Skin deep

Beauty is aphoristically in the eye of the beholder, I would also contend that the same is true for modern educational progress and achievement. Both of these seem to be as much related to the agenda, self-interest or ambition of the observer as any real attribute of the observed, indeed the latter can be something of a superfluous embarrassment in the process.

There are those whose role is to police, supervise and support our work: inspectors, advisers, an army of consultants, many (not all) are well intentioned, skilled, of huge relevant experience but they do not necessarily serve us or their own public agenda well with their misinterpretations, cover-ups and lack of courage.

During my long career in teaching I have come across many examples of waste, tokenism, hypocrisy, complacency, pretension, outright lies and the (possibly deliberate) use of jargon or organisational complexity to cover up confusion and meaningless drivel:
• SAT results so twisted as to be meaningless even for those for whom they are intended –I hasten to add that this group does not include parents, pupils or ultimately their teachers
• the new Primary Frameworks and their accursed website - why are all government websites so utterly, utterly useless, even the ones such as BECTA (RIP) driven by ICT professionals?
• PFI projects, where the true costs and limitations are never talked about or reported upon because these processes are usually driven by people with a vested interest in a positive outcome
• the non-admission of failure in the numerous additional and incredibly expensive interventions used in the last decade in a desperate attempt to appear to raise standards: appear, can you mean this? well, yes. Actual raising of standards is never the reality, it’s all about the graph, as long as it rises, all is well.
• I have commented elsewhere on schools covering up and exaggerating the true nature of their pupils’ achievement and the confusion this can cause. It is positively harmful for the pupils, the schools they move on to, their new teachers who can experience self-doubt when confronted with a mis-assessed pupil, their peers, the pupils who miss out while their teachers sort out the ensuing mess.

This list is hardly exhaustive, some of the memories are probably so appalling that I have blocked them out.

I have contributed to a number of TES debates on a variety of linked issues, one called, appropriately enough “VLEs, the Emperors New Clothes?” The metaphor of the emperor’s clothes sums up my feeling that education is dogged by forces which are only interested in what things look like, not what they actually are. Educators are then bullied into making their efforts fit the ‘vision’.

Achievement in education has become truly skin deep and the casual visitor to schools eg inspectors, like the queen, must think that the whole world smells of new paint.