The education ‘faultlines’ some believe will undermine inclusion

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I know too many people who say they “failed” school. Some of them left with no qualifications, some of them got a few, some of them actually got many. But they all say school “wasn’t for them” and, though most have since enjoyed success in various different areas, that feeling of rejection has stuck.

That’s bled into their wider perceptions about what education is and is not: it is for “thinkers”, not “doers”; it is for the articulate, not for the dextrous; it is needed for some careers, but not for others.

Now their children are in the system, it has bled into the perception those children have of education, too. When you look at current challenges with attitudes to school, attendance and behaviour, it’s hard not to connect the dots.

Curriculum change

As a sector, we can argue however much we like that this view is wrong: that their subsequent success suggests school did “something” and that their view has been moulded by societal misunderstandings, not the reality of education.

But it won’t make much difference: their lived experience suggests otherwise.

And actually, more and more leaders in the sector are speaking up to suggest their perception is, in fact, right. They say that the Gibb/Gove reforms made the situation even worse, too, driving a narrower narrative of success and creating a larger group of those who define themselves as school failures.

SEND and inclusion

You can see this thinking clearly in John Roberts’ excellent analysis last week of the “missing levers” in SEND reform: curriculum and assessment. The leaders quoted talk about the need to broaden out our view of educational success.

Geoff Barton, the ever-articulate former general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, sums the position up succinctly when he tells John that these “really big faultlines in the English education system - the ones that feed the dismal sense of failure in far too many of our young people - really haven’t been addressed”.

Many will point to past problems caused by assessment and curriculum reform aimed at inclusivity, which left expectations for some pupils dropped, standards failing and some teachers disengaged. That era, they would argue, really did fail young people.

Better conversations

These dangers should be taken very seriously. However, they should not hinder new ideas on reform, nor should they be an excuse to close this conversation down. Instead, they should inform better conversations.

Encouragingly, in their recent article for Tes setting out their vision for the Key Stage 3 RISE Alliance (you can find the newly announced panel members here), Becks Boomer-Clark and Dame Lesley Powell seemed to point to this tension and issue a call to arms to tackle it, stating they were seeking “a much better balance between academic rigour and the rich and memorable experiences that so often unlock personal passions and interests that stay with young people throughout their lives”.

Even if you do not agree with the criticism of the Gibb-Gove era or buy the argument that school itself creates “failures”, the above ambition seems pretty uncontroversial if implemented effectively and funded appropriately.

But would a broadening of curriculum and assessment accountability really mean fewer young people feeling that they had “failed” school? The critics would argue that it would at least make us more certain that it was not school that had failed those young people.

Jon Severs is editor of Tes magazine