There is a Yiddish proverb that goes: “Troubles overcome are worth telling.” In today’s education environment, I fear we are failing young people and not giving them the opportunity to experience those troubles, to experience rising from failure and learning from their mistakes. The mistakes that they are allowed to be made are carefully controlled and somewhat simulated: the Teaching Truman Show.
The stakes are so high, and are rising at a seemingly inexorable rate. Exams are becoming more challenging, literacy expectations are soaring and the opportunity to bag qualifications early is diminishing. It is even more crucial that students achieve success first time, for their own futures. Further, with the new mysterious Sats and Progress 8 measurements, schools are under more pressure to attain results so as to appear high up in league tables. The potential for excoriation and relegation is huge.
Schools, as a result of this new reality, are ensuring that GCSE and A-level students are within school perimeters for all hours of the day; exam support is an all-day affair. I fear that the consequence of this is that we are making learning seem a chore, a regimented exercise, and are losing any intrinsic love of learning. I do, however, appreciate that we need to secure the best outcomes for our students and often the social culture with which they surround themselves isn’t conducive to high performance in education nor to instilling a love of learning.
Recipe for success
The high-stakes approach to learning and performance is not a new phenomenon. On a recent trip to China, I met parents and students who mutually agreed that hard work (often in the form of a 14-hour school day) is the recipe for success. A culture of brain gyms and exam factories is prevalent across the capital’s school system, to help students access top universities around the world.
Is there anything we can do?
We need to work on how students view their education journey from the outset. We are all born with an innate curiosity and desire to learn, no matter who we are or where we’re from. Critics will argue that schools are draining this energy as pupils progress through education. I’m leaning towards that view.
If, however, we ensure that students are perpetually focused on why they are in school and why they need to be pulling out all the stops for their learning, then the desired commitment will be embraced more by students.
The what, how and why
This could come in the form of mentoring. The pastoral system within schools could focus more on why students should learn, on the purpose of school, and on understanding the barriers to learning with more clarity. I’m proud that my school has a tutor-mentoring facet to our pastoral care of students: we are committed to understanding our students better and helping them discover how to better their own journeys. There is too much energy placed on the what: A*s, and the how: hard work. Too little is spent on the why: to access incredible futures and become powerful and interesting through supreme knowledge.
Shadow education secretary Lucy Powell, in her speech at the Labour conference last year, said that we need to work on raising aspirations. This is a folly. We need to work on ensuring students believe that they can access anything. Mentoring is a great tool to achieve this.
We need students to experience moments of failure that they rise from - an experience critical for personal development. If students grasp why learning is crucial and how malleable their futures are with outstanding outcomes, then perhaps we can take off their stabilisers and let them ride free.
Schools should approach this with less trepidation; history tells us that the stories of long-run success are often preceded by failure. Fail once, fail again, fail better.
Oliver Beach is an inner-London economics teacher, former Teach First graduate and star of BBC series Tough Young Teachers. He tweets as @olivermbeach
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