Education Island

The education system in the UK is pretty messed up. No matter where you sit politically, this seems to be a common opinion. We all know that education is of exceptional importance at any time but even more so now that investing in education may be the best way to beat recession. The contentious point is what needs changed and who is to blame. If you read the Daily Mail or the Express, you no doubt blame a spontaneous rise in “poor teachers”. These poor teachers who sometimes infect whole schools have seemingly come into teaching simply for the pensions and the term time holidays and do not care about teaching. Building straw men has been the prerogative of these bourgeois rags for years and passing the blame to people who are far far too busy looking after the future of the future generation to properly oppose these allegations is not surprising at all.

The real issue here is that of control.  The control that individuals feel they have over their own learning, the control that teachers have over what they teach and how they teach it and the control the individual school or education institution has over who they hire and fire and how they spend the money they have available to them.  Teachers with more control over their own teaching can adapt to the rapidly changing cultural environment children and teenagers grow up in.  What limits this control is the introduction of competition between schools which supports learning by rote and teaching to the test.  This in turn results in the creativity of teachers being limited as well as limiting the achievement of students. Encouraging competition between schools as if they are individually accountable business entities is only suitable if they are indeed individually accountable business entities. This is the direction both the previous New Labour government and the Con/Dem coalition government are moving education.

The main reason this will not work with the education system is that it will create an even wider achievement gap between the social classes. For the education system to be competitive, there will have to be individual controls over fees and multiple sponsorship or funding revenues. This would create islands of education, where attractive locations receive the majority of funding and unattractive locations receive much less.  Therefore, state funding for education should increase, rather than be cut. Relying on finding private funding streams puts disadvantaged schools at even more of a disadvantage. This is unfair because the reason these schools are disadvantaged in the first place is because they have been tested in a way that they can't possibly succeed, with emphasis on testing for number of high grades rather than emphasis on testing for difference between expected and actual grades.  This however assumes that we want a fair system. 

Of course, a "riot" is better news and easier to understand, even if the understanding promoted goes against contemporary understandings of crowd behaviour.