Imagine we had an education minister who said: “Dominant curricular and organisational patterns in schools were not designed for the Internet Age 7and often inhibit its effective use. ICT offers some gains for the traditional curriculum delivery, but its full educational potential cannot be realised without radical changes in school structures and methodologies.” Well the day this actually happens may be closer than you think. These are not the words of some radical thinker, but appeared in a document from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). So things might be changing slowly, but they are changing.

The real debate about ICT rarely takes place in public, we just get the tired mantra about raising standards. How can we debate with ministers who don’t understand and civil servants who will not tell them? Once, if you wanted real, principled arguments you had to go to the fringe thinkers. This OECD document indicates that fringe thinking might well have become mainstream.

If you want to know why the UK is making such a hash of ICT, this document lays it out very succinctly and clearly. Usually documents like these are only of interest to those who wrote them or gave evidence. This is different.

The wide-ranging survey analyses with clarity where the mistakes lie. The short answer, according to the OECD, is that we are getting it completely wrong. Politicians with any pretensions to understanding education should be force-fed its conclusions.

Piling computers into schools without any real thought, in the vain hope that something good will result, seems to have been government policy since the days of Kenneth Baker. The realisation that the curriculum has to change means that politicians would have to contend with the forces of reaction and they do not like to do that. Until they do, asking teachers to use computers is like asking someone to drive a car with the brakes on.

The report goes on to suggest that the assessment system is at the heart of the confusion. The OECDargues that examining in single subjects by handwritten examinations is bound to lead to problems.

“What is assessed in schools and how the assessment is performed exercises a tenacious influence on the delivered curriculum,” says the report. “To continue with existing patterns of student assessment will act as a brake on the imaginative use of ICT. The pervasive adoption of ICT not only requires different assessment procedures but provides a variety of means. Is it not increasingly incongruous to limit student assessment to what can be measured by traditional handwritten examinations?” As an example, the report describes how the power of word processing is avoided. The authors point out the possibilities: “Text becomes a mutable entity to be revisited, extended and revised so that it reflects a growing understanding, a growing personal knowledge. In addition, there is increasing use of non-linear forms of writing using hypertext systems, and of multimedia, as pictures, sound and video are integrated into texts.”

The reality, according to the report, is that “beyond the correction of spelling and grammar the text created usually remains undeveloped”. The most powerful writing tool ever put into the hands of teachers and students is virtually neutered, and that is just one example.

One day - hopefully soon - someone will wake up to the fact that with one hand we have injected millions of pounds into schools to spend on technology, yet with the other we have built sanctions against its effective use.

The report finishes with a coda from the acclaimed American academic Seymour Papert, who makes the point that education leaders think in terms of more efficient or better achievements of the same learning goals. “Why,” he asks, “at the beginning of our century, when the biggest change in learning ever was about to happen, were the important countries of the world taken by a frenzy of preventing that change by establishing tests and standardising curricula? Many measures that cast in cultural concrete the knowledge of a previous century made it much more difficult to explore any development of new kinds of knowledge, new things to learn and ways to learn them.”

Jack Kenny

Schooling for Tomorrow. Learning to Change: ICT in Schools - Education and Skills, a report by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development

Price: pound;14

http:www.oecd.org