The Blunkett report on learning and skills, released this week, contains much that will no doubt be welcomed by teachers - including a planned restoration of the Sure Start programme, a commitment to building on teacher and leadership development opportunities such as the new NPQs and continued support for teacher collaboration, including through platforms such as Oak National Academy. The promise of teacher sabbaticals will likely also seem appealing, if incredibly complex to implement.

But while it does, encouragingly, point to the value of learning for learning’s sake and the importance of protecting the arts, social sciences and humanities, this message seems sometimes lost amid calls for a focus on creating “work-ready graduates” in a rather singular, albeit well meaning, view of the purpose of education.

This leads to reliance on overused tropes that fail to recognise that at the heart of any education system must be its teachers. It is the expertise of those teachers who should be informing this report - not, as appears to be almost exclusively the case at present, employers.

A prescriptive curriculum?

In one of a number of apparent contradictions, the report argues the need for a National Curriculum Authority to ensure we can have a curriculum that is “free from party political interference”, and raises concerns about recent curriculum reforms having led to a highly prescriptive national curriculum with a focus on subject-specific, knowledge-rich learning.

And yet, it goes on to propose that Labour should introduce “an inclusive, inspiring, creative and future broadening curriculum” where teamwork, problem solving and resilience are taught - which sounds no less prescriptive or free from party political interference.

Pedagogy is also in the report’s sights: teachers will be “trained in a wider range of methods than the traditional ‘chalk and talk’, including high-quality team-based learning”. This will seem strange to those delivering teacher training, which already covers precisely this range of strategies. It will also feel ironic to those of us who remember when group work was at the heart of much teaching practice and so-called “chalk and talk” was expected to be limited, driven by the expectations of Ofsted at the time.

We must move beyond this constant pendulum swing between knowledge and skills, driven by the government of the day. Research has clearly demonstrated the relationship between the two and the domain-specific nature of skills, as well as the value of direct instruction as a key part of a teacher’s repertoire.

But while few of us would be pleased to see a return to Ofsted expecting to see group work in every lesson, neither should we want to see an expectation of every single lesson starting with retrieval practice, for example. Teachers need to be trusted - and empowered, through excellent development opportunities - to make expert decisions. That means moving away from this kind of prescription.

In a further piece of irony, the report recognises how overworked the teaching workforce is and the effect this has on both retention and recruitment - while calling for reform to both curriculum and assessment. Constant change has a significant negative effect on teacher workload, and subsequently on retention. Ultimately, this negative impact extends to our pupils. So, even where a proposed reform appears positive, the need for stability, continuity and for any change to be introduced over time cannot be overstated.

Where do we go from here?

So, what’s the solution? Perhaps it’s naive to think that education policy will ever be anything other than ideological - but that’s the last thing that our pupils (and their teachers) need.

Some will argue that the answer is to look to research to provide a clear pathway that is driven by evidence rather than opinion. However, this perhaps fails to take into account the lack of consensus on such basic issues as the purpose of education, which in turn drives debate over what outcomes we want and therefore what constitutes effective practice. We also see, on a daily basis, how evidence can be selectively identified and used to argue for (almost) any position.

I would argue, then, that the solution lies not just in research, but specifically in evidence-informed practice. The crucial difference here is the role of the teacher - and this is the second way in which teacher expertise is missing from the Blunkett report. Evidence-informed practice is not about simply following the research; it’s about combining insights from research with teachers’ own professional expertise and judgement, in a particular context.

So, rather than us swinging from “prog” to “trad” and from skills to knowledge with each successive government, perhaps our focus should continue to be on developing, recognising and listening to teachers as the expert professionals who are best placed to lead their own sector.

Cat Scutt is director of education and research at the Chartered College of Teaching