired
by his English country dancing classes at
school. “All kids need is a spark, a half a
spark, just a little light. They think
‘mmm, that’s interesting’,” he told the
commission. “We’re not creating robots;
we want to create great human beings
who can actually contribute.”
There has undoubtedly been progress
over the past 25 years. The changes
introduced by Sir Tony Blair were built
on by Michael Gove and the chaotic
classrooms and “soft bigotry of low
expectations” that characterised too
many schools in the 1970s are largely a
thing of the past. Transparency and
accountability have driven up standards.
Literacy and numeracy rates have
improved and the UK’s position in the
Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development (OECD)
Programme for International Student
Assessment rankings, rose slightly from
2012 to 2018 in maths, reading and
science although it is nowhere near the
top of the table. The UK’s students were
also found to have the second lowest
levels of “life satisfaction” in the OECD.
In the past decade, however, the drive
to innovate has ground to a halt. Even
before the coronavirus hit, social
“
It’s more
important
than ever
that young
people are
taught not
just about
facts, but to
be creative
chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset
Management who as a Treasury minister
helped to set up the Northern
Powerhouse Partnership, said the control
freakery was undermining the prime
minister’s ambition to level up. “The
Department for Education has a far too
centralised national approach to
everything. Levelling up can mean
endless things but ultimately creating
opportunity for all is what it has to be
about, and the education system is
hindering that because it’s too rigid.”
Heads feel disempowered and teachers
disillusioned by a “factory model” of
education that is driven more by
managerialism and metrics than
inspiration or ideas. The former FT
columnist Lucy Kellaway, who now
teaches in east London, said curiosity
had been drummed out of the classroom
to the detriment of pupils. “I can feel
that the exam system is disadvantaging
my students. I think knowledge is really
important but we’ve gone too far down
that road now and our worship of exams
is almost sinister.”
There has been a narrowing of the
definition of success. A third of pupils in
England are in effect written off at 16Blair, who promised to make
“education, education, education” his
priority, told the commission that the
entire system needed rethinking. “I think
probably the whole concept of the exam
system is due a complete overhaul,” he
said. “As a result of the way the world is
changing, it’s more important than ever
before that young people are taught not
just about facts, but to be creative”
His predecessor as prime minister Sir
John Major agreed. The system was
underfunded and he said: “The teaching
profession is no longer given the respect
and social cachet it deserves.”
There are many brilliant teachers
doing remarkable work but too often
they are achieving their success despite
not because of a system that has become
over-centralised and inflexible. The
academies and free schools revolution
that was supposed to usher in a new age
of autonomy has in fact handed power to
the sclerotic Department for Education.
In 1976 the secretary of state had only
three powers over schools, one of which
was a requirement to approve the
removal of air raid shelters; now he or
she has more than 2,500.
Lord O’Neill of Gatley, the formerand efficiently between
classes that an extra two
minutes of teaching time
had been added to each
lesson, he explained.
“This makes 12 minutes
a day for all 500 pupils,
that is 2,280 minutes peryear or 11,400 minutes
per five years which is 38
full days of learning.”
It is part of a culture of
aspiration. The school’s
motto is “Respect,
Honesty, High
Expectations” and it
deliberately sets out to
emulate the ethos of
private schools. The
hours are longer than
most state secondaries:
the day begins at 8.25 am
and ends at 4 pm. Pupils
have only half an hour
for lunch, followed by aEvery child at Bedford
Free School learns an
instrument. The school’s
ethos is based on the
‘Sophie Test’, named after
Sophie Lehain, daughter
of the founding principal