Teaching is to Emancipate

… and we’ll do the job. This was a phrase often quoted at me as a project manager in industry, usually in response to some request for an explanation as to why a project was falling behind schedule, or why tasks were not getting done. Once upon a time, I was the kind of guy who could happily ask such a question, knowing that the necessary resources – time, tea, toilet rolls or tools – had not been provided properly or at the right time and place. Everything could be correlated to a cost and I knew that cutting costs could be done using the “just-in-time” model of resource provision. I learned, the hard and expensive way, that the T-shirt slogan, “make God laugh – make a plan”, just wasn’t really funny. Especially if it was your plan.

Don Ledingham falls into the same old traps of the deluded project manager in his blog post on reducing bureaucracy in education when he cites the cost of a 30-minute meeting of SMT/PT’s as something approaching £18,000 – £20,000 per year. The cost is, of course, £0.00. The financial costs of the enterprise are the same, with or without the meetings. The posts are filled, the salary bill is fixed. Whatever you want those people to do, they will endeavour to do – whether it is on your time or theirs. No, the cost of spending time is what is not achieved with the remaining time. If you want a fully-integrated, cross-curricular, child-centred, four-capacity-compliant, literate, numerate, articulate, coherent curriculum, then the time to build it must be given to the builders.

The principles are simple but missing from education: from blindness to the effect of initiative layering to the extremes of narcissism, education is driven by expedient and personal self-interest far more than it is driven by the principles of providing good value for public money, future-proofing our economy and preparing people for social, economic and political environments which haven’t been dreamed of yet.

I have a great deal of time for our Prime Minister, Gordon Brown. We do not necessarily agree on politics – I actively opposed his introduction of IR35 when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, surrounded as he was at the time by the likes of Dopey Dawn Primarolo – but I know him to be an honourable and charitable man of principle. What happens, then, to such a man when promoted to the highest level of authority and influence in the land?

Take his latest article in the Grauniad, for example. He speaks valiantly about the importance of education:

we can be the first generation to commit ourselves to offer all our young people the fullest possible chance to make the most of all their talents

and yet he scatters his thoughts with such utter tosh as

Globalisation dictates that the nations that succeed will be those that bring out the best in people and their potential.

It is evident that Globalisation means economic anarchy: you’ll see more stories like Young’s shedding workers in Scotland where the prawns are caught because it’s cheaper to ship them to Thailand and back than sustain our home economy. The nations that succeed will be the ones that always succeed: those that pay no heed to moral rectitude, sustainability, principle or shame in the same way that Britain built its Empire.

This is the age in which the First World became the Third World. Whilst education sets you free of the bonds of ignorance and bigotry, naive self-delusion from some kind of apologetic, politically correct sense of fair play will consign you to the underdogs of the new society.

I would like to see our Prime Minister and all those who are in a position to do anything about it, grip the nettle firmly and tackle what ails us directly:

• Education fails because it is damaged by inclusion of those who don’t want it
• Children don’t want it because they often don’t need it (welfare and the black markets provide)
• Parents are the ignorant product of the damaged system of the last 30 years
• Cheap imports destroy home economies
• Centralisation destroys Public Services
• The Chinese do not care how much damage they do to us or anyone else because of the principles of their own constitution
• Forcing children to remain in school until they are 18 will cause further damage to an already struggling education system

Perhaps it’s time we had our own Constitution, a set of principles upon which a society can be built, although I think we’re a little late for that. We live in the age of expedient and immediacy and therein lies our downfall. There is time for men of principle – like our Prime Minister – to exercise those principles in the duties they perform if we are to preserve the civilisation we currently enjoy. Failure to do so will mean this state of civilisation is merely an ephemeral summer, to be longed for in years to come like a previous generation remembers the summer of 1939.

An exercise my school is engaged in, the SMT being in full panic over the latest HMIE inspection, is a “consultation” exercise with the whole school on, well, I think, discipline. Or behaviour or something. There’s a committee / working group. There are memos and this week we have suddenly given over two periods in our vertical tutor groups to it. Whatever “it” is. This week is prelim week, by the way, so the seniors are excluded from this con(sultation). Anyway. Keep up.

The instructions for tutors leading the discussions state clearly what the aims of the school are:

We aim for you to:

• Develop a clear sense of right and wrong
• Develop respect for yourselves, for others and for property
• Understand that we are all responsible for our actions
• Realise the importance of honesty, trust, reliability and manners

Funny. No mention of Education. I’ll not bore you with the details, except that in the discussion I did have with my wonderfully perceptive tutor group, we came up with what we thought should be the aim (singular) of the school, with a few supplementary objectives:

The aim of the school is EDUCATION with supplementary objectives of:

• Developing social skills
• Developing language and communication
• Developing self-esteem
• If possible, to do so with enjoyment.

Doing things on principle seems so rare in education leadership. Maybe that’s why it’s so dysfunctional. Yet here, in my little group, are the clearly stated principles upon which an empire could be built. There’s hope.

I’ve been lucky enough to secure interviews recently for promoted posts. In every case, I have been unsuccessful in securing the post and in every case, I am sure for very good reasons. Head teachers have a difficult task to do and must, as public servants, execute their office in the public interest. This means that they have to appoint the most expedient candidate. They also have to comply with recruitment rules of fair and open competition, visibly without bias or prejudice. Unfortunately these two things may conflict with each other, so the expedient candidate is appointed to the post and the rest are offered “feedback” or justification for the decision based on some weakness in their responses at interview. How I wish that these head teachers had the balls to be true leaders and tell the truth. Although disappointed for myself, I don’t mind not getting the job because appointing the other guy means benefits for the school: I understand that and as a taxpayer, expect it. What truly pisses me off is the transparent game of transferring responsibility for this in the pretence that it’s a development opportunity for me. Can we not just be honest about it?

Don Ledingham has raised the topic of observation in the classroom which is a topic which sometimes offers further illustration of the fear that exists in education of open, honest dialogue. I love to have other teachers see what I do: they might learn something new, I might learn something new or get the chance to know more about my own weaknesses and the pupils can only benefit from what comes out of that.

Don Ledingham has provoked the virtual equivalent of my throwing a brick at the telly in his latest post in which he asks, “So, are children and parents customers?” Part of my response:

Ideas like this picked up from the guttering around the edges of education underline the lack of principle and political understanding in this human history in which we are living. Can I spell it out: teachers, like great kings and soldiers, serve the greater “customer” of society itself. What we produce is the society in which we live: we fail when we tolerate liberal stupidities, political correctness and the false sycophantic grovelling to the “customers”; we succeed when the communities in which we live become intrinsically better because perspective, principle and purpose feature in the developed minds of our output.

More and more it seems to me that we are becoming blinded, perhaps by risk averse politicians who issue directive upon directive to comply with every liberal whim in the collective sense of “fairness”, so much so, that we have lost sight of the principles upon which our society is built. I speak as a physicist – we were once called “natural philosophers” – and perhaps so because I have always understood that if the principles are right, the policies and procedures follow with ease.

The implementation of inclusion in education is perhaps the most extreme example. The weak principle is that all children have an unqualified right to education. The expedient is that 28 children are denied the right to their education by the appalling behaviour of one or two untouchables. The principle is easily fixed by restating the principle as “all children have the privilege of education”.

Throw away your education management books, please. If you want to read something useful to your job, try Ben Elton’s Blind Faith. It’ll show you what we will build if we start letting the children think they are customers. It might make you blog a little less often, too.

In 1977, I wrote my first computer program. After I left the Army, in 1982, I wrote my first program as a commercial programmer. On Friday, 16th August 1996, I wrote and published my first web site in preparation for launching my own software company. In 1999, I became one of the first Microsoft Certified Solution Developers in Europe. On October 20th, 2001, I bought my first web domain. Tuesday, 25 March 2003, I launched my first blog. Thursday, March 24th, 2005, now a qualified teacher, I launched my first education blog. Monday, April 17 2006, mrhood.co.uk was created. Just over a year later, as the site was receiving its first Digg-driven peak of over a million session visitors in one day, Fife Council filters blocked access to the site in schools.

We haven’t got to a satisfactory resolution yet but we are trying.