Comprehensive education means unlearning ‘ability’ and all its works
Posted on 09/10/2023
Formal state education continues to be organised around the false idea that young people are of fixed innate ‘ability’. The difficulty of moving beyond this damaging notion is one reason, Patrick Yarker argues, why the comprehensive ideal has yet to be fully realised.
In the second of their recent pair of guest-blogs, Ian Duckett and James Whiting of the Socialist Educational Association note that the movement for comprehensive education has been decades in the doldrums, making no headway since the failure of the government of Harold Wilson in the 1960s to end selection. Derek Gillard suggests the tide turned a little later, in 1976, ironically enough the very year in which Callaghan’s Labour government wrote the principle of ‘no selection’ into law in an Education Act which, three years on, the new Conservative government quickly repealed. On his invaluable website Derek explores the political and social context which saw full realisation of the comprehensive ideal thwarted.
Or rather say deferred.
Fundamental to this complex and continuing story seems to me the persistence of ‘ability’ thinking, and the mutually-reinforcing relationship between such thinking and the educational structures which pertain. Inadmissible at any age in an education system dedicated to comprehensive ideals, selection is the logical and necessary consequence of fixed ‘ability’ thinking. Such thinking regards each pupil or student as being ‘of’ a certain ‘ability’ or ‘potential’ and so best suited for certain kinds of educational experience while less suited for others.
Ability thinking remains the current system’s common sense. ‘Ability’ is the article of faith whose truth the system’s structures confirm and uphold. The advertised post offers teaching ‘across the full ability range’ or the opportunity to work with ‘children of all abilities’. Fixed ‘ability’ thinking is the doctrine which justifies overt selection, most obviously the existence of grammar schools, and urges and excuses the plethora of mechanisms by which selection infiltrates supposedly non-selective schools. The lens of ‘ability’ shapes how pupils and students are seen and worked with, and how they see themselves. Ascribed an ‘ability’ label at the earliest opportunity, each pupil or student is thus positioned within the hierarchical distribution—by stream, set or table—which comprises the system.
Consequences follow and continually shape what it means to go to school. A pupil or student may be prevented on the basis of ‘ability’ from taking certain kinds of course or exam. They may be denied the chance to study particular books, or particular subjects, or attempt certain kinds of task or activity, or be seen as capable, or be helped to be so. Coupled with a regime of high-stakes public testing and published league tables of results, ‘ability’ thinking legitimises particular groups or individuals being regarded as of little educational account. It narrows young people’s scope for choice and intensifies their anxiety, sense of failure and imposter-syndrome. It stigmatizes, sometimes for decades. Or so my undergraduate students tell me when we talk about their experience of being labelled by ‘ability’, and the experiences of their siblings and friends.
A mountain of research bears out what they say. Fixed ‘ability’ thinking justifies the customising of the curriculum offer made in school: narrower for some people, wider for others. It underlies the different ways in which groups of students are spoken to, or questioned in class and allowed more or less time to answer. It ensures and endorses the differing opportunities and choices allowed to different groups, denying possibilities to some people, opening doors to others. It rationalises inequalities, for example that top sets tend to be taught by better qualified and more experienced staff, are offered greater degrees of choice, are allowed to go on particular school trips, and so on. Meanwhile, bottom sets tend to get duller work, find themselves more heavily surveilled and controlled, trusted less and steered away from the ‘academic’ towards the ‘vocational’, and so on. ‘Ability’ thinking works hand-in-glove with other structural inequalities, notably those based on class and gender and racism, to watermark the way formal education is lived every day by young people.
Full realisation of the comprehensive ideal involves, first and foremost, turning our back on ‘ability’ thinking. A comprehensive education system requires a more educationally enabling way of regarding those who are taught, and of framing the work of teachers. Its corner-stone is the belief that human educability in general and anyone’s educability in particular is not limited by genetic inheritance or social circumstance. There is no ability-spectrum, no norm-curve of potential. Everyone is able to learn without limit provided conditions for learning can be made sufficiently enabling, which is to say sufficiently ‘comprehensive’.
We are not all the same nor do we come in kinds. Human difference is the norm. But, in the realm of education, differences in attainment outcomes (to speak of nothing else) are not to be explained by notions of a pre-set mental hierarchy or a ladder of fixed innate intelligence. Any attempt to label our mind or categorise our thought according to some hierarchy of perceived ‘ability’ does violence to the truth of who we are.
To unlearn ‘ability’ seems to me essential in the successful pursuit of comprehensivisation. Going comprehensive means that ways of thinking and working in school which continue under the sign of ‘ability’ must be generally superseded. This can’t be accomplished solely at the level of ideas. Yet it must also be accomplished there, to anchor the comprehensive movement’s practical reforms and policy-improvements.