Is it time to trust the teachers?

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By Mike Baker Teacher quality is central to the system

This week's government White Paper, 21st Century Schools, may mark a watershed in government policy for schools in England.

For the past 30 years there has been a steady push towards greater central government control over what is taught and tested in schools.

It has been driven by a lack of trust in teachers, particularly from politicians, but also to a large extent from parents.

The result has been that teachers have increasingly lost their professional autonomy and have tended to become "deliverers" of government-approved teaching methods.

Ever since 1976, when the then Labour Prime Minister, Jim Callaghan, bemoaned his inability to influence what happened in schools, there has been a steady growth in government micro-management of what happens in the classroom.

This trend has continued under successive Conservative and Labour governments.

It brought the national curriculum and its associated national tests. It reached its height with the National Strategies, which set out, minute-by-minute, how teachers should "deliver" numeracy and literacy lessons.

Tests

Now if you just listen to the rhetoric of the main political parties, you might think nothing much had changed. No politician wants to be thought to have gone soft on standards.

But look a little more closely and a distinct change of climate is detectable.

The level of micro-management is being reduced. It began with the several reviews of the national curriculum, each one reducing the amount of prescription and providing more flexibility to schools.

More recently, the government abandoned the national tests for 14 year-olds. They even allowed a question to hang over the future of the tests at age 11, as they attempt to develop the "testing when ready" approach.

The Conservatives, sensing the unpopularity of primary school Sats, went further by suggesting that these could be put off until the start of secondary school.

Most recently, the Schools Secretary, Ed Balls, lifted the expectation that all schools had to follow the strictures of the National Strategies when they teach numeracy and literacy.

'The anxiety is palpable'

So, if micro-management is being reduced, what is happening to another trend in government policy: the creation of a consumer market in schools through league tables and parental choice?

Well, this has not yet gone into reverse, but there are signs the government now recognises that many of the school accountability measures of the past have had unintended consequences.

The focus on exam league tables, and particularly the emphasis on raw scores in the Sats and GCSEs, has made these almost the only measure of school success that really counts.

If you doubt this, you only have to be in schools when the Sats results arrive in the post - the anxiety is palpable, even in the most well run schools.

It has driven teachers to coach pupils in some subjects at the expense of others and has sometimes encouraged schools to target borderline pupils (particularly at the C/D boundary at GCSE) at the expense of the progress of all students.

Report cards

The proposals this week for new school report cards are an acknowledgement of this problem. Report cards would grade schools on a much wider range of indicators than the current league tables.

Indeed, the White Paper quietly inserted a notice of the anticipated death of league tables, saying report cards will "supersede" the current league tables as the central objective measure of schools.

There is of course still a debate to come over whether the report cards should contain a single overall grade for schools' achievements across a wide range of measures.

The teacher unions oppose that as too crude and simplistic but the government believes that the simplicity of a single grade is the price that must be paid for the ending of the league tables.

Autonomy and accountability

So, what do these shifting trends amount to?

Well, 30 years ago we had a school system that was characterised by high autonomy and low accountability.

Since then we have moved to the polar opposite: low autonomy and high accountability.

The current shift seems to suggest that this is now becoming as undesirable as the position 30 years ago.

There is growing realisation, I believe, that a more desirable combination is: high autonomy and high accountability.

So schools and teachers should be trusted more: trusted to devise their own curriculum, their own teaching styles, and their own forms of assessment.

But the price of that freedom is strong accountability. But an accountability that is more intelligent than the rather crude measures we have had until now, which have distorted school behaviours.

Report Cards might be the more intelligent accountability that is needed, providing a measure of what schools are achieving without encouraging schools to focus just on certain subjects and on borderline pupils.

But, as the pendulum swing of education policy has shown, getting the right balance between autonomy and accountability is not going to be easy.

Teacher quality

Meanwhile, as faith in micro-management diminishes, there is a new mantra: that raising educational standards is all down to the quality of teachers.

That is why this week's White Paper proposes a new licence to teach, renewable every five years, and wants all new teachers to undertake a Masters degree in teaching and learning.

The Conservatives have got in on the act too, suggesting tougher minimum standards for entry to teacher training.

It is an interesting shift. It is one that is based on studying the success of school systems in Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong and Finland, where entry to teaching is highly selective.

As an influential report from the management consultants McKinsey & Company concluded: "The quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers".

After 30 years of policy that has been driven by a mistrust of teachers, this could signal a new age for education policy.