FORUM 65.1 Spring 2023: Thinking again
Posted on 21/03/2023
Educational developments in Scotland and Wales are a particular focus of the Spring 2023 number of FORUM, which Patrick Yarker introduces here.
One morning long ago, in the Dark Ages before a National Curriculum or high stakes public testing or academisation or the EEF, I arrived at a comprehensive in north London to be interviewed for my first teaching post. Nervous, hopeful, wringing wet behind the ears, I was put at ease by a kindly member of the English department and shown around the school. There was much to admire in what I saw and heard, and I was beginning to imagine how I might fit in, when a member of the interview-panel introduced himself and ventured to opine that in the end what teaching came down to was knowing how to handle kids.
My heart sank, but I lacked the nerve to disagree out loud, so the remark stayed with me, a splinter in the soul, even as I developed (albeit not in that school) those essential characteristics in a teacher’s composition which help make it possible to ‘handle’ school students. To establish and maintain order. To ensure compliance. To harness and direct the urge to learn.
Classroom management. Behaviour management. Control. Discipline. Handling kids. In the previous number of FORUM (64/2 ; Autumn 2022) Diane Reay noted the rise of ‘authoritarian’ models of schooling. These are characterised by what Matthew Clarke and Charlotte Haines Lyon term in this new number ‘zero tolerance no excuses disciplinary approaches’. Clarke and Haines Lyon home in on the use made in these schools of the practice of ‘isolation’, a way of excluding a young person from almost all social contact for a given period, commonly less than an hour but which in some cases may extend over a day, or days, or even weeks. ‘The fear of isolation’, they write, ’is part of a “pedagogy of punishment” that attempts to coerce the child into becoming an obedient, compliant and productive subject.’ They counsel that we must think again about what we are doing, and call into question a way of handling kids which ‘typically targets individuals from disadvantaged communities [and] punishes a particular sector of society…’
One way I’m helped to think again about what I do is by seeing what someone else does in pursuit of the same end. This new number of FORUM has been compiled in that spirit. Half a dozen contributors illuminate how the education of young people is being approached elsewhere in Great Britain: in Scotland, and also in Wales where a new national curriculum has begun to be implemented. The impact of this curriculum, in particular as regards ‘outdoor learning’, is considered by Glenda Tinney, while Caroline Lewis offers an insight into Welsh Higher Education policy. Walter Humes, Lynn McNair and Chris Holligan consider aspects of Scottish education policy and practice including educational research policy, the school starting age and the importance of dissident voices. They draw differing conclusions as to the overall health of education north of the border. Aveek Battacharya explains why the idea of parental school choice is less fraught in Scotland than in England.
Mel Ainscow provides a synoptic overview. He reflects on the development of more equitable education systems in our island, the barriers to be surmounted in pursuit of such systems and the all-pervading influence of context, those ‘specific factors that shape thinking and practices in particular places.’ English education policy has intensified the fragmentation of the system and privileged competition rather than collaboration between schools, to the detriment of poorer children’s education. Wales has followed the opposite path, but historical factors and cultural constraints complicate the picture. In Scotland tensions continue between the centre and the localities, with ‘local authorities acting’, Mel Ainscow writes, ‘as the delivery arms of nationally determined policies.’ He urges policy makers to license those on the ground in each locality to tailor and inflect the implementation of policy, for they understand better than those at the centre what’s required.
Talking in class remains ‘official’ pedagogy’s poor relation, though the importance of talking for learning can’t be overstated. Rupert Knight’s article helps show why. He looks at how teachers enable and sustain purposeful talk among young people in the classroom, surely one of the most demanding and skilled aspects of practice a teacher can develop. Daryn Egan-Simon writes about the way film can prove a powerful stimulus for such talk.
In a development that may not be altogether unrelated to the slow spread of authoritarian ways of ‘handling’ pupils and students, there has been an upsurge in reports of mental ill-health among the young. John Quicke considers how schools might respond. Alan Parr salvages from neglect the work of Harriet Johnson, a Primary teacher who taught over a century ago in Suffolk and whose pedagogy was celebrated by Edmond Holmes, Chief Inspector of Elementary Schools for half a dozen years before World War 1.
‘We do our best when we are happy’, Harriet Johnson wrote. How, then, to make the classroom a place to be happy in each and every school day? Thinking again about this question may bring us closer to whatever it is that teaching can be said to come down to.
The Spring number opens with tributes to the late Clyde Chitty, for so many years FORUM’s animating spirit. Richard Harris’s warm recollections of Clyde, which draw on a long friendship, are freely available for readers to download.
Image: Scotland England border: credit