The Sorting Hat.

You can’t revise for the Hogwart’s Sorting Hat ceremony.

The children who go through it know how serious it is and are very afraid of being sorted into the ‘wrong’ house.

Fortunately this does not happen.

The Hat does not make mistakes.

While most of us muggles want to be Gryffindor those in Harry’s world understand that while some might be more glamorous than others each House is of equal value. It’s why revealling Slytherin Snape as the hero of the whole series is so satisfying.

One role of education is to be the Sorting Hat, dividing sheets and goats, separating the Oxbridge set from the Redbrick set, the Redbrick set from the Poly set and the Poly set from those who don’t go to university and so on all the way down to those doomed to zero hours contracts.

This is not inherently A Bad Thing.

Some jobs are more intellectually demanding than others and in an imperfect world exams are probably the least-worst proxy we have for the capacity to learn new things. Nobody wants someone who really struggles with basic comprehension to go into a role that demands advanced comprehension and fast high-stakes, complex decision making. There are direct links in many fields too. A young person without a firm grasp of human biology would likely find themselves at sea in their first year on a medicine course.

But the main purpose of education should not be to be The Sorting Hat.

When it does become the main purpose we run into troubling ethical issues in societies that ascribe value to people according to the status of their employment.

We live in such a society. Most people in the world do. Those who have responsible jobs earn more money. They get to drive flashier cars and live in bigger houses. They get pedigree dogs and second homes in charming villages.

They live ‘better’ lives.

While there is not much schools can do about this it is wrong of them to teach pupils that the reason they should value learning is so that they will do better in exams and so either maintain a privileged position or attain one. It is wrong because success in examinations is not primarily or perhaps even mainly about how hard a child works – there are a wide range of variables many of which are beyond their control. It is wrong because the competitive nature of examinations (and indeed life) makes it impossible for everyone to rise to exalted positions and many of those who won’t rise know they won’t, giving them little reason to play the education game.

It is wrong because by making exam results the point of it all we diminish the value of the lives of those who go on to do jobs that don’t require academic success. We make not doing well at school a moral failing then punished through a lifetime of low status drudgery.

It is wrong because by reducing what pupils learn to mere hoops to jump through we weaken its inherent value, making the content of curriculum seem arbitrary, even random. What does it matter what you learn if it’s forgotten as soon as the last exam paper is handed in? Why bother having intelligent, challenging conversations about the best book to teach or the most interesting urbanisation case study? If you aren’t interested in French why should you have to do it, given you’ll drop it at fourteen and forget everything you learned in Years 7-9 anyway?

Covid19 has turned this old tension into a fracture.

It has been depressing to see how fixated conversation about education has been on making the exam process ‘fair’, with comparatively little attention paid to what shutdown means for the substance of what pupils learn about. Discussion about content, as far as I am aware, seems to have been mainly limited to the small scale furore about Year 11 pupils supposedly not being examined on poetry in 2021, which evoked a sort of savage joy from sections of the public, met with despair from concerned teachers, authors and academics.

This miniature culture war was disturbing and revealing in its illustration of the failure of our education system to convince many of those who have been through it that it was ever more than a means to an end. While I’m sure this has always been an issue the expansion of higher education may, counter-intuitively, worsened this effect with the increasing number of jobs now open only to graduates reinforcing the impression the value of a degree is derived solely from the lack of opportunity for those without one.  

This is something Michael Merrick has been banging on about for a while. As usual for when he’s not wrong, he’s very right.

So what’s the answer? How do we get out of this mess and increase public trust in education?

Firstly I think it important schools stop playing into the hands of the instrumentalists. The sector should not justify its role in language limited to the grades pupils receive in public examinations. Schools tempted to do this in a drive to improve outcomes might reflect on how likely this is to even work on its own terms, given what an exclusive message this is to pupils who think they aren’t capable of results and high falutin’ careers that would make their school proud of them.

Secondly, I think it is essential schools do not present themselves in ways that might be interpreted as elitist.

Elites are utterly alien to those outside them and there are many, many people in many, many communities who do not want to become something other than themselves in order to fit in. This is something Sonia Thompson understands well, explained cleverly in her now deservedly famous ‘backpack’ metaphor. Having considered her work carefully I am sure schools do need to think really carefully about how they are embedded in their communities and alert to the dangers of seeming to exist in rarefied air above them.

When schools present themselves as bridges to a different sort of life they are making the assumption all children want to cross the river. Often this isn’t true.

Finally, and I realise this is something that goes beyond the gift of schools, we must work harder at not ascribing worth and importance to status.

Doing this makes knowledge fundamentally undemocratic. It makes it the preserve of people who are ‘clever’ and ‘posh’. It makes the idea of an unqualified care worker reading poetry at the end of his shift seem ridiculous when it should be beautiful and inspiring. It leaves little room for night school, or the old style Open University, or going to the library to borrow nature books to learn about the birds in your garden.

We must do better than this.

We have been shown how integral our cleaners, carers, drivers and shelf-stackers are. We have been taught how we much we depend on them. We have been made to recognise their worth. There are children in all our schools who will grow up to do these jobs. They are entitled to better pay, conditions and respect, and they are also entitled to an education that’s not made meaningless by the failure of exams.

Let’s make education more than the Sorting Hat.

All of us wherever we find ourselves are entitled to much better than this.