Our schooling crisis: the need to prepare for life

THE CRISIS IN OUR SCHOOLS

The shocking news that Ruth Perry, the headteacher at a primary school in Reading, Berkshire, committed suicide in January 2023 after her school was downgraded from outstanding to inadequate by Ofsted has raised questions about the inspectorate’s procedures and judging system.

Critics have spoken of the need to reduce the pressure that the current inspection regime places on teachers, children and parents, with Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, describing it as “intolerable”.

In spite of this, the teaching profession seems to agree with the education watchdog’s chief inspector, Amanda Spielman, that inspections help parents understand how their children’s school is doing and helps schools understand what their strengths are and where they need to improve.

The fact is, however, that Ofsted does no more than reinforce the structures of an education system that is itself broken, from top to bottom. Education, even at primary level, now fails to do the one thing that children need most.

Schooling prepares them, almost to the exclusion of all else, for a university education which is itself dangerously narrow, while doing almost nothing to ready them for the complex challenges of real life.

The extent to which children emerge into adulthood equipped with life skills is largely dependent on family and cultural background. Teachers who might otherwise be wholly committed to helping children gain broader competences cannot do as much as they’d like because of the limitations of the curriculum which Ofsted defends.

In his one public statement about educational reform in January, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who studied economics and business administration, talked about the need for mandatory teaching of mathematics up to the age of 18 to tackle innumeracy, but not about the need for educational changes that would tackle other types of unpreparedness.

For anyone outside the educational system, what seems obvious is that children need systematic help in anticipating and handling problems in their relations with each other and family members. They need to understand the impact of death and loss, how to deal with achievement and disappointment, and how to navigate the whirl of emotions that make adolescence a trial for so many.

They need to understand issues to do with health and the workings of the body and the mind. They also need to be taught about wider definitions of health: of the dangers to society and the environment but also to themselves of over-consumption, waste and pollution, as well as over-dependence on other people and electronic aids, how to recognise and discredit disinformation, and of the need to protect nature.

Such issues may be promoted as a general ethic in schools but occupy none of the teaching time taken up by subjects in which knowledge has been formulated into jargon that, even at university level, is very likely never to be needed after being tested for in school examinations.

Even at a practical level, children do not now enjoy the sort of competences that their grandparents took for granted: repairing a puncture on a bicycle, building a simple radio receiver, knitting, milking, manual skills, things one used to do for oneself. Today, life spent on a mobile phone means little more than being a passive receiver; by contrast with a century ago, there seems little that today’s children know how do for themselves. We have all been reduced— and AI threatens to reduce us further.

At the same time, the setting in which education is delivered has barely changed since schooling began. Teaching continues to be delivered in large classes, led by teachers, top-down, in spite of the availability of more sophisticated methods. I tell you what you need to know; you remember it.

Lockdown showed that lessons can be transmitted at long distance, into the home, via computer and smartphone. And every subject now taught in school is backed up not by books but by online “curriculum materials” that children are meant to access on their own.

Not a single local authority now says it has the resources to maintain its stock of school buildings and its cohorts of teachers. And yet there has been no serious investigation of what education would look like if digital learning equipment made school attendance optional or unnecessary.

Children themselves complain about the boredom of the school regime, of the cramped, repetitive nature of the curriculum, and of inflexibility in teaching styles and expectations.

For children who are academically gifted or naturally social, school may be what our parents told us it was—the best days of our lives. But for many more, and perhaps most, the school day is a challenge, during which they are repeatedly reminded of their incapacities or their unpopularity or their failings, or forced to compete with each other against their will.

It’s not surprising that many children regard school as a prison, and one in which they are made to confront a range of abusive behaviours, whether from bored or insecure teachers or from bored or transgressive peers. It’s at school that bullies learn their craft.

To expect every member of the school community to behave perfectly every day, in spite of the personal challenges they may be coping with in their outside lives, is to fantasise about the school environment. Given the tools now available to us, we should be finding better ways of providing children with settings tailored to their needs.

The mantra of the incoming Labour government in 1997 was “education, education, education” and Professor Paul Cartledge, writing in these pages, repeats it in his prescription for the survival of democracy.

We cannot expect our political system to perform at a higher standard, he suggests, unless we are better educated about it—and about much else. That requires enormously more imagination than the educational establishment currently shows any sign of and much more than it seems to aspire to.

Instead, the establishment is highly conventional and institutionalised, entrenched in its own routines, and incapable of carrying out the self-scrutiny that education systems ought not just to teach and value but to practise. Without it, the main purpose of schools seems to be little more than that of keeping young people off the streets, lest they cause trouble, and keeping them off the job registers, lest they add to our unemployment figures and claim benefits.

The national curriculum was intended to raise educational levels in the worst performing schools but it has bulldozed more sensitive approaches to teaching and ignored the singular talents of exceptional teachers. It is the most conformist, unquestioning teaching employees today who are most likely to succeed; those natural educators with the greatest flair and charisma are the ones most likely to be squeezed out or to feel there is no place for them.

Conformist teachers in turn expect students to conform to the curriculum, learning in the same way and at the same pace, relying not only on memorisation rather than thought but on their ability to regurgitate information on demand, in examinations, whether or not what is coughed up is understood. It’s no wonder that many children feel unengaged, frustrated and discouraged. Teachers too.

Such teaching can be detrimental to the mental health of both. The pressure to perform well in tests and assignments—as with the pressure on schools to perform well in Ofsted inspections—can be overwhelming, especially for students who in any case struggle with anxiety or other mental health issues. Stress and anxiety in turn adversely affect academic performance and overall well-being. And, as we have seen so tragically, affect teachers anxious to have proved themselves and not let down the communities they serve.

Meanwhile, the exclusion of creativity and individuality among the teaching staff becomes a template that stifles creativity and individuality among their charges. Rote learning rarely inspires.

The educational establishment needs to look urgently at how to introduce rootand-branch reform, overhauling its own institutional practices in favour of varieties of approach that allow for variation in what schools offer and what teachers are valued for, that welcome a range of possible teaching environments, that allow for single or group learning, peer-to-peer learning, exams versus continuous assessment, and project work or other types of assignment, according to what a pupil feels comfortable with.

But schools must go much further and prepare their students for life. We need adults who know how to prepare decent meals rather than relying on unhealthy carb-heavy supermarket products, who can manage a bank account and understand varieties of financial risk, who recognise the differences in human motivation and the reasons why we disagree and see things differently, and who can think through problems and look ahead to the consequences of any action.

Where is all this being discussed? It’s not obviously a central concern at Westminster, nor of the teaching unions and academics, nor of Ofsted, otherwise we would have heard about it. And yet it’s fundamental not just to how we ensure the survival and prospects of society but to how we improve the life chances of the most vulnerable.

Trust the children

Who, then, should be asked to lead this essential restructuring? Children, of course, just as prisoners should be asked to lead our thinking on the rehabilitation and reform side of the justice system. Children should be asked not just because they are the end-users and beneficiaries of schooling but because they have the most to lose if the system fails them.

In an ideal world, as was said after the death of Ms Perry, Ofsted’s inspectors would spend a year at a school instead of just two days every four years, ensuring that they’d really got the measure of it. They cannot; but children can and do. They see everything. And unlike DfE civil servants, they live with the consequences.

Children know, really know, what their needs are, to an extent that adults find hard to credit. Older children also know their way round technology better than we do— find it more intuitive and obvious—and are less wedded to old habits.

Can we trust children to design their own education? We haven’t done in the past and look where it’s got us. Children are already making intuitive moves that no one has taught them. Long before undergraduates get to put off parenting to focus on their careers, their teenage siblings are talking of not wanting to bring children into a world that their parents have wrecked. Talk to them about how their schooling fails and how it could be improved and you’ll be surprised by what you learn—not just about the education system but about their own insight.

It’s radical to the point of naïvety, of course, to imagine that children have the maturity of mind to identify and work out all the problems but, guess what? Children know this as well. They’ll say when a problem is beyond them. We need to trust and listen, take them seriously and not condescend to them by imagining we know everything better.

Education is in crisis—unacknowledged by too many of us but fully recognised by those we’re failing—and it needs a partnership with the young to rebuild it. Fortunately there’s conceptual stuff that we older hands find hard to deal with that the young know instinctively. We need to press them into service.