Hinges and Turns

Posted on 30/05/2023

Colin Richards was once a primary teacher and is now a long-retired HMI. In this guest blog-post he considers the changes to school inspection over recent decades which have culminated in what he calls ‘a kind of dominated “professionalism”’. He looks forward to the prospect of educational renewal under a different government.

In 1996 I published a piece, ‘At a hinge of history?’, in the TES (April 19). It was provoked by the chief inspector’s misuse of inspection evidence and his increasingly strident ‘turn to the right’ foreshadowing increasing political involvement in issues relating to the detail of curriculum, pedagogy, assessment and accountability.

Almost thirty years on, a combination of government-‘inspired’ financial neglect, DfE-‘inspired’ orthodoxy, Oak-‘inspired’ instrumentalism and Ofsted-‘inspired’ fear and anger is provoking a major crisis of confidence within the education service. This could just be another ‘hinge of history’—involving ‘a turn to the left’ or at the very least  ‘a turn for the better’.

This blog focuses on changes in primary education: a similar, though not identical, thirty-year history could be written of special education and secondary education.

When I began primary teaching in the middle of the 1960s, English education, like the past, was a foreign country. They did things differently there (apologies to L.P. Hartley). There was no mandated curriculum except for religious instruction (ironically often ignored in practice). There was a strong emphasis on the teaching of English, mathematics and, for 11-plus classes, ‘intelligence’. The rest of the curriculum was left to teachers’ discretion, resulting—in some schools—in wonderful practice illustrating young children’s amazing potential, particularly, but not only, in the arts. HM inspectors were few and far between. Their visits were met with curiosity tinged with a little apprehension. Local Education Authorities had advisory services, varying in quality and primary expertise but generally welcomed in schools. There was no national system of assessment whatever, though there was a variety of arrangements for selection at age eleven. Primary schools did use standardised tests but sparingly. Schools operated as very largely self-contained, isolated institutions. Compared with the present things were different; not always better but certainly not always worse.  There was a kind of unchallenged, embryonic professionalism.

Fast forward to the very early 1990s to a rather different educational landscape on which my HMI colleagues and I were inspecting and reporting. There was a broad national curriculum of ten or so subjects, recently scaled back to more manageable proportion as a result of a major review, but still dominated by the so-called “basics”—English and mathematics but thankfully not ‘intelligence’! Guidance, not dictation, was provided by LEAs, HM Inspectorate, subject associations and publishers on a take-it-or leave it basis. Teaching methods were still at teachers’ discretion and, through the Education Reform Act (ERA) of 1988 , were explicitly protected from government proscription.  A degree of professional autonomy still remained -in principle and also in large measure in practice. A national assessment system was being introduced, as was regular periodic inspection by Ofsted with its contentious strap-line ‘improvement through inspection’ without the question mark that ought to have been at its end.  Schools met the prospect of regular periodic inspection with some foreboding but not for the most part with outright fear. Compared with the 1960s there was greater consistency of practice but still with considerable professional discretion resulting in some excellent work in both core and other foundation subjects. Compared with the 1960s things were different, still ‘foreign’ compared with the present but in my judgment (and that of many of my colleagues who were inspecting schools) generally better. There were the beginnings of regulated professionalism.

Fast forward (or should it be backwards?)  to 2023 to a more impoverished country politically, economically and, I would argue, educationally. There is now a very imbalanced primary curriculum dominated by highly precise prescription in just the same two subjects as ever—a curriculum badly in need of a fundamental review but with none in sight as yet. There is a national testing system which, beginning with base-line assessment, constrains more than it informs teachers’ judgment and is very largely a school-accountability mechanism rather than serving pupil-informed development. Despite the ERA being still on the statute book, officially-approved but highly contentious teaching methods especially in early reading and in arithmetic have been imposed in an attempt to constrain professional autonomy and are being policed by an ever more assertive Ofsted regime increasingly and stubbornly at odds with a fearful teaching profession over a number of issues, especially highly problematic whole-school grades and unreasonable inconsistencies of inspectorial judgment. And then there are Oak National Academy’s swathe of officially-approved, Ofsted-advised, on-line lessons often scripted to a common format and self-inspected by Ofsted itself whose cloth-eared chief inspector has strong ideological views of her own informed by undue reliance on ‘knowledge-rich’ rhetoric and on the overblown claims of so-called ‘cognitive science’. Compared with the early 90s things are certainly different and arguably not that much better. There is now a kind of dominated ‘professionalism’—note the single quotes.

L.P. Hartley was right: the past is a foreign country. We do things differently now.

We could also do things differently in the future—with another ‘turn’ at another ‘hinge’. The forthcoming departure of the current chief inspector, the belated but welcome concerted efforts of the professional associations over finance, pay, recruitment, retention and Ofsted, concern over the aftermath of Covid and, in particular, the prospect of a different government with a different ‘turn’ offer an opportunity for educational renewal in primary education, special education and, of course in secondary education. Can the opportunity be seized for a new educational settlement?

Colin Richards