Skills, motivation, relevance and the front line.
Yet another warning has been issued by the CBI (Confederation of British Industry) that the education system is not providing the right skills for the 21st century workplace. A short while ago the then education secretary, Ruth Kelly, commenting on the findings of the Tomlinson committee accepted that: "Too many young people are unattractive to employers, deficient in the basics of English and maths." Tomlinson said even those with apparently good GCSE grades in maths and English did not necessarily have "functional" abilities.
As a result the Government announced that the GCSEs would be revised to incorporate a test in functional skills. Without passing this, no-one in future would be able to achieve a grade C or above. However, the new versions will not be available for several years. As an immediate step, the school league tables were changed to show the proportion of pupils who achieve at least five good GCSEs or the equivalent including English and maths GCSEs.
Maybe I’ve missed something but I don’t see how changing the league tables helps. In fact I can’t help but wonder whether league tables and targets are half of the problem, whether they relate to schools or hospitals. They seem to encourage a focus on passing the exam or meeting the target regardless of the quality of the learning or quality of care.
My own recent forays into education (yes, the old dog is still trying to learn new tricks!) very much support this. In two entirely different fields, ‘ticking all the right boxes’ seemed to count higher than the usefulness for what was being taught. I have the same jaundiced view about the effectiveness of so called quality assurance schemes. From my previous involvement with them it seemed that having a book full of policies and procedures neatly filed was far more important than what actually went on in the business.
On Tuesday morning’s BBC breakfast news programme there was an item on a project whereby children were shown how to develop their own computer games, as opposed to playing with ones off-the-shelf. Essentially this was a day of lessons like any other. The difference of course was that the subject was of interest and the children were motivated to work hard to achieve something from the day. In other words, what they were doing was relevant to their area of interest.
This must be the challenge for education, to make the subjects taught seem relevant to the ‘real world’. And just before you question how computer games are relevant to the real world, it is a huge industry employing twenty odd thousand people in the UK alone apparently. So perhaps it’s time for the government, civil servants and educationalists in the Department for Education, or whatever daft name it has now been given,* to stop meddling and leave the front line to get on with it. The same goes for the NHS.
Maybe it is a character failing of those who go into government in whatever form, that there is an overwhelming desire to govern as opposed to providing leadership that supports rather than hinders the efforts of those on the front line.
David Wike
* Quote from the Government website: The Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) is responsible for improving the focus on all aspects of policy affecting children and young people, as part of the Government’s aim to deliver educational excellence.
1 comment:
I agree with your sentiments David. For years the prevailing culture has been ‘recruit for skills and train for attitude.’ I have always said we should do the opposite – recruit for attitude and train for skills.
People with a mindset that says ‘I want to learn’ will always learn more.
Another ‘Trevor’ statement of the bleedin’ obvious (remember Basil Fawlty saying to Sybil - 'You really should go on mastermind dear - Sybil Fawlty, specialist subject the bleedin' obvious') is that passing exams only proves one thing - you can pass exams.
Practical experience in the real world among the muck, blood and bullets is still the best education in my view. And I speak as someone who has all the right academic tickets and a Masters in Management. Interestingly enough I did my Masters in the 1990’s as a mature student at the age of 45 because I WANTED to do it – not because of some externally imposed ‘requirement.’ It was an intrinsic thing. I’m convinced self-motivation is one of the keys to this whole debate.
I share your concerns about targets although meaningful and credible targets are of course needed to ensure we are moving forward and not stagnating. My experience in the NHS is that whenever measurable processes are put in place to measure quality then all the effort goes into managing the process. Managers simply make sure all the boxes are ticked and administration is done well and they forget that such process should merely be a tool to support QUALITY IMPROVEMENT and ‘ticking the box’ is not the purpose.
How do we equip ourselves for the challenges of the next few decades? – How about asking young people how we can make sure our ‘education system’ does not stop at 16 or 19 but lifelong learning becomes the norm?
I always quote my Grandmother who died in her 90’s and I can remember her telling me many times as she approached the end of her life that she was still learning.
And as far as I am concerned I want to be still learning and rattling cages when I am well over 100. How about you David?
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