Re-examining Success. David Hughes J.
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Section A
Building a whole-school programme for learning transformation
This book is organised into two sections. Section A explores what amounts to a mandate for progressive change in the way education works. It is based on recognising the redundancy of much that we take for granted in the priorities, structures and practices in current schools.
From term times to lessons, content to delivery, from teacher exposition to the examination system, much of the daily work of schools is extremely wasteful of the talents of the young people for whom access to learning represents their preparation for a changing future.
We have seen in the crises of teacher recruitment and retention that it is equally corrosive to the mental and physical health and well-being of those charged with delivering the existing model of learning.
We are, in effect, trying to impose an increasingly dysfunctional, historical model of learning onto a rapidly changing future. We seem to be in thrall to those, many of whom are politicians, who believe that the best way to address the future is to double down on existing practices and structures.
This book is a call to arms for teachers – to you! For you to have confidence in your professional expertise and determination to learn from others and so improve the lot of all pupils; to equip pupils to survive and thrive in the challenges and opportunities the future will hold for them.
Section A provides insights for educational leaders to explore more comprehensively the range and scope of changes needed to revitalise and repurpose educational provision in their own schools. The section proceeds from a survey of the wider educational drivers and processes at the national level down to the analysis of teaching and learning priorities and strategies. International comparisons are introduced to show the direction of learning in countries that have a more rational and intimate view of the patterns and requirements needed to shape future provision.
For the sceptics, or the complacent, a case study is provided at the end of the section in Chapter 8, showing how the most fundamental realignment of education and learning was conceived and delivered in an English school.
1. THE EXAMINATIONS PROCESS: ANTECEDENTS, ANOMALIES AND LIMITATIONS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Critical issues
»Limitations of the format of the examinations system in developing learners.
»Limitations of the equality of opportunity of the current examinations system.
»Limitations of the scope of the examinations system in providing ‘job ready’ lifelong learners.
»Limited attempts at reform of the current examinations system.
»New directions in learning: the growing distance between current examinations and the effective twenty-first-century learner.
Limitations of the format of the examination system
The public examinations process, as internationally constituted, is the most eminently fair and equitable system designed to test pupils in national examinations at statutory levels. It gives every pupil the same circumstances, time constraints and environmental conditions in which to respond to the standard questions. If the school invigilation teams are doing their job and ensuring there are no infringements of the rules, then every pupil has an equal opportunity to demonstrate their ability. This is incontrovertible.
Put another way, over the whole programme of study of perhaps two years in which the pupil has prepared for the examination, the last one to three hours in which they are tested is the only point that can be guaranteed to be equitable.
Up until entry into the examination room, myriad other factors are in play:
• access to good teaching;
• home support;
• access to online resources;
• places to study outside school;
• access to books;
• support from peers and mentors;
• access to professional tutors;
• freedom from illness to enable pupils to attend school;
• an adequate diet;
• sufficient sleep;
• access to role models/aspirational role models;
• parents in work;
• freedom from poverty.
All these factors make the examination less a test of the native ability and aptitude of the pupil, and more a trial of circumstances beyond the control of the individual pupil. I am not arguing here that pupils with more difficult circumstances cannot do well in examinations. I am arguing that such pupils succeed despite the system, not because it efficiently and effectively recognises their educational potential at the point of statutory testing (Gillett, 2017).
I am passionate about the efficacy of the examination system from personal experience. I grew up on a council estate and thoroughly enjoyed it. It was a marvellous community with exceptional role models in fairness, family orientation and entrepreneurship. Nonetheless, it offered few examples of formal educational success. My passage to university was supported materially by my parents (who had lost the pathway to further and higher education to the Great Depression and the Second World War), an uncle who was a Labour councillor and an aunt who was a staff manager at a popular high street department store. Their ability to see beyond tomorrow and invest in the future through study today was what gave me an opportunity to succeed in what would otherwise have been an educational lottery. Many children far more talented than me did not get this opportunity to thrive in study. Many succeeded through other pathways but too much native talent was wasted for want of sufficient support at critical times in their schooling.
Limitations of the equality of opportunity of the examinations system
If I suggested that you wilfully neglect a section of the cohort of pupils entering both their GCSEs and A levels as an experiment in social engineering, you would be aghast. If I suggested that you leave the top performing 20 per cent of your pupils to their own devices and concentrated all your efforts on the remaining 80 per cent with a disproportionate bias to those with the greatest social disadvantage, how would you react? Would your parents or governors support this policy?
This would be seen as a preposterous position to take and would fly in the face of all your school stood for: excellence, opportunity and hard work.
Now let us reverse the proposition and suggest you abandon the bottom 20 per cent of your pupil cohort to their own devices and whatever support they could muster.
Again, this is a preposterous proposition which makes a mockery of your school’s proud position of equal opportunity and support for all. But would there be such an outrage from parents and governors?
I am suggesting that this is what is, in fact, happening because of the assumptions schools make about the capacity of pupils from less advantaged backgrounds to develop the self-supported study skills that underpin academic success.
Limitations of the scope of the examinations system
There is an element used to justify all intense ordeals, from the long hours incurred as a junior doctor to military service that highlights the mindset ‘Well, I went through it, and it didn’t do me any harm!’ This, of course, is always said by those who survived the ordeal intact and with