During the holiday period the Olympics have dominated the news to the exclusion of almost everything else, but with the publication of A level and GCSE results the educational debate has surfaced once more, both on radio and in the papers.
One of the dominant voices in the debate claims that our educational system can only improve if parents are allowed to choose the schools they send their children to and that their choice must be facilitated by league tables and test results which will tell them where the good schools and the best teachers are to be found. The language is the language of the market place, the language of competition where the best succeed and the failures go to the wall. The parent is seen as a consumer, the school as a provider or producer in a market where one producer’s gain is another’s loss. This outlook also encourages the formation of privately managed schools, a standardised curriculum so that regular testing can be managed centrally, and deregulation to the extent that bad teachers and bad pupils can be more easily dispensed with. Alongside such a view there are also strong arguments in favour of early divisions between academic and vocational courses, and sometimes also the claim that bad teachers and not poverty are the main source of our educational problems. This is of course a gathering together of arguments which don’t necessarily go together, but on the whole it represents a set of dominant claims in the present educational debate. But we might ask, are any of these arguments worthy of being supported by the church?
The question of choice is a sensitive one – in a free society parental choice might seem to be an imperative in any fair educational policy. But should education be a matter of choice in a just society? Is education not rather a right which a just and Christian society should seek to provide as well as it can for all its children? Should an education policy encourage a competitive approach where the possibility of failure is built in from the start because schools are expected to compete with one another and are subjected to a system of testing which has been devised not by teachers but by educational managers? These tests cover only a restricted range of subjects and are administered on only one day of the year; they can lead to a narrowing of the curriculum and they form a poor basis on which to judge the quality of a school and its teachers. In such a system the whole meaning of education has been distorted by the need to win. Individuals and communities are seen as competing with one another without questioning whether this is actually a beneficial context in which children are encouraged to learn or develop as social beings. Learning thus becomes a useful and measurable commodity in the race of life. Modern education seems all too readily to be about developing the skills necessary to succeed while your rivals fail. These are hardly the building blocks for a collaborative society in which people are taught to recognise and value complimentary skills as part of a community which in Pauline terms functions like the human body where no part can survive without all the rest.
So what might a better system look like? One answer might perhaps be found in Finland, recognising of course that Finnish society is in some ways very different to our own, being much smaller, ethnically more homogeneous, and with a higher rate of taxation. Finland has one of the highest performing schools systems in the world, and Finnish schools have very little variation in quality. Over the last forty years it has focussed on improving its teaching force, limiting student testing to the minimum, and leaving the management of schools to education professionals. Students do not take standardised tests until the end of high school; all other testing is administered by teachers themselves to assess their students ongoing needs.
Finnish teachers are highly educated. Their teacher education programmes are hard to get into; only eight universities are permitted to prepare teachers. Entrants have already taken courses in physics, chemistry, philosophy, music and at least two foreign languages. They take a three year degree course followed by a two year masters programme administered by the university and every candidate is prepared to teach all kinds of student including those with disabilities and other special needs. Given such a difficult and rigorous programme teachers are well prepared and highly respected – teaching is regarded as a prestigious profession, with a high sense of responsibility.
Compulsory education in Finland begins at the age of seven, before which free preschool programme are offered and though not compulsory most people make use of them. Children are not tracked according to ability and when they reach the age of sixteen they can choose to enrol in either an academic or vocational high school. The national curriculum describes what is to be learned but prescribes nothing else. It requires mathematics, the mother tongue, history, biology, environmental science, religion, ethics, geography, chemistry, physics, music, visual arts, crafts, physical education and health. Every child has the right to get personalised support provided early on by trained professionals. Each child thus develops as a thinking, active, creative person, intrinsically motivated and with an ability to sustain their natural curiosity.
This system has been developed over a period of at least forty years; for anything comparable to be achieved in this country it will take time. But a good starting point could be with our teachers themselves, ensuring that their profession is highly qualified, respected, and left to do what it is trained to do – take charge of our children’s education, ensuring that the joy of learning for its own sake is the chief motivation of our schools.
The information on which some of this letter is based comes from two articles in the New York Review of Books (vol. LIX, nos 4&5) by Diana Ravitch
The Vicar Writes
Stephen Tucker