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.