What should education ministers be watching out for?

Cynicism is a good way to avoid bad policy

A secret agent destroying a school

It would be a mistake to assume that everyone wants children to learn

There is an adage, attributed to the historian Robert Conquest, that says:

Every organisation appears to be headed by secret agents of its opponents.

Another version of it is:

The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

I would cynically suggest that any politician who wants to ensure that children are well-educated should bear this principle in mind.

The reason Conquest’s maxim is useful advice is that many powerful people and expert voices in education consistently act as if they are against educating all children. They are not secret agents. They are the education establishment, and they could not do more damage if they were the agents of an enemy nation. They’re not secretive or shadowy. They have the biggest platforms and the loudest voices, and will be the first to appear in the press when a politician does something they don’t like. They are not a small cabal; their networks are wide and involve a large proportion of those whose jobs are in education, but are not working in schools.

That’s not to say the education establishment doesn’t have elaborate justifications for the policies they endorse. It’s just that no politician or policymaker has time to go through and critique these justifications. The priority must be to identify those who want to prevent education as soon as they start suggesting it. Politicians and policymakers should be able to listen to moral exhortations, political rhetoric and claims about the latest research and realise that what they are really being told is: it doesn’t matter if children learn anything. If a politician cannot recognise when this is what they are being told, then they will not do any good in office. They will be fooled by the establishment’s pundits, activists and vested interests selling them the latest excuses for promoting ignorance. In education, cynicism about those who have all the answers, but couldn’t teach a lesson if their lives depended on it, is an absolute necessity.

There are three main ways in which the project of educating children can be thwarted by bad policy.

1. Devaluing knowledge;

2. Obstructing teachers;

3. Destroying the learning environment.

Politicians and policymakers need to be able to spot when people are advocating any of these three things, and oppose them.

1) Devaluing knowledge

The arguments for an empty curriculum

The most obvious responsibility of schools is to ensure that the knowledge of the world, accumulated through the centuries, is passed on to the next generation. This is the foundation on which most of the other aims of education are built. The easiest way to obstruct education is to obstruct the transmission of academic knowledge to the next generation.

Opponents of knowledge will usually want to start a debate about the purpose of education. The more purposes for education they can find, the more distractions there are from identifying and passing on knowledge. Many of the purposes they suggest will be desirable, but they will also be vague. For example, they might argue that schools exist to ensure children are happy, confident and safe. The problem is not that it is bad if the education system ensures that children are happy, confident and safe, or one hundred other desirable-sounding outcomes. The difficulty comes when you write such aims into a curriculum. If you write a curriculum that includes every desirable outcome for children, it leaves little room for identifying what they should know. If the curriculum identifies subjects (such as maths, history or French) then it will lead naturally to lessons in maths, history or French. However, if the curriculum identifies virtues (e.g. kindness), feelings (e.g. happiness), attitudes (e.g. tolerance), political objectives (e.g. creating responsible citizens), and workplace skills (e.g. teamwork) no one will know what to teach. A vaguely written curriculum, lacking in specific knowledge content, merely serves to give schools an incentive to teach nothing in particular.

Even if the aims seem quite academic (like critical thinking, curiosity, problem-solving or creativity) this does not mean that they can be taught directly. Attempts to teach these things in the absence of specific knowledge will be unsuccessful. However, they will serve as an excuse for lessons in which children learn nothing. Politicians must be cynical about this. Those who advocate generic skills will always end up incentivising classroom activities in which nothing is learnt. Those who attack “rote learning” and “regurgitating facts for exams” will always end up removing useful knowledge from the curriculum.

Fortunately, it does not take much to challenge this. All a politician or policymaker has to do to challenge dumbing down is to treat every new proposal as a choice between options, rather than as an enhancement to the curriculum. The question to be asked of every proposed curriculum change is “What will be removed to make time for this?” Anyone asking this is unlikely to get a straight answer. If the suggestion is to remove academic knowledge, the change should be rejected.¹ The answer might be that the new element will be incorporated into existing lessons without removing any existing subject knowledge. If so, a wise policymaker will trust teachers to judge whether to do this and will not attempt to decide for them. The aim should be to, force those who want children to know less to say so explicitly.

How will a politician know if cynicism is justified and that there are individuals who genuinely want children to know less? Because if they fail to get their way through subterfuge, they will resort to arguing explicitly for less knowledge. They will claim that existing knowledge is outdated, ideologically suspect, boring, irrelevant, or not for kids like these. However, at least then we will all know where they stand.

2) Obstructing teachers

The war on teaching

The best way to pass on knowledge to someone is to tell or show them (often this practice is simply called teaching). This is not the whole story; if it were, the best lessons would be lectures where children simply sit and listen. No one is advocating this. To teach effectively requires checking for understanding, responding to difficulties and repeating (sometimes in the same way, sometimes in a different way) what has already been said. Even then, this is not enough for learning. Children need to practise recalling and using the knowledge that has been taught. However, the act of telling or showing pupils what they need to know is extremely important. Therefore, the best way to prevent learning is to prevent teachers from telling or showing children what they need to know.

There are many excuses used to prevent teachers from teaching. Politicians and policymakers will be told that children learn best by doing, or by discovering knowledge for themselves. They will be told that curiosity and enthusiasm are all that matters, and encouraged to replace teaching with motivational speeches. People will promise that miracles will happen in the classroom, if only teachers stop teaching.

Often these ideas will be presented as the latest scientific finding, and it will be suggested that those who persist in the old-fashioned practice of actually teaching are dinosaurs. This will not be the case. The idea that teachers should not teach has been around for centuries. If it were true that the latest science supported this idea, then it could be left to these experts to disseminate this knowledge to teachers. There would be no need for politicians and policymakers to get involved. However, the opponents of teaching would never be satisfied with being one voice in the marketplace of ideas. Their agenda is not to spread new knowledge about effective teaching. Their ambition is to persuade those with power to obstruct and discourage effective teaching.

No matter what crazy ideas are promoted to prevent teachers from teaching, teachers still have a couple of incentives to teach their pupils.

• Teachers value what they teach. This is particularly true of subject specialists. For this reason, opponents of teaching will promote curriculum content that does not come from existing subject disciplines and argue that subject boundaries should be ignored.

• Teachers often teach pupils who will be tested in exams. Those who wish to discourage teachers from teaching will lobby for exams to be either abolished or diluted by the use of teacher assessment. If the teacher assessment is bureaucratic enough, it can be done in a way that takes up a lot of lesson time, reducing teaching even further. Nobody likes exams, but they are the least bad method of assessing learning. Exams will always be opposed by those who wish to prevent teaching and learning.

3) Destroying the learning environment

Bringing chaos into the classroom

If a politician will not dumb down the curriculum or tell teachers not to teach, then there is only one way to go. They will need to be persuaded to create a situation in schools where it is almost impossible for teachers to teach the kids in front of them.

There is no more effective way to prevent learning than to undermine school discipline. Managing hundreds of children is a huge challenge for schools. Those who have never worked in a challenging school will find it hard to understand how great this challenge is, especially if they spent most of their own school days in a relatively calm environment.

I won’t defend or describe all the things schools do to keep their children safe and learning in an orderly environment. I will, however, point out that almost all of these things are attacked continuously by pundits who have issues with adult authority. Exclusions, suspensions, detentions, internal exclusions, rules, uniforms and routines, are all characterised as draconian cruelty. The alternatives to these things are always utopian. It is claimed that schools can change human nature, and solve every other problem, through amateur therapy, kindness, relationship-building and tolerance. The naive idealism of these solutions means that those who deal with the practicalities of keeping children safe and learning will be accused of having the worst motives. To those who oppose school discipline, all who enforce it are sadists, bigots and crooks² who hate children.

Politicians and policymakers seem particularly susceptible to being hoodwinked by those who claim that schools can reduce exclusions without tolerating extreme and dangerous behaviour. It is vital to ask about the victims of the worst behaviour in schools. No one speaks on behalf of victims, but there is an endless array of advocates for the interests of the most dangerous and out-of-control young people. There is no issue where listening to teachers is more important, and no issue where school leaders are more unfairly demonised for making difficult, but necessary, decisions. Leaving kids in school, but out of control, benefits nobody.

The other way to obstruct learning is to ensure that pupils are distributed in ways that will prevent them from learning. If you put children who don’t know the basics in with pupils who are extremely advanced in their skills and knowledge, it becomes very impractical to teach. Maths gives the most obvious example of this. Many secondary schools will have pupils arriving in Year 7 whose maths skills are weaker than the average Year 2 pupil, and other pupils whose maths skills are stronger than the average Year 11 pupil. It would be incredibly difficult to teach both types of pupil something they don’t already know in the same lesson. I am not suggesting that schools need to be selective, or that it is possible to have completely homogeneous classes. However, it should be clear that those promoting mixed attainment teaching, are intent on making life very difficult for teachers.

Further difficulties can be created by a policy of “inclusion”. This is a policy of ensuring that those pupils who need the most support don’t get it. This is done in two main ways:

1. Placing children with the greatest needs in mainstream classrooms. It should be obvious that many pupils will benefit from being in special schools or other specialist provision. However, denying them this support can be presented as some kind of moral imperative to end segregation. Those who question it are accused of being prejudiced against the disabled.

2. Increasing the number of children classed as SEND³. The claim will be that there is a huge problem of “undiagnosed” SEND. This claim will be made no matter how large the proportion of children labelled SEND becomes. However, in practice, if everyone is special, then no one is. The greater the number of children identified as SEND, the harder it is to help those with the greatest needs.

I could write a lot about the bureaucracy and lack of evidence behind the SEND system, both as it is, and how pundits want it to be. All I can recommend to a politician is to ask about the evidence base and how “inclusion” will work in practice. Because everyone wants to help disabled children, SEND is a useful Trojan horse for those with some other agenda entirely. All proposals in this area need to be scrutinised.

A checklist

Here are the questions I want politicians and policymakers to ask about every policy idea⁴:

1. Has this been tried before, and what happened?

2. What do school leaders think about this?

3. What do classroom teachers think about this?

4. Could this be aimed at obstructing existing practices?

5. Does this replace something else, and if so, what?

6. Why does this need to be imposed from above?

7. Will this create more paperwork than action?

8. Is there any reason to think this will last?

Education is a large and bureaucratic system. A politician or policymaker who signs off on bad ideas can do a lot of damage before they even find out anything has gone wrong.

1. This is not to say that it is never acceptable to reduce the amount of knowledge in the curriculum. If there’s not enough time to teach something, then remove it. I am arguing against reducing knowledge to make way for something less valuable, especially something much more vague.

2. The claims about dishonesty are often the most puzzling. School leaders who enforce rules are said to be gaming exam results. Those who give advice on behaviour that involves enforcing rules are accused of profiteering. Opponents of school discipline do not believe anybody could disagree with them in good faith.

3. Special Educational Needs and Disabilities

4. This is not an exhaustive list. There are many other considerations.