Here we go again. Schools should “deliver more than academic results and rely less on rote learning,” says the CBI, encouraging politicians to “dump the ideology” and reform the curriculum (“Business leaders call for less rote learning in schools”, Tes, 9 March).
This is the same CBI that has historically bemoaned students’ lack of basic literacy, numeracy and IT skills. The same CBI that consistently presses for more character education, better development of employability skills, better preparation of young people for their chosen careers, compulsory work experience and more apprenticeships. The same CBI that called for Ofsted to be reformed to put more emphasis on academic progress. The same CBI, in short, that is quite comfortable pressing its ideology onto education.
Most tellingly, its latest foray into education policy comes with the following statement: “We should take ownership - let’s persuade our politicians to set up a new Education Commission.” Who is “we” in that statement, exactly? Take ownership indeed.
Laudable as the idea of “bypassing turf wars” is, the truth is that last week’s intervention by CBI president, Paul Drechsler, plays right into them.
There is a lot to be said for taking the party politics out of education, for providing stability in matters of curriculum and autonomy in terms of pedagogy. I have myself proposed the idea of an Education Commission (see bit.ly/DutautBlog). Unfortunately, the CBI’s own similar idea is far from ideal.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the vision Mr Drechsler sets out of a commission with a broad membership, made up of “educational leadership, businesses, young people, parents and politicians.” Anyone, it seems, except teachers. Not that I think we teachers are being pointedly omitted: we simply don’t figure in his thinking.
In 2014, Mr Drechsler also ventured into education policy but, back then, he didn’t call for an Education Commission. Four years ago, he and his organisation seemed to care neither for ownership nor for democracy, but the sudden appearance of this proposal can only be construed as a foil for the former. It certainly has nought to do with the latter.
Finest double-speak
When the CBI calls for “dumping the ideology” and “bypassing turf wars”, I can only read that as double-speak at its finest, and the ideology that it pushes onto us and onto the electorate is one that places education at the service of the economy. Not even the whole of the economy, but those businesses who are CBI members. Never mind society. Never mind democratic citizenship. Education’s purpose is to produce workers.
At what point businesses divested themselves of the role of training their workforce, I couldn’t tell you. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the intent of the national curriculum, though.
Nor is the CBI particularly well-informed about what goes on in classrooms. Decrying “rote learning” is all well and good - and falling back on an OECD report that suggests we do more of it than anyone else could make an important point. But it isn’t the one Mr Drechsler is making, nor one the CBI could make.
Instead, we get the same corporate tropes that drip out of Silicon Valley about character education and teaching the whole child, while surrendering our practice to those who have the minister’s ear. The same ideological tenets that have led down a path of full-blown crisis in the recruitment and retention of teachers, and the decimation of our status as a profession.
Yes, the same pressure on schools to be all things to all people. Hell, we’re not even trying to do that. It’s hard enough to be all things to the CBI.
It’s not that increasing numbers of us aren’t teaching the whole child. It’s that increasing numbers of us do it despite this very system, for as long as we can keep doing it, until we can do it no longer and we join a supply agency or leave altogether. Anything but keep dancing the thinktank two-step. Rote/Discovery. Guide-on-the-side/Sage-on-the-Stage. Knowledge/Skills. Opt in/Opt out. Shake it all about.
Even if you agree with Mr Drechsler - as I do, that education has been too politicised and that views have become too entrenched, that our education system puts an increasing and worrying emphasis on rote learning and that tampering with school structures is detrimental to education - let’s not kid ourselves. The conclusions that the CBI draws from this view are not solutions to our problems. They are solutions to only businesses’ concerns, namely how to get better-trained workers for less.
What kind of workers? One only has to look at education to get a flavour of the CBI’s utopian workers. Ones whose very existence is omitted from the list of people who might have ideas about how best to do their job. Ones whose value is best considered in respect of supply agency contracts. Ones whose contribution is only as good as their last set of results. Ones whose rights are vanishing, eclipsed by the logic of the market.
These supposed solutions can have no impact but to aid the business community to capitalise on our semi-privatised education system, to hobble any independent thought of re-democratising it, to hand curriculum over to commercial interest, and to keep us dancing the Hokey Cokey.
Be under no illusion. This is not a vision of a system that will return teaching to the status of a profession, even - perhaps especially - if it agrees with your sensibilities. As long as we are seduced by statements about what the purpose of education is, we are failing to ask the better question: whose purpose?
We live in a democracy. The CBI have a right to command the attention of ministers to state their case. But if we don’t add our voices, or if we allow our voices to be silenced, that’s where we let democracy end - for us and for our students. Avoiding that at all costs must be our purpose.
JL Dutaut is a teacher of politics and citizenship and co-editor of Flip The System UK: a teachers’ manifesto, published by Routledge
