Sal Riordan – Page 2 – Little Boxes

The harm of not teaching politics, law, economics and international relations to every child

Every child in the UK must be given the opportunity to learn how to measure how much energy it takes to heat up a kilogram block of aluminium by 1 degree. They must be given the opportunity to learn how to calculate the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle and to read at least 15 poems by at least 5 different authors. But schools are under no obligation to explain what happens in a courthouse, what a trade agreement is, why there is war in Syria, how the European parliament operates or how a law is formed in the UK.

Palace of Westminster, February 2007, by Diliff [CC BY-SA 2.5 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)]

It takes time to change what we teach in schools. It was the Greeks who started teaching trigonometry and we haven’t given it up since. The Victorians made a substantial change from the Middle Ages, highlighting the importance of the natural sciences. The social sciences were coming into their modern forms at this time but struggled–and still do–to gain acceptance as proper, ‘hard’ subjects. Thus the Victorians handed down the idea of learning the cluster of maths, English, French, geography, history and science. This is what we call today, ‘the English Baccalaureate’, mistakenly thinking it sets a child up well for today’s world. Perhaps very different choices would serve many of us better; how about statistics, computer science, modern European history, material science, English, Chinese and genetics?

The Meaninglessness of “Raising Aspirations”

It is a motto that creates a warm feeling and a good impression. We raise aspirations. It can be found all over vision documents in education. Our students aim high. In practice, too: schools hold assemblies, run form time lessons and design off-timetable days to raise aspirations. Dream big. But behind the good intent and the seemingly positive focus, we’ve got diversity and inclusivity all wrong. It’s not about dreaming big at all.

The raising-aspirations mindset is intended to address the class gap in performance between children from more and less affluent homes. It’s based on the logic that children from middle-class homes are more likely to aspire to becoming doctors, lawyers, research scientists and the like, that high aspirations are the first step in achieving goals of this kind, and that we should therefore create similar aspirations in working-class children to help them get started along the same career paths.

The very first problem with this raising-aspirations logic is that it assumes young people don’t have aspirations to begin with, or have the wrong ones. Research suggests this is not the case, especially for children in primary schools. Young people of all backgrounds have lots of wonderful ideas about what they would like to be when they grow up (at least, they do until our education system sucks their dreams from out of them). Children are certainly not short of aspiration, although they just might be short of what other people think are the right aspirations.

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Every Child Deserves Quality Vocational Training

If we want to take vocational work to be seen as important as it is, we should make everyone try it.

TECHNICAL SCHOOL: TRAINING AT TOTTENHAM POLYTECHNIC, MIDDLESEX, ENGLAND, UK, 1944 (D 21381) Boys learn to become bricklayers in the sunshine at Tottenham Polytechnic. They have a string stretched horizontally along the wall they are building, to ensure that the course of bricks they are laying is completely straight. Image reproduced under the IWM Non Commercial Licence. Copyright: © IWM. Original Source: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205201116

How to Ditch Double Science

The insightful work of the ASPIRES team has shown how deeply damaging double science can be. What remains to be done is to figure out how to ditch it. There’s a simple short-term solution for academies and free schools: replace double science with two sciences. Here’s the reasoning why…

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The Cluttered Curriculum

We can’t do it all: we can’t teach our children everything. British education systems have responded to the demands of every age by adding to school curricula. It has been much harder to purposefully take things away. Just like the nice jacket that doesn’t quite fit, we’d better save that little bit of trigonometry in case we need it later. The cluttered curriculum is fueling the great post-GCSE exodus from science: to enthuse young people about the beauty and utility of science, we need to decide what to take away.

Ever-burgeoning curricula sometimes create a temporary fix for their own problems, when they push entire subjects off school timetables by accident. The passing of subjects such as Latin is occasionally lamented, the threat to drama or music is sometimes recognised, but science curricula continues to protuberate. The accumulation of curricular items has created a particular crisis in science: we don’t spend lesson time on what is most important-we can’t try out, think about, play with scientific ideas-because there’s too much stuff to learn in the first place.

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Embracing the Softer Skills in Education

It is great that so many of us leave school knowing so many things… how much better if we were also kind, resilient, patient, empathetic, brave, confident, caring, persevering and conscientious. The challenge, of course, is that we don’t truly know how to create learning environments that encourage and foster the most important skills of all. And it is a bigger challenge than we’ve realised so far.

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Nourishing Talent

Since 2011, schools have received extra funding for students from low-income families. The purpose has been to improve the attainment of 1.8 million disadvantaged students. It hasn’t truly done so yet.

In our schools today, disadvantaged students get more money spent on them than students from non-disadvantaged homes. The cash most usually funds music lessons, trips, revision guides and educational apps. It has been one of the most remarkable and changes in moral outlook in our educational system in the last fifty years. Teachers have come to understand, not only the impact of poverty upon a child’s aspirations and achievements, but that something can and should be done to close this attainment gap: we are to give these children at school what the others get at home.

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The Dominance of Biology, Chemistry and Physics

What once made sense makes sense no more; instead, introduce children to science by teaching them genetics, geology, astronomy, neuroscience, medicine, material science and even quantum theory.

Once you know your biology, chemistry and physics, so the argument goes, you can then go on to study more specialised sciences later. It is best to get the basics right by receiving a good grounding in biology, chemistry and physics first. That stands you in good stead to be a natural scientist of any stripe.

The other sciences just reduce to biology, chemistry and physics, right? Cartoon courtesy of xkcd.com under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC 2.5)

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The Need for Large-Scale Education Research

University faculties and departments of education… too small, isolated, underfunded, prone to fads, and ineffective at driving forward education strategy in the U.K.

Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, 2013, courtesy of H. C. Kuo, under a Creative Commons License via Wikimedia Commons

It was a Labour government, empowered by socialist ideals, that significantly reduced grammar-school education in the latter half of the twentieth century. It is a Conservative government, striving to meet the demands of middle-class families, that is now reversing this long-standing decision. So the pendulum swings once more, from non-selective to selective schooling… from more coursework to more exams, from less setting to more setting, from separating students with special needs to including them in mainstream schools… Teachers who grow old in the system get used to the state of things returning to a time gone by, before the first grey hairs had appeared and the wrinkles set in.

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The Separation of School from State

A single idea nourished for years inside one Oxford-educated mind dominated the workload of a quarter of a million teachers for two years.

Official portrait of Michael Gove. Reproduced under license https://beta.parliament.uk/media/U6auUM9t

In 2014, the national curriculum was updated by the conservative government, spearheaded by the then Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove. The primary reason was rigour: there had been, for many years, a sense that the GCSEs were simply too easy. To overcome this, according to Michael Gove, a complete reworking of the curriculum was necessary:

This new national curriculum represents a clear step forward for schools, ensuring that all children have the opportunity to acquire a core of essential knowledge in key subjects. It embodies rigour, high standards and will create coherence in what is taught in schools. It sets out expectations for children that match the curricula used in the world’s most successful school systems.

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