Soon I begin teaching the history course Crime and Punishment for the first time.
I really should read the textbook. I really should read the past papers and look at the mark scheme. I should read the history books sitting on my desk at home.
I know that if I did these things teaching this new course will go so much better.
My planning will faster and better. My Do Now quizzes tighter and more focused. My explanations crisper and more purposeful.
I know if I do these things, I’ll enjoy teaching this more and that my class will benefit.
Yet because there is no deadline, I find it hard to get to it, because also sitting on my desk are lots of other things that need to be done by a specified time.
Tests to mark. Data to enter and analyse.
Quality Assurance to collate and summarise. Lessons to plan and parents to call or email.
These and a thousand other things that must be ticked off if I am to do my job properly.
And so, the textbook, exam papers, mark schemes and history books sit there.
Because there is no deadline.
It’s silly. I know it is because know if I were to do this pre-work all the tasks I must that do have deadlines would be easier, faster and more meaningful.
It is an investment I know would pay off.
But just as I am about to start, I open my email or look at my diary, see something that feels more pressing and do that instead.
And still the stuff sits on my desk.
Because there is no deadline.
I’m thinking about how much of a problem this might be generally in schools which do so much that’s urgent, they often don’t have time to do fewer tangible things that might – if we had time – make stuff much easier to do and better, and how this might lead to us having to do less overall.
While much of what is urgent is unavoidable – more so in schools working in contexts of challenge – I also wonder whether it’s possible we sometimes get so accustomed to working at pace to produce things that we forget other forms of work are just as and sometimes more valuable.
If we – for example- took the time to properly read about and understand assessment in geography instead of bashing out tests ready for Week 5 of Half Term 2 then we might well end up with a teacher producing better tests for the next twenty years, and this might help them know their classes better, and this might result in them teaching more efficiently and having to do less intervention and catch up work.
But often we don’t– because for the reading there is no deadline and for the other stuff there is. At the end of all my reading and thinking there won’t be anything I can point to and say, “here is what I did.”
It is a problem.
When I look back over my career, I’m sure that everything I’ve got better at has been because I took the time to read something or attend a talk or try something out and none of this stuff ever had deadlines.
Every single truly exceptional teacher – those I know to be way better than me – I’ve asked about this has said the same thing.
And leaders too – those I rate the highest are those who’ve done the deep no deadline work – those who’ve taken the time to really understand.
Frustratingly it is usually those who have the most flexibility with their time who get the privilege to do this and even for them it is hard to do this when everyone you know needs you to reply to their email yesterday.
For classroom teachers on full timetables, it’s much harder. They are the colleagues who have most deadlines while also being the people who probably benefit most from having time to do the deeper deadline free strategic work.
What can be done about this? It isn’t easy.
An answer that seems to be picking up popularity is to structure planning in ways that make the deep thinking less necessary. to create banks of resources and plans that those without the time to read the exam specifications and the books can still deliver something of value.
Given the frightening state of recruitment and retention I’m open to the possibility this the least bad option in some contexts but it saddens me regardless.
Because while I know the stuff with deadline must be done, it is work without deadlines I have always loved the most. It’s the years of this that have made me the teacher I am, and I believe the pupils I have now do well by me because I did this work.
Ideally, I’d just like us to have more time. For there to be fewer deadlines. For us all to understand that work with no deadline isn’t of less value than the work that must be done for the date we are told it must be done by.
I get the irony in spending time writing this, so I’ll stop now. I have a curriculum and textbook to read. Past exam papers and mark schemes to look over, and Hallie Rubenfeld’s The Five to finish.
All this to do – work with no deadline – just my pupils who need me to be ready.
Five or so years ago schools began talking more about misconceptions.
It was a part of the greater focus on curriculum.
It became an on-trend word – appearing on documents, lesson plans, quality assurance, lesson observation forms and lots of other places too.
It still pops up everywhere.
What misconceptions will children have and how we can identify them? How can we correct and pre-empt them? How do we head them off?
But there are issues with the word ‘misconception’ – a misconception of misconceptions if you like, and it’s a particular problem in history.
The first problem is people sometimes use the word to describe things that weren’t really misconceptions – for example a teacher describing blank answers on tests as “misconceptions” when they really meant the child who’d taken the test just didn’t know the answer.
Perhaps this doesn’t matter that much and just irritates me because I like words to mean what the person using them wants them to mean.
There’s more too it though.
I wonder why the term misconception caught on so fast though and suspect it’s an example of genericism pulling us towards misleading uniformity unless we struggle actively against it – the idea there are more commonalities between disciplines than is really the case because this makes it easier to organise and deliver things at scale.
In his Hidden Lives of Learners, Graham Nuthall does a good job defining and exemplifying what a misconception really is.
He describes a child who believes that the needle of a compass is affected by the direction of the wind, and how this blocks their ability to learn from their teacher the real reason is to do with magnetism.
This is a true misconception – an incorrect belief that acts as an obstacle to learning the truth because it has been absorbed and accepted.
Misconceptions are more relevant to some subjects than to others.
We might expect science and physical geography to vulnerable to misconceptions because they deal with things students may have wondered or asked about before. Children – for example – may have wondered why a compass needle moves the way it does, or why water only runs one way down a river if they have experience of seeing a parent using a compass or have visited rivers.
Their misconception – at heart a noble attempt to make sense of the world – might come from within them or might be constructed by an interaction with someone who didn’t know the right answer but thought they did; memorably in the Nuthall example it came from a charismatic student who managed to spread it through half his class without his teacher cottoning on.
More abstract subjects such as history and English Literature are likely to be less vulnerable to misconceptions and more vulnerable to just not knowing, because children are less likely to develop misconceptions about things they have never encountered.
The difference is important because if the likelihood of misconception is overstated then curriculum might be affected.
Take – for example – a history Year 7 unit on the Anglo Saxon England.
A misconception based on assumptions about what lots of people think might be that Anglo-Saxon society was brutish and uncivilized because they were not literate.
Current scholarship reveals this to be incorrect. Non-literate societies are no less ingenious than literate one. The Anglo Saxons had sophisticated governance and were skilled craftspeople.
But most children do not have this misconception – they do not think the Anglo Saxons were brutish.
They just don’t know much about Anglo-Saxons.
By assuming they have a misconception teachers and schools can waste time focusing on things of limited relevance to real children in classrooms. To deal with the misconception the teacher might even have to teach it first – by saying something like “now some people think that the Anglo Saxons were less intelligent than us because they couldn’t read or write”, which might make children feel there might be validity in this belief when they’d never thought this themselves.
History may be uniquely vulnerable to this because of the way it works, with newer scholarship challenging older scholarship and out-of-date work constructed as a misconception. The problem is that misconception is only held by those who have studied the antecedent scholarship but not the critique of it – and this is something unlikely to be true of most children, who are more likely to have never learned about it at all. It’s also important to note much of what we now regard to be “true” will itself become superseded by new scholarship and become a misconception in future years – although it is hard to do when convinced by an argument, we should fight against the idea that there’s anything exceptional about us and that we have arrived at a more empirical “truth” than our predecessors.
This is all complicated further by assumptions and generalisation we make about children that might not be true.
Take – for example – the idea children believe medieval people were stupid and ignorant because of their belief that God was the direct cause of all things that happened on earth. This “misconception” might be held by children from secular backgrounds, but in a school containing a large proportion of children from traditional religious backgrounds it is much less likely.
Finally, it’s worth pointing out how the assumption what we think and believe is what the children we teach think and believe is unsafe and how this can affect substantive curricular choices too.
It’s quite common to hear history curricular decisions justified by saying some subjects – such as the Norman Conquest and the Tudors – have become old and tired and should be replaced.
This isn’t a good reason.
What might be old and tired to us can still be new and exciting to a child and to deprive them of it just because familiarity has made it dull to us would be unfair – indeed often what is old and tired only feels this way because the curriculum doesn’t reflect modern scholarship.
Historians have not stopped writing about the Tudors!
This isn’t to say – of course- that curriculum should not be adapted and updated, but when it is it should be based on what’s best for the children in our classrooms not what’s most interesting to us.
To do so wouldn’t be a misconception – it’d be a mistake.
Of all the banes of education overcomplication is the worst.
It drives workload and shifts focus away from things that make a difference to children and onto minutia that doesn’t.
Class context sheets. Much data input and analysis. Standardised PowerPoints. Target Grades. Meetings and meetings and meetings – how much do these things and a thousand other things really impact on the children who sit in our classrooms?
The point of a lot of what we do is to create a narrative that’s more pleasing than what’s actually happening so other adults will approve of our work.
Regrettably, a lot of this is unavoidable.
As much as Ofsted would have us believe we don’t need to do anything for them it’s a brave school leader who takes them at their word.
But this overcomplication is serious because time we spend on stuff that doesn’t matter is time we aren’t spending on things that do, and as anyone who has ever worked in a school knows there are never enough hours in a day.
I’m thinking about overcomplication because recently someone asked me what I thought an inclusive classroom looked like.
This is a fair question given how much time I spend thinking, writing and speaking about exactly this.
It’d be easy to go all beard-strokey on this – to say something like “well, it’s actually more of a process than a thing and looks different in every context” and then waffle more until the question goes away but given how seriously lots of good people are about inclusion right now doing that would be ducking a responsibility.
So here goes.
There’s a damaging myth about inclusion which adds overcomplication and makes it appear hard to do – even frightening.
The myth is in inclusive mainstream classrooms lots of children should do lots of different things in lots of different ways.
Some may be working on coloured paper.
Some may be wearing headphones or using computers or tablets. Some may be using fiddle toys while others sit on beanbags on the floor. The teacher may not be instructing the whole class – instead they will be using different methods with different pupils. Occasionally overstimulated children who need a break leave the room quietly to stand outside while the re-regulate before rejoining the class.
All children – of course – will be doing what they are told by their teacher and the room will have a cheerful productive hum about it.
If this vision sounds familiar it’s because it is.
It’s what teacher training twenty or so years ago held up as the ideal.
This vision – extensively adapting for individuals – has never gone away and is in tension with whole class instruction methods.
It’s easy to see why it’s still here.
SEND support is built around conceptions of “additional/different” that imply inclusion means different for different children.
It’s driven by the work of non-teacher professionals who assess and find strategies for individuals and seem to rarely if ever consider how these work in a class of thirty – perhaps because their conception of a classroom is aligned to the same vision I’ve just described as a myth.
And it is myth.
As much as we might want the truth to be different lots of children doing lots of different things is chaos.
Teachers know this.
It means confusion. It means an unreasonable workload. It means accusations of favouritism. It means hidden and open resentments and it means an inability to establish and set up predictable disciplinary systems that allow for lots of people to be in the same room successfully doing things together.
It’s been attempted so many times and it doesn’t work.
And when it fails who suffers most?
It isn’t the children who find learning easiest – those who read the textbook and quickly grasp what is in it.
It isn’t the children who intuitively understand what it means to behave well – who know they shouldn’t swear and that however chaotic the classroom feels they still need to finish the worksheet.
No.
Those who suffer most – in a terrible irony – are those for which the system is apparently designed for.
And too often –when classrooms begin to fray and then come apart at the seams we double down on our initial mistakes.
“We haven’t adapted enough!”, we say.
“We need to focus more on the individual needs of more of our kids!” – as if it were possible to additional/different our way out of the disorderly and perhaps even unsafe culture that’s taken hold of the room.
So, what’s better? If not this then what does an inclusive classroom look like?
There isn’t a jazzy or clever answer because inclusive classrooms tend to look like any genuinely good classroom.
Calm. Quiet. Orderly. Predictable. Clear.
The teacher explains things and then tells children explicitly what to do.
They maintain standards.
They know the children in the room as individuals and target just the right question to just the right pupil.
In the quiet and calm they can go to the child they know doesn’t usually grasp things first time around and explain again. This is such a matter of routine it’s not seen as particularly noteworthy or remarkable, which means the child receiving the extra help they need maintains their dignity.
Of course, a calm, quiet, orderly, predictable and clear classroom is not inevitably inclusive.
It is possible that the teacher leaves those who find learning harder to flounder and struggle alone in cold silence – but without calm it’s just not possible for the most vulnerable to ever be truly included, and order creates the intellectual and emotional space for schools to best support those who most require targeted expertise.
I know – believe me – how hard it can be to stay level and positive – to even think straight when you’re hot and bothered and trying to put out dozens of fires. And I know how much children who find learning harder can appear challenging – and how much they need us to be level and positive when things overwhem them.
So when I’m asked what an inclusive classroom looks like I want to first ask whether it’s a good classroom? Is the teacher good enough to be inclusive if they want to be? Are they happy? Do they want to be there? Is the school culture supportive enough for teachers to be good?
Only when we can confidently answer “yes” to these questions are we ready to start thinking about what to do differently for different children – and even then no amount of adaptation can compensate for environments in which teachers are so stressed all they can focus on is the immediate moment and surviving the day.
“Have you really got twenty years of experience?” The inspirational speaker asked the room, then paused for dramatic effect.
“Or have you just got one year of experience repeated twenty times?”
He smiled as if he’d said something very profound.
The speaker – hired by a school I worked for more than ten years ago – was saying we should be suspicious of experience because those with decades of it may be as novice as someone with fewer years under their belt.
It is an attractive message to those who haven’t been in their field that long – particularly if they are responsible for leading those who have. It affords a sense of legitimacy – the idea their solutions and ideas might be better than those who’ve put more time in because they made faster progress.
On the most part – with inevitable exceptions – I don’t think this is usually true of teaching.
The front-forward people-facing nature of it means improving fast is necessary for survival, and many of those who don’t get better find it too much of an ordeal to stick with for long. The ever-changing and near infinite variability in teaching means that whether teachers want to or not they are forced to learn – as they experience different needs, different behaviours and different curriculum they must change and adapt.
It is impossible to repeat the same year.
This does not mean all experienced teachers are effective and continue to improve at the same rate – the teacher plateau effect is well known – but in a world of imperfect proxies the experience of a teacher is not a bad one; while I know younger teachers can be competent and talented, when I heard my daughter was to have twenty-year veterans this year I was pleased.
In a landscape in which we struggle to retain experienced teachers, veterans are becoming increasingly rare creatures.
It’s a shame.
With inevitable exceptions this group is likely to have more teaching expertise and knowledge than those who lead them, especially in contexts in which early promotion is common, because promotion usually lessens teaching time.
On the face of it, it would make sense to devolve as many teaching decisions as we can to the experienced teachers who are most likely to know what’s best.
This – as a twenty-year veteran myself – is what I would prefer.
But I know it isn’t so simple.
No teacher operate as a fully autonomous actor and their success or failure is at least partially a product of the systems they operate in. These systems must encompass all those in them and must be compromises because no system can perfectly meet the needs of everyone in it.
Teachers in England are less experienced than in most other developed countries and the more experienced a teacher in England is the less likely they are to work in a disadvantaged area where the stakes are highest.
This makes it logical for school management, improvement systems and CPD to align themselves more to the needs of those with less experience than to those with more.
This may be what we see happening at scale now with standardisation of curriculum, teaching and CPD becoming more directive and allowing teachers a smaller say over what and how they teach.
It could be for the best.
Schools are not and should not be designed with the interests of adults most in mind and if more direction provides better experiences and outcomes for children then making compromises in favour of less experienced teachers might be the right call.
Or it might not be.
Here I worry about what I think of as “The Latter Career Christian Ronaldo Problem.”
This was the period after Ronaldo’s pace waned, but his finishing ability remained the best in the world.
To compensate for his lack of pace and his inability to press, and to capitalise on his intact finishing ability clubs that signed him adjusted their tactics to served his distinct skill set. This impeded the development of other players and made them dependent on Ronaldo’s goals, despite him being the cause of the problem in the first place.
Latter era Christian Ronaldo was the solution to the problems he created.
My concern is by calibrating our school system to the needs of our least experienced teachers we may create and then sustain a system in which direction becomes the solution to the problem it has caused too.
If curriculum is developed centrally then where and how will teachers learn to develop curriculum? If we try and develop teachers through iterative action steps and leave no space for personal reflection and work, then what happens when what they need to work on moves beyond the gift of the directive systems around them?
I fear this might deskill the profession and make strong direction seem more necessary.
But perhaps I am catastrophising and overthinking. Pretty directive systems and CPD probably are the right bet for many schools given the experience level of teachers in English schools, and I’m optimistic the improved way in which we now train teachers through the ECF will lead to greater expertise faster.
But I remain uneasy.
What if this model makes the latter years of teaching less rewarding? What happens to those who in the ECF now when they’ve been teaching ten years and if they become frustrated that what was once a scaffold has become a trap?
A year or so ago someone who trained at the same time I did – twenty years ago – told me their school had been taken over by a new MAT.
Despite a record of strong outcomes and many years of skilled curriculum work they’d been told from the next academic year they would be expected to teach from a standardised deck of PowerPoint slides.
Perhaps this overall was for the best. Perhaps this would lead to better outcomes for more children when all the schools in the MAT was considered.
Perhaps.
Although of course there can be no guarantee.
The only certainties were my friend felt close to despair and was left questioning whether they wanted to stay in teaching at all. “What is the point of being a head of department?”, they asked, “If I can’t decide what we teach?”
Is the departure of my friend and people like them from the profession a price we must pay for a greater good? Must we expect our most knowledgeable and expert practitioners to constrain their practice in the interests of those with less expertise than them?
Perhaps.
If so, it’s a very bitter pill to swallow – how happy are we with becoming better at your job causing more frustration and pain than satisfaction and joy?
How happy are we with a profession in which becoming more experienced really does come to mean doing the same thing every year?
Some years ago, one of my friends attended a talk by the then Manchester United manger Sir Alex Ferguson.
He spoke about how he’d changed his management style.
When he began, he said, he sometimes shouted at his players at half-time if he thought this would lead to a positive response. Even back then it was a risk– he knew he had to stay in control and keep his temper, because if he went too far one of his grizzled hard-men might shout back or even physically go for him, which would have a negative overall impact.
In the talk Sir Alex said he’d had to stop shouting altogether once he realised the character of his players had changed – that the result of his “hairdryer” was now more likely to be players collapsing into tears and associated worse performances.
A key to his decades of success was how he changed in response to how his players had changed.
This – of course – was not lowering standards. If it was then Manchester United would not have remained a dominant force in English and European football for so long.
It’s interesting to contrast Ferguson’s career with that of Jose Mourinho who – for a long time – looked the most likely candidate to emulate his long-term success. Mourinho’s career took a sharp downturn from which it has never really recovered after an ugly incident in which he foolishly and unfairly blamed Chelsea’s doctor Eva Carnerio for rushing onto the field to treat an injured player without his permission. The result of this was him losing the respect of the players he managed. His inability to adapt and respond began a deterioration from which he has never really recovered.
Over twenty years in teaching I feel I’ve seen the character of teachers change just as the character of elite footballers has changed too. When I began – during the years in which the then head of Ofsted Michael Wilshaw openly said to school leaders “if someone tells you morale is at an all time low then you’re doing something right” – aggressive and sometimes bullying management of teachers was largely accepted.
In those years I got used to being “told off” and “held to account” and regarded this as an unpleasant inevitability.
Performance reviews and exam results meetings were sources of real anxiety and I learned that surviving them meant being assertive and robust in response – that to operate effectively in schools meant being thick-skinned and tough. I learned never to show weakness in school but cried at home.
This was never a positive model. Those tempted to look back at this period with any sort of nostalgia should also bear in mind these were years in which the bullying of teachers and other staff was normalised to an extent it wasn’t even recognised.
While people may have coped, they were only doing so because they had no choice but to.
Many of us still carry the scars.
Today things are different because there has been a shift in how people expect to be treated at work, and this shift has accelerated post-pandemic.
People now expect better.
They have higher expectations of a reasonable work life balance and are less tolerant of feeling unhappy while at work. If schools are to be attractive to those who might consider teaching as a career, then they – like Alex Fergson – must adapt and change too.
While it may be possible to achieve good outcomes and positive inspection reports through old style punitive management it’s likely such models are at best non-scalable and at worst damaging to the system, because they are off-putting to prospective teachers in a landscape in which recruitment and retention has become a permacrisis. For those wanting to go further into this it’s always – always – worth returning to this canonical blog post by Jo Facer.
None of this is to say that all schools achieving great outcomes are toxic places – there are many schools doing incredible things in challenging contexts which respect and value their teachers. It doesn’t mean lowering standards either, or accepting poorer outcomes for the young people for whom schools are for. If Alex Ferguson’s methods had resulted in Manchester United performing worse each season, then he wouldn’t have lasted long.
Instead it means being ambitious and realistic about the best ways to continue to achieve and this means acknowledging and responding to changed realities.
Having a stable core of happy teachers in schools is the only way to create and sustain improvement. Not sufficient of course – but necessary.
In the 1999 film Two Hands, a young Heath Ledger plays Jimmy, a young man making his first steps into the world of organised crime, and his dead elder brother who was killed by the same gangsters Jimmy is doing a job for.
At a crucial point in the film Jimmy’s brother laments how it was only after death he began to appreciate poetry.
“Whatever you’ve been through,” he says, “someone else has been through it too – and they wrote it down.”
He’s right. This is the point of poetry.
It moves us beyond ourselves and connects us to people who might live thousands of miles away or have lived thousands of years ago.
It’s a reminder that despite all our apparent differences there are many ways in which we are the same. We are human. We share hopes, fears and experiences.
We are individuals but we connect with each other and when that happens we see we are not alone.
The programme featured a modern translation of a medieval poem called “Pearl”, in which a man who lived almost a thousand years ago grieves the death of his daughter.
Gerry McCann said:
“When I read the Pearl poem, I could see echoes in it with Madeleine’s situation and our loss.”
It’s impossible to understand the depth of pain the McCann’s live with, but I’m glad they have this poem.
I’m glad they have something that shows them they are not all alone with their sorrow.
There are three poems that mean more than all others to me.
The first is Ithaka by C P Cavafy – which teaches that it is the journey that matters, and that we should not be daunted by the monsters we can ourselves conjure up. The second is The Two Headed Calf by Laura Gilpin which shows that there is beauty in all life, and that there are ways we can teach ourselves to see it. The third is the Orange by Wendy Cope which reminds me that at the end of the most awful storm there will be calm again, and happiness in the everyday absurdities you can’t notice when you feel like your whole life is on fire.
Now, I’m sure if it can’t do it already AI will soon be able to look at them – and others I like – and create bespoke poetry just for me.
I’d like to believe I’d be able to tell but I know – soon if not now – I won’t be able to.
I won’t know whether a person who existed wrote it – won’t know if someone ever felt the same feelings I do.
It’s the Uncanny Valley – the unease at something that appears to be human but isn’t.
And more than this is the horror of disconnection and separation. A world without substance or reality. A world in which experience is subsumed into a collective that deletes identity and casts us adrift from each other.
I’m terrified by the consequences of our own unique humanities altered by a cold intelligence that can talk convincingly about what’s happened to us and make us feel but has no idea what it means to wake up one day and laugh at a huge orange.
A world in which all of us are unable to tell the difference between the real and the artificial.
More than five years ago I wrote emails to people I trusted to tell them about Bessie’s diagnosis of Williams Syndrome.
Someone from here – the twitter education world – sent a brave reply.
She advised me not to have set expectations.
To not indulge “what ifs.”
Her emails said that just like any parent I did not know and could not know what would happen to my child – that all a diagnosis gave anyone was a vague and uncertain direction, and that the actual journey was too unpredictable to know in advance.
She said I should not expect an easy life, but nor should I make assumptions of hardship.
Being a good dad, she said, relied on me dealing with real situations not hypothetical flights of fancy or disabling thoughts of doom.
It is good advice, but it is also hard.
If you ask a parent of a child with learning disability what they worry about most they will almost certainly say it’s what will happen to them after they are gone.
Thoughts about such things are not easy to dismiss.
We know that many in this world do not see our children the way we see them and the statistics around happiness, fulfilment and even life expectancy are terrifying.
Who will look out for our kids when one day we cannot?
But perhaps it is possible to worry too much and by so doing end up centring ourselves in the lives of people who have their own identities and to overstate our importance to them.
Recently for the first time my wife and I went away for four nights without our children and left them with their grandparents.
When we arrived back, we learned that they hadn’t missed us that much. They had been too busy having a good time with people they loved and who loved them.
My mother-in-law told me about a Sunday lunch Bessie attended and how she’s gone round each person at the table introducing herself and shaking their hands. By the end of the meal – my mother-in-law said – she had charmed everyone.
She did this in all her own. She did not need me or my wife or even her Nana to do it.
She is not defenceless. She is not passive. She is not just a thing to which things are just done.
Lots of the expectations I had have turned out to be entirely wrong too.
The information we got about Williams Syndrome after her diagnosis suggested she would be poorly co-ordinated and physically weaker than other children – that she would have a diminutive stature and might not be able to climb stairs.
These things are true of lots of people who have Williams Syndrome and if they were true of her this would make no difference whatsoever to how important she is or how much she is loved. If Bessie were different her accomplishments would be different, not better or worse.
But this doesn’t mean we can’t be thrilled by her achievements.
And we are.
Yesterday Bessie won her sports day race.
She lined up at the start with four friends, her TA close by, making sure she knew when to go and where to run.
A teacher sweeps down his arm and she’s off.
She pulls ahead immediately and never veers from her lane.
I’ve already watched the video of her triumph more times than I can count, and I’m made breathless by how tall she is and how strong she looks, and an upright, knees-high style that looks so much like my father’s before he packed running in for cycling.
Halfway to the finish line one of her friends goes down in a heap and Bessie’s TA abandons her to help, and by the time she’s got her back to her feet my daughter is long gone and nearing the finishing line.
She’s fast – so fast!
Then she’s over. The winner. The champion. Arms in the air and swept into a huddle of other children and adults.
I know this all means more to me than it does to her. It can’t mean as much to her.
Bessie doesn’t remember – and never will – that she is the baby who walked almost a year later than most other children do. Who doesn’t know that the physio and the portage and the OT exercises and all the other things she did weren’t just games. Who doesn’t know that yesterday was the realisation of a dream that would have seemed beyond radical and ridiculous five years ago.
What a year she’s had; she’s learned to read. She’s been a best friend. She’s cemented herself in a community. She’s played in a band. She’s won her race.
Although it’s hard to believe there’s more.
This morning before I left for work Bessie told me one of the things, she liked most about the day was all her friends chanting “Bessie, Bessie, Bessie.”
So I played the video again, and there right at the start I heard it too.
Lots of people – people who love her – chanting her name.
She’d won before the race even began, and while she has had help, all the things she’s done this year, she did herself.
She will not always be mine to look after and that’s very good.
What happens to her will move beyond my control as it moves into hers.
This does not mean she will certainly be OK, but we don’t know anybody will be.
My hero is an Olympic Ski-jumper who never won an Olympic medal. I don’t think he ever won an event at all.
People laughed at him.
Many thought him a joke and it’s easy to see why.
He was much heavier than every other competitor in his event and had to borrow equipment to train and compete in. He was also – like me – very short-sighted and had to wear big thick glasses under his ski-goggles, which often misted up and left him unable to properly see.
He was born hundreds of miles away from any mountains in the heart of England not too far from here, so it was hard for him to find places with enough snow to practice on.
When he found out he had qualified for the 1988 Winter Olympics he was training in Finland and staying in a hospital because he couldn’t afford anywhere else to stay.
At the games he finished last at both the 50m and 70m event.
People neither respectful nor kind. To many he was a laughingstock and a figure of fun.
People laughed at his thick glasses and how badly he did compared to the other athletes. An Italian commentator sneered – describing him as a “ski dropper” rather than a “ski jumper”.
He was given an ironic, mocking nickname: Eddie the Eagle.
But I don’t find Eddie funny. Not at all.
Why not? Why is he a hero of mine?
Let’s start by thinking about how it’s easy if you’re good at something.
If you are a fast runner, then running is fun because you win. You win a lot and when you do people praise you. If you are really good then you might get even more help; sponsorship, equipment and expert coaching to help you get even better.
Eventually you may appear on television with the entire country cheering you on. Good for you!
This is true of lots of things in life. If you’re good, even if this is just because you’re lucky or had lots of help getting started then you get rewarded, and these rewards lead to more advantages, more success and then even greater reward.
It’s the way the game of life goes – it’s much easier to be a winner.
I’m not knocking life’s champions – honestly. Becoming good at something, like those who beat Eddie at ski-jumping were, does take work.
If Usain Boult the 100m world record holder hadn’t trained hard for years he wouldn’t be successful.
But the point is if you’re good it’s much easier to work hard. You get praise. Nobody laughs at you for trying.
Eddie wasn’t very good – not compared to the world’s best ski jumpers but he kept going anyway. Consider the strength of character you need to raise money for expensive equipment and for flights to competitions when nobody will give you anything because you’re likely to lose.
Imagine what it takes to keep going even when you know the crowd is openly laughing at you to your face.
Imagine how brave you must be to stand at the top of a huge ski ramp to launch yourself out into space without the certainty you’ll be able to land safely and knowing even if you manage it people won’t be impressed.
Some of you might find this funny too. I get that. Why bother going to all that effort to still finish last? From a narrow perspective it looks like a foolish thing to do.
But it’s only foolish if you make comparisons between Eddie and others who had far more advantages; those who more athletic and lived near facilities where it was far easier to train. Those with more funding. Those who knew that their efforts would be rewarded.
On his own terms he was more successful than I’ll ever be at anything.
At the Olympics in which he finished last he set a British record and this – more than thirty years on – is still the sixth furthest a British man has ever jumped.
Eddie also captured the attention of the world and had adventures he can only have dreamed about when he first began his journey.
In 2010 he was chosen as an Olympic torchbearer, and this wasn’t a joke – he was chosen because years on people understood his story was more than funny – it was a story about how the best of humanity isn’t just in those who always win – it’s in those who struggle and fall down and get laughed at but just won’t be beaten down. Those that get up again and again not because they want to impress anyone else but because something drives them on. Eddie now gives talks to motivate and inspire people. Few laugh now and those that do are just showing they don’t really understand.
Yeah, Eddie is my hero. Not because his big glasses are cute and funny, but because he teaches me something useful.
Eddie teaches me there will always be people better at stuff than I am. I am never going break a world record, earn millions or become famous.
There will be many times I will try and try and still not succeed and I’ll wonder whether all my efforts are even worth the bother.
But who cares? It’s not about how I do compared to others.
It isn’t the winning. It’s the taking part. The true spirit of the Olympics.
So next time you’re facing something hard – running in PE or doing a test or gearing up to give a presentation to your classmates and you think you might fail, and this makes you want to stop and give in I invite you to think of Eddie.
Picture him staring down the barrel of a ramp of snow and ice that’s about to catapult him a hundred feet into the air.
Picture him worrying whether his borrowed equipment is safe and whether he has the skill to land without breaking bones.
Picture him knowing that even if he succeeds his reward will be the laughter of those who don’t understand.
And then why not think “if he can do that, then perhaps I can do this.”
Finally, if it’s important you that you are recognised do have hope. You never know what might happen. He may have never won a medal. He may have been mocked for years but after all is said and done and the dust has settled there’s only one ski-jumper I can name.
My interest in the learning of children who find school harder – those commonly identified as having SEND – is recent and personal.
It began with the discovery my older daughter had Williams Syndrome and was almost certain to have learning disabilities.
I often feel a fraud in this world.
I have never worked in a Special School. I have never been a SENDCO. I do not have decades of experience working in this area as many I have been privileged to work with recently do.
While I would never rule out becoming a SENDCO or moving to a special school neither is on the cards for me right now.
So beyond trying to amplify the voices of those with more expertise than me and speaking and writing in the abstract, what is my role? What are my credentials? What am I doing here?
While it will always bother me, and I think its healthy to be bothered I have an answer.
My recent learning and thinking has convinced me a big conceptual problem we have around SEND and children who find learning hard is the creation of a practically necessary but logically problematic binary between those who find learning hard and those who don’t.
I don’t think this is controversial.
Our SEND system relies on a people deciding a child has a special need so extra resource can then be directed towards them.
As things stand if such decisions weren’t made then thousands of children who need help would not get it.
But it is also wrong. There aren’t two types of people and the lack of standardisation around SEND designation means the labels are somewhat arbitrary anyway.
A child with a SEND designation in one school may well not have one if they went to a different school, and the needs of all children change as they grow up.
But perhaps all this complexity doesn’t matter that much to mainstream teachers like me because the truth is in every class there are some children who find learning harder than others, and these children need targeted expertise most.
Over the years since Bessie’s diagnosis, I’ve come to think this is what my role is – to make sure the children who find learning hardest in my classes get the best possible deal from me. I think in some ways – for me – looking to move to a specialist role or thinking I can’t contribute unless I am in one might be a way of avoiding responsibility and ignoring my agency.
How do I do this?
It isn’t always easy to find answers.
Well meaning “additional to, different from” framing often incentivises the idea that children who find learning harder are different sorts of people to those who find it easier and so need different sorts of teaching. This in turn has created incentives for things that are visibly “additional to” or “different from.”
Examples of such practice might include fidget toys, wobble cushions, coloured lenses or overlays, or interventions designed to link together different hemispheres of the brain.
These strategies may have value or they may not but regardless, I don’t think stuff like this should be where help begins. I worry about the evidence base behind such interventions and the opportunity cost involved in things that at best might have a very marginal impact. Where I’ve honestly tried to engage in conversations about this I haven’t been reassured, with some making the argument the placebo effect might be an acceptable reason to put in place an intervention for which there is no stronger evidence.
I worry about the motivations behind such practice and the implication that finding learning tough is akin to an illness that can be fixed with a prescription. My suspicion here is all this comes from a meritocratic squeamishness and a feeling of shame around difficulty learning.
And more than all this I worry that a lot of what happens – whether because it’s flawed in conception or in enaction – just doesn’t work. That the kids who have the least amount of time to lose might be exposed to ineffective practice more than those who find learning easiest, and that this is about our collective guilt and helplessness more than what really works best.
I think all this because I’ve found what works best for those who struggle more usually isn’t very different to what works best for everyone – it’s just they need more and better of it.
The problem is this simple thing isn’t easy to do because it requires aspects of a classroom and the wider school to be working well first. It’s something that is all our responsibility not just the role of TAs and SEND departments.
Children who find learning harder need classroom behaviour to be exemplary.
Lessons must be calm and quiet and predictable.
Almost all people avoid distractions when focusing on something difficult and those who find lots of things difficult will be less able to cope with them than those who don’t. For these children following along with an explanation or reading might well be impossible if others are in disorder.
Explanations need to be expertly crafted and flawlessly sequenced, so the thread doesn’t slip from the fingers of the children who find things hardest of all.
It needs teachers to know their classes really well –exactly who the students who struggle by using centrally held information about them judiciously in conjunction with their own records and experiences. It needs them to have the time to do this which means sensible school-wide policies about workload.
It requires teachers to manage classes in ways that allow them to work in Adam Boxer’s Golden Silence so they can sit next to a girl and expertly repeat and scaffold an I/We/You sequence in a way that leaves her full of confidence about what she should do. It means remembering which bit she struggled with so the next time she is given a similar task the help moves her on so she doesn’t become dependent on it.
It means properly focusing on the specific struggles of specific children with an expert eye – knowing that one might need extra check for understanding on a threshold concept before the class moves on, or a brief prep session before a cold call so their heart will be on fire with pride when it happens.
All of this – more – is necessary before it’s possible to work out who genuinely needs more because when there’s chaos noise is too easily interpreted as signal with resource and energy wasted as a result. As many have said it is about the right support at the right time for the right children and to work this out all our notes must play together in harmony, and when there’s no harmony adding more notes can only make things worse.
Adding extra stuff can’t come anywhere near compensating for getting the basics right even if there is value in it and by trying schools are likely to find themselves no closer to real solutions.
The point here is before the foundations are in place – what I think is really meant by quality first teaching – schools aren’t providing what’s essential for vulnerable children, and the answer isn’t to compensate for these deficiencies by making them do extra things.
It’s all simple to say but hard to do. I work deliberately but I often fail because teaching is hard.
But sometimes – more often recently – I don’t fail and it’s a sort of magic.
When a child begins to trust.
When they see you’re genuinely interested in helping them and they are genuinely knowing more and able to do more and more.
When they see your classroom is safe. That you don’t think them finding stuff hard is weird or shocking or weird. That it doesn’t make you impatient or cross.
When callouses drop away. When tentatively at first – as if all this could be snatched away – they begin to ask you to look at their work.
To read their sentence.
To notice how neatly they’ve presented today.
To stop pretending they don’t care.
To see themselves as not special or different but just children.
Our road network is a good example – the one I used to get here today.
Some cars are safer at higher speeds. It’s more important for some people to be on time than it is for others, but saying “all cars produced before 2015 must drive ten mph slower than those produced after” would be unworkable and unfair – as would saying people should be able to speed if they are late for an important appointment but must stick to the limit if they are on time.
Although everyone’s circumstances are unique, everyone has the same speed limit.
What’s best for everyone individually isn’t what’s best for us as a group – we must compromise.
Education is a big system in which there must be compromises too.
The system is not designed to meet the needs of any one child. It can’t be.
This is often poorly understood.
Parents of privileged children might not see why they shouldn’t take their daughter out of school one day a week for museum and art gallery visits and other enriching activities.
It’s hard for them to see why this isn’t permitted.
To understand why the needs of other children in the school must be considered too – the disruptive effects of allowing planned absence would be significant and detrimental to the cohort. While allowing this for one child may be of benefit to them, allowing it for all would make it harder to plan and implement a cohesive curriculum and this would affect all children.
It’s impossible to appreciate this through the lens of just one child or by looking at schools only as places of education. Much of how schools operate isn’t about learning at all – an important purpose of schools is childcare for working parents.
From a purely educational perspective arranging children into classes of thirty by their age, locating them in one big building from 8.30 until 3.30 and placing their learning in the hands of one person at a time isn’t ideal.
Perhaps a better pure education model for each individual child would be the Royal Academy at Macedon, with polymaths like Aristotle tutoring three or four children for years and years in everything on the curriculum.
Easy right?
We just need thousands and thousands of Aristoteles and funding to pay them all.
Good luck with that – Jack Worth will have some things to say later about why it’s hard enough to get teachers as it is, and services such as the NHS would have something to say about the budgetary implications if I were seriously proposing this.
Compromises are necessary. Failing to accept these traps us in passivity.
If we want things to be perfect for everyone before we move, then we will never move.
Thoughtful compromises deliver benefits to very large groups even if nobody gets exactly what they need.
Our road system is a modern miracle – it’s never been more efficient or safer – we slip into our cars confident we’ll arrive where we want to go without mishap at around the time we expect to.
And our mass education system is a miracle too – establishing the right for every child regardless of background to education and finding a way of making the commitment work for a minimum of eleven years is a remarkable achievement.
So far so comfortable.
But we shouldn’t be too comfortable.
Compromises are never neutral.
There are always winners and there are always losers.
The interests of some outweigh the interests of others.
It appears to many that our education system makes compromises in favour of those that find learning hardest – those often labelled with SEND, or learning difficulty, or learning disability or all and more of these terms.
“There’s loads of funding for children with SEND.”
“Children with SEND get loads of extra help.”
“Daisy in Mya’s class has a one-to-one TA to help her.”
“The teacher always gives help to the kids with the EHCPs first.”
It isn’t silly to think children with SEND get more help than those without.
Consider the time spent identifying, supporting, and tracking the progress of children identified as having SEND – consider the degree of systemic attention and intervention – all the time and effort that’s gone into the recent SEND Green Paper and the recent SEND and AP implementation plan – just the latest expression of a stream that’s run through education for decades.
The numbers are striking.
Between 2019-2020 and 2022-2023 there has been a 40% increase in high needs funding and the number of children with Education and Health Care Plans is nearly double the number of children who had statements prior to the 2015 reforms.
All this costs a lot of money.
Sadly though – even if it were true that we make compromises in favour of our most vulnerable – this multigenerational debate and intervention cycle has achieved little.
The outcomes for children identified as having SEND – those that often find school and learning a struggle – remain dreadful.
These children often grow up into troubled lives too. They are more likely to be excluded from school, more likely to be involved in crime and less likely to find stable and secure employment.
It’s no surprise that people with learning disability are more likely to be anxious and depressed than those without.
Why?
Why – if it’s true that those who find learning tough get the most help – is this the case?
A useful place to begin is by asking ourselves why there isn’t a credible or serious argument for men’s rights movements – a question Laura McInerny began with once when she was getting me to think about why corrective bolt on SEND strategies don’t really work.
Men like me live in a world with rules, systems and routines that facilitate success to a degree it doesn’t for women.
While this isn’t to say no men experience systemic hardship there is little need for organised campaigns around “men’s rights.”
This is also true for the most academically able children in our education system, which has been constructed and is maintained primarily in the interests of those who find learning easy.
My contention is the reason SEND interventions are often ineffective is because any impact they have are strangled by the meritocratic presumption those who fly highest should be the most rewarded.
Despite what it might look like on the surface our big compromises – those that matter most – have always been made in the favour of the academically brightest.
Look at the structure of primary and secondary education.
At primary most children are taught be one teacher in one class most of the time. This helps both younger pupils and those who struggle because there’s lots of consistency and predictability.
A lot of time and expertise is focused on literacy and numeracy. While there are many other things on the curriculum –many primary teachers feel far too much – the aligning of accountability to English and Maths means this – quite rightly – remains its main aim.
Once children have achieved a satisfactory standard in the basics what they need to know moves beyond one person – we don’t have thousands of Aristotles – so they transition to secondary school where they can be taught by many subject specialists.
The system level assumption is once they finish primary, children have sufficient mastery of literacy to access a secondary more specialist curriculum.
This is true for many – perhaps most – but it certainly isn’t true for all.
Large numbers of children leave primary school unable to read well enough to fully access the secondary curriculum and then go into a system set up on the assumption they can.
This isn’t a big reveal. It’s coded into the language we use – when we talk of an “expected standard” we acknowledge the secondary phase of education will be based on an expectation children have learned what they need at primary to follow specialist lessons.
While there have been improvements this isn’t true for lots of children.
Those children furthest behind in reading are torn from the places with the greatest expertise in teaching them and thrown into environments working on a systemic assumption they have mastered them already.
For some this is very difficult – for some it’s awful – for some it’s a disaster.
In this compromise they are the losers and we all know it. I think every primary teacher worries about the most vulnerable children in their classes – those they know are getting on well enough with them but are likely to crash when they transition into Year 7.
Expert and caring secondaries do their best – for example synthetic phonics instruction and even the hiring of primary experts has become more common, but such strategies and interventions go against the grain not with it.
Wider accountability often doesn’t help.
I’ve heard too many stories of Ofsted inspectors implying schools that remove children from language lessons for extra synthetic phonics instruction narrow curriculum to dismiss such instances as anomalous – the issue isn’t inspectors aren’t well intentioned but that they’re operating in a paradigm that assumes what’s best for all children is what’s only best for most of them.
The division between primary and secondary is a compromise and this compromise isn’t in the interests of those who struggle most.
Let’s go further – into secondary.
GCSE history specifications are much too big.
The course I teach has almost 300 directly identified teachable pieces of content – using a methodology I took from Alex Ford’s work I counted them.
Assuming three lessons a week for two years – and in practice it’s usually significantly less – this works out at as one explicitly identified examinable piece of content around once ever twenty minutes.
For a student to be certain they can answer every question over four topics they need to remember all of it.
For all but the very most academically able this is unrealistic.
The implications on classroom practice are startling, being opposed to many established features of high-quality teaching.
Take Rosenshine’s Principles, which have been adopted by many schools in recent years as a helpful heuristic for what good teaching should look like:
Daily review.
Present new material using small steps.
Ask questions.
Provide models.
Guide Student practice.
Check for student understanding.
Obtain a high success rate.
Provide scaffolds for difficult tasks.
Independent practice.
Weekly and monthly review.
How is it possible to do any of this properly if you’re moving onto something new every twenty minutes?
It isn’t and the harder a child finds learning the more damaging being deprived of good teaching become to them – the faster they lose the thread and become bewildered and lost.
Teachers could even things out a bit by not attempting to teach the whole specification and spending more time on less of it. This might be corrective but it isn’t practically realistic given the harsh professional penalties for not finishing a course and the volume of complaints this would get from the most advantaged children and families.
Here compromise means listening to these voices more than we do of those who struggle.
We know they do. They say things like “the teacher goes too fast” and “they can’t keep up” and “they don’t get it.”
But on we plough.
TeacherTapp data suggests most teachers prefer teaching clever children.
This might be because these children are more similar in character to their teacher – more on this a bit later – but it might be because the size of curricula makes it easier and therefore more rewarding to teach well with groups that grasp things quickly – if the curriculum were more accessible to those who find learning tough perhaps teaching them would feel more rewarding.
The result of such diverse cohorts sitting one exam on a specification designed predominantly for the cleverest children is chaos in the lower grades.
For candidates on the bottom half of the bell curve the exam becomes a crapshoot.
It isn’t possible for these children to learn and remember everything so they and their teachers must make blind bets about what might and might not come up in terminal exams.
Students who get lucky find they can do more questions and get higher grades than the unlucky who can do fewer.
This isn’t OK.
In history for students nearer the bottom it’s hard to see a bigger picture, which can easily make the whole endeavour feel a mess of dates, facts and events divorced from meaning and purpose.
This compromises the spirit of history as a discipline for the many children unable to learn a meaningful part of the specification.
And there’s more.
Discourse around GCSE grades in all subjects constructs anything less than a Grade 4 as a fail.
This devalues lower grade and leads to an uncomfortable sense they exist only to prop up and add value to the higher ones.
But there are those who feel it is right more intelligent children are afforded greater advantage by our education system – that we should spend time and resource on finding those of great talent so we can help them fly faster and further. It’s the well-intentioned driving force behind charities provide academic mentoring, scholarships, and visits and residentials to clever poor children who would not otherwise have such opportunities. It’s so part of the way we do things we don’t see the oddity of giving more privileges to groups of children who are already more advantaged than those they grow up with. While apparently logical – children who struggle get SEND support and those near the top get extra too this doesn’t acknowledge the whole system is in the interests of the high fliers.
So again, this is compromise tilts in the favour of the already most advantaged.
Where are the charities to help poor children who aren’t doing well in school? Wouldn’t it be more equitable if we focused on these rather than those who have comparatively more advantage already.?
“An education system that allows people to go as far as their talents will take them” – phrases like these are deployed by politicians as vote-winning slogans, but what does the silence between the lines about those who don’t have talents that will take them very far say about who we think is and who isn’t deserving of help?
It’s the meritocracy speaking – the idea those who are already successful deserve greater benefits than those who are not. It argues that there are Elis and Morlocks, and that the job of Morlocks is to live underground hidden from sight doing dirty work that allows their betters to live lives of beauty and greater meaning.
Morlocks should not get in the way of Elis and if they do it’s a wrong to be righted.
There’s an argument this is exactly what many so-called inclusion systems do.
Take Teaching Assistants assigned to individual children.
For many familiar with the SEND world this is gold standard provision – a one-to-one helper whose job is to act as a bridge between the rest of the class and a student who wouldn’t be able to be part of the lesson at all if it weren’t for them – a sort of lesson interpreter.
In the Inclusion Illusion, Rob Webster finds this is often not the case.
He argues one-to-one TA support can often be a feature of an exclusionary system that places a child in a class without being of the class.
The point is not to include the child but to contain them so more able children aren’t impacted by the challenges the struggling child faces.
Webster makes it very clear this is not the fault of TAs who he found often concerned about their lack of training and confidence.
Our mainstream professional hierarchy is upside-down with the least trained, lowest paid, least secure and lowest status given responsibility for educating the children for which learning is hardest with little formal appreciation, guidance or help.
This is not an argument there isn’t value in the work of TAs – our education system has been constructed in a way that can make just getting through it a real success for those who find learning toughest, and when a ship is in trouble we don’t throw away lifeboats because we think we shouldn’t need them.
Those who assist with this survival – our lifeboats – deserve respect.
Many TAs give up their own time and money to better help children nobody in the system cares more about. They know their limitations and they also know they’re all some children have – pragmatic improvement would do well to begin by recognising and valuing these people.
Webster finds what often emerges is not an inclusion system but a containment system with some of those he interviewed explicit they thought this was their purpose.
Webster even found this belief in some parents.
One said “but they’ve got like 30-odd kids to take care of and they can’t be expected to just pay attention to Kai all the time.”[1]
This – in its acceptance of poor provision for the good of others – is the saddest thing I’ve read about any of this.
Here – as in GCSE curriculum – we see how education is set up to benefit those who find learning easiest – while TA support may appear an example of how compromise is slanted towards those who struggle, the balance often tips the other way.
It shouldn’t surprise us that things are set up like this, and why we all find it so hard to imagine up ways in which things could be different.
Firstly we – I certainly, probably most of us here – have done well out of the way the education system is set up.
It exists for us and for people like us.
We are the winners.
When we look around at each other we are mostly the top set aren’t we?
I’m not going to stop and spend twenty minutes going over what I’ve said so far.
I’m assuming you’ve kept up.
I hope you won’t walk away going “no idea what he was on about and that was boring and pointless, four sessions to go until we can leave.”
Lots of compromises have been made in our favour and when we go back to work and talk to our colleagues and friends there aren’t likely to be many who feel their education was a waste of time.
This makes it hard for us to understand the experiences of those who struggled at school.
There is no easy way to get it.
When I was training to be a teacher my PGCE provider tried by making us all sit through a postgraduate level physics lecture and then asking us afterwards how we found it. It was partially successful. Most of us found ourselves daydreaming, doodling and even passing notes but it could only ever get us part of the way there, because we were people who found learning easy just playing make-believe we weren’t for an hour.
While this sort of role-play might have given us an insight into what a lesson pitched beyond us felt, the awful cumulative effect of experiencing this for days, weeks, months and years was an experience we were mercifully spared.
Not all children who find learning easy enjoy school.
If they did there would be no need for us to compel education and we do. This isn’t the time or place to get into debates around this, so I’ll just say I agree completely children must be educated whether they want to be or not.
For those wanting a more nuanced take I’d recommend having a look at how the Quakers have wrestled with this. In a nutshell they reckon compelling education is deeply problematic but the consequences of not doing so are even worse – a sensible “least bad” position.
Some Quakers reckon one of the strongest arguments for compelling education is that in the long run it is of benefit to the people it is imposed upon. This is well explained in Francis E Pollard’s 1932 Swarthmore Lecture on Education and the Spirit of Man[2].
This seems fair and I think it’s true for a lot of children.
But not all and this exposes yet another way in which compromises are made most in favour of those who find learning easiest and why we find it hard to understand.
As Chris Baker put it recently on twitter – “Not enough people are using the library. The future of the library will be discussed in the library by people who use the library. The librarian will chair it.”
For these children – children who grow up to people like me– the benefits of school are clear.
If we work hard and do as our teachers say we’re more likely to find what we’re taught interesting, and we’re also much more likely to be rewarded than classmates who struggle.
Higher grades lead to more prestigious destinations, more choice and more prestigious careers and lives.
But it’s fair for those who aren’t on this path to question what the point of their education was – especially if their experiences have been impoverished by compromises made in the favour of others.
Education is not just a transitory state between infancy and adulthood.
It is a complete life stage that lasts a long time.
Children do not spend their school years suspended in cocoons – they are sentient beings, fully aware of what’s happening to them. They have emotions and opinions about what is done to them.
We can understand why those who struggle – those who end up without a clutch of “strong passes” at the end of it all – may feel angry and resentful at a system that’s made them feel inadequate for a very long time to no obvious end.
We can understand why they feel education wasn’t ever really for them.
We can understand why they become even angrier when they emerge from school and find what they’d been led to believe wasn’t true and it was possible to be happy and fulfilled in life that didn’t demand academic success all along – that all the years of struggle and humiliation hadn’t been necessary – had not given them either instrumentally useful credentials or an appreciation of our rich culture.
This should not be taken as one of those anti-curricular, anti-knowledge, futurist takes that so annoy us all.
I am pro-knowledge, pro-curricular and broadly philosophically traditional. I believe the first thing schools should do to help children who find things hard is to sort behaviour so it’s calm, predictable and well organised.
I am not saying I think progressivism is the answer. Instead, I am pointing out traditional positions for many children are not compatible with structures designed predominantly for those who are already most advantaged.
My concern is structural ability bias makes it less likely those who find learning hard will be inducted into traditional disciplines, because it’s resulted in lessons that go so fast, they leave behind many children.
I think on the most part people do like to learn – they do want to know things about the world around them regardless of whether it leads to greater instrumental reward. They want to feel successful at things that matter.
The problem isn’t that they don’t want knowledge but that the way things are structured means they don’t get it.
I am not cross about GCSE history specifications because they contain lots of knowledge.
I am cross because they make it harder for me to teach history well to children I care about very much – they make it harder for huge numbers of children to really understand what the discipline is all about – to get a sense of meaning and purpose from what they learn.
I’m angry because our compromises make it easier for me to be a good teacher of children who find things easier than it is for me to be a good teacher of children who find things hard.
People who feel they were generally unsuccessful at school can better understand the real worth and power of education when it’s done right.
One of my neighbours failed his eleven plus.
Forty years on he still talks about it.
He resents the way he was “funnelled” into a life he didn’t choose. But when he talks about his history teacher at his secondary modern, he lights up – a man who taught him history even though there was no chance of him doing A Levels or going to university and by so doing opened a world to him he’s never left – a world of model making and re-enactment, of books and documentaries and museums.
This hero the odds with Steve – he beat selection and humiliation, instrumentalism and the meritocracy and gave him a life of meaning.
I hope his teacher knew what he achieved.
A life of meaning– an aim we should have for all children and not just those who find learning easy.
What should we do?
I get how hard it is, and while I would love to see some system level changes – for example, more thoughtful transition for struggling primary pupils – there’s lots to learn from Eric Kalanze’s What the Academy Taught Us here – and examination specifications that are more designed to account for the needs of those who find learning tough – wise friends of mine have taught me how wrong it is to remain passive while we wait for change.
As is often and rightly said kids get one shot of education. For some kids – some of those that have had terrible hands dealt to them – it’s the only life they’ll ever have.
What can we do for them now?
It’s hard.
It’s much easier for me to point out all the problems than it is for me to develop a plan that solves all of this in a way that doesn’t cause worse problems, and something else I’m learning is as bad as things are it’s usually possible for them to be worse.
I’m pretty sure it’d be a mistake to make big top-down changes very suddenly.
Education systems are calibrated to the value systems of the societies they are developed in.
There are also good arguments as to why things are structured as they are – for example the importance of growing economies and how there are probably greater economic benefits on concentrating resources on more able children, and that greater prosperity create conditions in which there are more resources to support our most vulnerable.
Is this true? Maybe – although I’m cynical about anything that sounds like “trickle down”, especially given how dire life outcomes have been for learning disabled people for generations and generations and the regular steam of awful news about what happens to them in homes and institutions.
But in addition to the inequities between those who find learning easy and those who find learning hard there are inequities between those who are rich and those who are poor. It’s tough to see how changing accountability measures wouldn’t risk making these even wider to their detriment and after all a clever poor child is just as deserving as a poor child who struggles.
Children have entitlements and these aren’t contingent on how fast they learn.
If they were they wouldn’t be entitlements.
Abruptly moving away from concept of “special” and dismantling our SEND system – an idea I have explored before- would delete the only system we have to channel resource away from the brightest to those who find things hardest of all.
It could damage the lives of thousands – recently I’ve been convinced of this by Doctor Neil Gilbride who’s here today – his most recent blog caringly and pragmatically shows the harm this might do.
But any solution must start with understanding the problem properly.
Big systems must be compromises.
The big compromises in education aren’t in the interests of those who find learning hardest – that while it might seem sensible to make decisions on the principle of the greatest good for the greatest number this leaves space for very many to have a poor time and a minority to have dreadful experiences.
Facing this is the start. By doing that we can at least distance ourselves from the damaging fiction everyone starts from the same place and ends up where they deserve to.
Then perhaps we can pay proper attention to our most disadvantaged –listen to their voices and sympathise – perhaps create more bridges to rich and fulfilling lives outside school for those who struggle with education if we find we can’t solve this within education.
And there are compromises in our control.
Think about how and to who the most effective teachers in your school are deployed. Who teaches those who find things hardest? Think about behaviour – is the way you manage it in the interests of those who find things easy or have you thought about how those that struggle probably need calmer, quieter and more predictable environments than those who don’t?
Do you keep abreast of the best evidence available for children who struggle?
Do you know the evidence base behind your interventions?
When you see something odd and suspect unhelpful do you challenge it in the same way you would if you thought a program or strategy for a top set was of no use?
How are TAs recruited, trained and valued? Do they have time to work properly with teachers and to learn what it is that is most helpful?
Is there time for teachers to learn about SEND and how certain are you that the training they get is robust and evidence informed?
Does your SENDCO have time to teach the children who most need their expertise?
Are they the most research-informed teacher in the school? Do they have time to be?
Where are the opportunities to celebrate the success of children who work hard but don’t finish at the top?
This all takes a lot of time and resource. To do it well compromises will have to be made – compromises in favour of our most vulnerable children and perhaps against the interests of those who find things easier.
It’s by making these compromises we show we are serious. By making more in favour of those that might otherwise fall quickly behind we can check the hubris of our highest flyers – show them they are no more special or deserving than people like my daughter who will never grasp things as quickly as they do – that they are no more special or deserving than a young man who will never talk.
Perhaps we can foster senses of obligation and collective responsibility – a belief those who win at this great fixed game have a responsibility to those who lose.
If you don’t like this framing, fine – instead see it as the charitable duty of the winners to be magnanimous to the losers – to make more space at the table so more can eat the delicious things on it.
Either way you want to see it, if enough of us – the people in this room and others- come to understand and recognise this responsibility, then what ways of meeting it might our clever brains arrive at?
If we all made provision for children who find learning tough a priority for us then how far down the road might we go?
A hero of mine – Paul Farmer – was an American medical anthropologist and the founder of Partners in Health. This was an organisation designed to provide direct health care services to some of the most marginalised and poverty-stricken communities and people in the world.
He said this:
“I have fought the long defeat and brought other people on to fight the long defeat, and I’m not going to stop because we keep losing. Now I actually think sometimes we may win. I don’t dislike victory. … You know, people from our background-like you, like most PIH-ers, like me-we’re used to being on a victory team, and actually what we’re really trying to do in PIH is to make common cause with the losers. Those are two very different things. We want to be on the winning team, but at the risk of turning our backs on the losers, no, it’s not worth it. So you fight the long defeat.”
I’m no Paul Farmer.
I do understand what he’s saying here though.
Perhaps there’s not much that can be done for those who find learning hardest. The history of all this isn’t pretty and perhaps my belief things might be better is naïve.
But I have hope. I really do. I can’t help it.
When I first began thinking and working in this space it was very personal to me and I expected little interest. I thought people would say “Ben used to be quite interesting and used to talk about Relevant Significant Big Things but then his daughter got diagnosed with Williams Syndrome and what he says now is pretty niche. Bless him.”
But there has been interest – huge interest. I’m looking at twitter and I’m having conversations with people in schools and I’m seeing work done by big players like Ambition Institute and the Confederation of School Trusts and there is attention and there seems a desire to work at this and get it right. It’s work of humility – reaching out and connecting with and learning from the people this directly affects and those who’ve dedicated their professional lives to serve children they know should get much more than they get. There’s been so much thinking and learning and doing – it’s been happening for decades in the shadows by people who should have been listened to more a long time ago. We should all make up for lost time and listen to them now.
It feels like there’s an imperative to try and make schools work for all children not just the lucky clever ones. Not just the ones it’s easy to teach.
To do it right in a way that means genuinely high standards and high ambition – in a way that includes children and doesn’t just contain them,
Maybe one day soon this long defeat can turn into a victory parade – a joyful parade that ends in schools in which more children learn. In which more feel belonging and find meaning and feel seen and valued.
But if we can’t win – if there’s never a parade – if attention moves away and the debate is pushed back into the shadows, I’ll still be here.
I’m committed. I can’t unsee what I’ve seen. I can’t unlearn what I’ve learned. I don’t want to.
Too many people who were in this fight long before me have shared too much and worked too hard to help me get it and I’m awed by the work they’ve done long before any of this meant anything to me – awed by and grateful for work they’ve been doing for children like my daughter, Bessie, before I even knew there would be a Bessie.
Teachers, TAs, SENDCOs, leaders, parents – thank you all for getting this before I did and helping me understand.
You know who you are.
Win or lose I’m proud to stand with them.
I don’t dislike winning – I think we might – but if can’t I’ll fight the long defeat.
Long defeat or victory parade – I invite you to join us.
Ben Newmark 