Tag Archives: BESA

What is the role of the State in schooling?

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This is an interesting philosophical question for a Sunday morning. It arises out of my post yesterday questioning a decision of the Labour government to allow a state school to open sites overseas, presumably for profit. Has Labour gone mad? | John Howson

The genesis of that blog  post was a tes magazine piece about a grammar school in London teaming up with a global brand to open sites in Dubai and Delhi Queen Elizabeth’s School to open fee-paying school in Dubai | Tes

What is the role of the state in schooling in the second quarter of the 21st century? When the 1870 Education Act was passed, as one of the Gladstone government’s first Bills before the new parliament, it was to ensure all children received at least some education. There was a feeling that a lack of literacy was resulting in British’s industry losing its advantage in the industrial revolution to countries with better educated populations.

After 1870, the State increasingly became the default position for schooling. Parents didn’t have to use it, but if they didn’t choose an alternative, basically the private sector or home schooling, then attending the local school from five to early teens was required of children. State paternalism or practical politics to allow the economy to continue to be successful?

155 years later, and we have the State, now run by a Labour government, sanctioning a state-funded school partnering with a global company to create school sites overseas selling its brand of education.

Why not allow this? After all, as someone pointed out on LinkedIn, the State too often rescues loss-making industries, why then shouldn’t it make money out of education?

Of course, the State already helps British Industry and commerce make money from exporting aspects of our successful education enterprise, from textbooks to teachers and private schools with sites overseas, as well as private schools bring in overseas students and their fees the government offers help and advice.

So, should State capitalism in this country support state schools opening branches overseas, and those schools making a profit on that work, to be ploughed back into their school in England, thus potentially earning it more cash than the State provides?

Firstly, profit is not a given. Secondly, how will the countries where such schools are located react. Happy not to worry about attracting expatriate workers because there will be high quality education for their children. And, also happy for its own citizens to attend such schools, with a different curriculum to what State schools in that country might teach?

The issue of state schools topping up their funding, whether from parents, donors or now profits, has worried me ever since I taught in Tottenham in the 1970s. School fetes, a feature of those days, run by primary schools in Highgate made thousands of pounds, those run by schools in Tottenham couldn’t match such income. Was this acceptable? At that time, local authorities ran schools and could compensate for this discrepancy. Now, the National Funding Formula make such compensation more challenging, except through the Pupil Premium.

The entrepreneur in me applauds the school making money overseas; the politician takes the opposite view. In this case, I think the politician wins. We need to debate afresh the role of the State in schooling in England, and both its purpose and its limits.

Welcome -U- turn on EdTech

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Readers with long memories, or at least those who were around in 2010, will recall the Tories famous bonfire of the QUANGOs. Michael Gove was an enthusiastic supporter of the movement, axing the GTCE and BECTA and starting the process that lead to the disappearance of the NCTL and all the good work it had undertaken in both leadership and initial teacher education. There were other less visible casualties of which some survived in the private sector whilst others disappeared.

Axing rather than reforming BECTA, the long-standing QUANGO (Quasi Autonomous Non-Government Organisation) on EdTech was a short-sighted move that has back fired on the government. As a result, I welcome today’s announcement that the government has once again recognised the importance of technology in education.

Throughout my career, this is an area I have championed, from the early use of video cameras to record both PE lessons for skills development and rehearsals of plays to improve the schools’ entry into one-act play festivals in the 1970s, through both my time at a teachers’ centre – sadly missed professional development hubs much more engaging that the teaching schools of today – to my time in a School of Education in the 1980s where student were required to create a tape-slide presentation for one of their assignments.

Even during my brief stay at the TTA in the 1990s, I helped commission the famous internet café stand at careers’ fairs that replaced the coffee table and a couple of armchairs plus a few posters that was the staple fare before then as the main means of selling teaching to graduates..

Sadly, as the whiteboard programme showed, there has often been a tendency to put the phone before the mast (to update the cart before the horse metaphor) when it came to new technology in education. How many boring presentations on OHPs in the old days and PowerPoint these days have you say through by educators that ought to know they needed a bit of training to make best use of the technology. Still, this was the profession that axed voice coaching as not academic enough for education degree courses, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at the lack of understanding of technology in teaching and learning by policy makers.

I would start with requiring all those that work with teachers in training to have a qualification in the use and development of education technology. As a geographer, I would have interactive earthquake and volcano sites open on a whiteboard in my classroom and challenge pupils to indicate anything unusual. Do that with Key Stage 2 pupils, and I guess many would soon know more about earthquakes and volcanoes than their teachers.

I think that Caroline Wright, Director General at the British Educational Suppliers Association summed my view up perfectly when she said:

I am delighted that the Department for Education’s plans place teacher training and support at the heart and soul of their future approach to EdTech and recognises that EdTech, when introduced as part of a whole school strategy, has the power to help improve pupil outcomes, save teacher time and reduce workload burdens.

As TeachVac has demonstrated in the field of teacher vacancies, technology can be very disruptive to existing orthodoxies, but that is not an excuse to do nothing and cling on to the past. –U- turns are never easy, but this one is both necessary and long overdue.