The Education Secretary spoke to the members of the Education Reform Summit as teachers and other public workers marched in strike action nearby. It's a very interesting speech and worth a read. It does underline the intention of aligning educational reform with economic globalisation where measurement across nations, in the form of PISA, is pressurising our managers to conform to the multi-national framework of performance - despite the illusion of increased autonomy spoken about throughout the speech, but below are several excerpts of other issues raised that I want to touch on in this short blog:
'In the past, great teachers - and indeed education ministers - have operated in isolation from any systematic and rigorous analysis of which of their interventions worked. Views on pedagogy or funding had to be taken on trust.
But in the last decade there has been a much more rigorous and scientific approach to learning. Instead of a faddish adherence to quack theories about multiple intelligences or kinaesthetic learners, we have had the solidly grounded research into how children actually learn of leading academics such as E.D. Hirsch or Daniel T. Willingham....
...Underperforming schools taken into the academies programme and placed under the leadership of great heads are improving more rapidly than those schools which remain in the hands of local politicians.
A stunning example of what’s happened under this programme is the progress made by a school in London which used to be called Downhills Primary and which has been reborn as Harris Primary Academy Philip Lane. [Please view Academies & Lies film linked below on the right]
When Downhills was under the control of local politicians, it failed its pupils year after year.
...The unions, in the past, have claimed to ‘stand up for education’. Today they’re standing up for their own pay and pensions.
I urge them to join all of us in this hall, all of us who are really standing up for education - putting education first and foremost - and the education of our most deprived children most of all.'
This rhetoric, which is the promotion of 'new' policies spun out of attacks on 'old' ideas, is an example of the marketplace in which the contemporary global education model has been placed aimed at furthering economic interests in the 'knowledge-based economy'. Or as Stephen Ball puts it in Big Policies/Small World:
'[O]ne key facet of the policy process and the formulation of new orthodoxies is critique. New policies feed off and gain legitimacy from the deriding and demolition of previous policies (see Ball, 1990) which are thus rendered `unthinkable’. The `new’ are marked out by and gain credence from their qualities of difference and contrast. In education in particular, part of the attraction of a new policy often rests on the specific allocation of `blame’ from which its logic derives. Blame may either be located in the malfunctions or heresies embedded in the policies it replaces and/or is redistributed by the new policy within the education system itself and is often personified - currently in the UK in the `incompetent teacher’ and `failing school’ (see Thrupp (1998) on the politics of blame).'
The speech may promote the current neoliberal agenda with a naturally positive spin but as Ken Jones writes in The Politics of Austerity:
'In terms of education, England is experiencing a less severe austerity than Spain or Greece. Cuts in spending, pay and pensions rights are significant, but are not at Greek levels, Youth unemployment is high, but has reached less than half the height of Spain - and so on, indicator by indicator. Nevertheless, in many respects, the programme of restructuring that accompanies austerity is more sweeping than that of other countries: the complete withdrawal of state funding for undergraduate arts, humanities and social science courses; the cutting of financial support for 16-18 year olds; the loading up of university graduates with as much as £45,000 of debt; the transfer of more than half of England's secondary schools to private management; revisions in curriculum and assessment that most experts think will increase educational failure'
In this instance I am seeing very little evidence of the 'celebratory, ambitious, inspiring day for all of us' that Mr. Gove shared with the Education Reform Summit.
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