characteristics (or symptoms) being seen in many education contexts around the
world:
- Standardization
- Increased focus on core subjects
- Prescribed curriculum
- Transfer of models from the corporate world
- High-stakes accountability policies (Sahlberg 2011 :99–106).
It becomes clear in Sahlberg’s book that Finland’s success is built against a very
different background from many other developed nations, including England or
even the wider UK, which is a much more stratified society than Finland, with
many institutions of privilege for the privileged.
45.2 Teaching and Teachers
The overall theme for this symposium is‘Education underpinning social and economic
transformation’. Teachers have a major role to play insupporting these aspirations for
the transformative effects of education. However, from the outset we must remember
the clear caveat stated by Basil Bernstein more than 40 years ago—‘Education cannot
compensate for society’(Bernstein 1970 ). Nevertheless as others have pointed out,
‘School Matters’(Mortimore et al. 1988 )and‘Teachers Matter’(Day et al. 2007 ). It is
now a truth almost universally acknowledged that the single biggest element in edu-
cational success and indeed in educational improvement is the quality of teaching and
of teachers. That is the conclusion of the McKinsey Reports (Barber and Mourshed
2007 ) and it is also what emerges from the TALIS studies (OECD 2009 ).
In England, we had a White Paper as long ago as 1983 called‘The Quality of
Teaching’ (DES 1983 ). In 2010, we had another White Paper called ‘The
Importance of Teaching’(DfE 2010 ). The recognition that teaching is important has
led to some greater efforts to identify what it is that may make teachers more or less
successful. But of course there is a rather important prior question that may get in
the way of answering this directly. That is, what do we mean by‘educational
success’or indeed by‘good teaching’?
It is often suggested that the measure of a successful education system is to be
located in indicators of social and economic development. But few would deny the
simultaneous importance of cultural and intellectual development. Indeed, in these
times of‘the knowledge economy’, much of the key debate concerns how these
different purposes of education relate to each other and should be balanced. One of
the key British thinkers on the development of twentieth century democracy,
Raymond Williams, suggested that you could understand the development of
education in Britain as a continuing struggle between the interests of three
influential forces within society:
668 I. Menter