What it does require is confidence.
“You have to be receptive to new ideas and be prepared to go with them,” Wise said. “When we first introduced ‘learning to learn,’ we only timetabled one lesson per week in whatever room we had spare. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work nearly as well as we had hoped. Some schools might have just given up on them at that point, reckoning they were a bit of a non-starter. We talked it over with the staff and reckoned that it failed because we didn’t back it wholeheartedly. When we did so, it really paid dividends — and we haven’t looked back.”
Wise is far too much of a diplomat to say so to me, but the confidence he talks about clearly also extends to telling the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) to back off from time to time and to protect his staff from some of the more ridiculous central diktats.
“What we are fighting is a dependency culture,” said his deputy, Mark Lovatt. “Many teachers end up just spoon-feeding information to their students, because they know they are going to be judged on how they perform in exams and they are terrified of failure. So kids often end up bored and failing to acquire any independent learning skills that will benefit them later on. In some ways that teacher-student relationship is mirrored in that between the DCSF and schools: the DCSF doesn’t really trust schools to deliver, so it micromanages them to the nth degree. And schools lose their ability to innovate as a result.”
This raises some interesting questions about the Innovation Unit itself. The schools minister, Lord Adonis, is due to be present at this week’s launch of Leadbeater’s report, but it is anyone’s guess just how far he and the government will be prepared to back up this support with hard policy to devolve more powers to schools to deliver learning in the way they see fit. The suspicion remains in many quarters that the Innovation Unit largely exists as a symbol to the teaching profession that the government is receptive to new ideas, while the DCSF technocrats have no real intention of decentralizing their control.
As with almost any report, you can read it any which way. Rather than looking for similarities in the Cramlington experience, you could just look for differences. You could argue that Cramlington’s almost monocultural white intake makes it far easier to realize the idea of personalized learning than in schools where a large number of students may speak English as a second language and the range of possible provision is far less prescribed.
And you could argue that the level of teacher retention at Cramlington is well above the national average, helping to instill a sense of common purpose. But then so what?
Because the real point of Leadbeater’s report is that excellence is a process, not a finite goal. And no one can really be sure what works unless they are prepared to give it a go.
RSS