- The Guardian,
- Wednesday July 12 2000
Remember the Bleeper man in the first story in this series, racing through the corridors of his Sheffield school, rattling from crisis to crisis, quelling outbursts of imminent disorder? He was dealing with the central riddle that continues to trouble every education system in the developed world. What do we do with the underclass of failing children; with the 10% in this country who leave school without a single qualification; with the 54% who leave without the five A to C grades that is the government's chosen measure of success? How can schools compensate for a society that produces so many children who see so little reason to learn?
We have seen some of the roots of the problem, particularly the acidic effects of the surge in child poverty in this country since 1979 and the chronic shortage of school funding, both essentially untouched by current government strategy. Failure is still seen primarily as the fault of teachers and LEAs; sometimes of parents, too. But is there not something else in there - some faultlines in the very organisation of our schools; some assumptions with which we have lived for so long that we have ceased to notice them?
If you can begin to see these faults, you begin to see the potential solutions. The interesting thing about them is that they not only challenge a lot of current government policy, they also uproot some of the most cherished landmarks on the educational landscape of the left as well as the right. Consider first this question: why have we accepted for so long that education is academic? Take two scenes.
First, come to the Netherlands, to the small town of Hoorn, about 20 miles northeast of Amsterdam, to Tabor secondary school. On the first floor of a teaching block, a group of 14-year-olds are running a company. They are trading in sports equipment and DIY tools, ordering raw materials, organising production, sending out invoices and bills of sale. They deal with other companies in the Netherlands and further afield, as far as Russia and China, fielding phone calls, typing letters, sending emails and manning a reception desk for visitors. The teacher is the company president, the oldest pupil is the chief executive, the rest rotate their jobs: one week a sales manager, another week a secretary or a book-keeper. They carry business cards. At the end of the year, they produce their annual report, declaring their profit or loss.
This is education, but it is also, in a sense, a game. The company they are running is a simulated one, as are the companies with which they trade, set up either by other schools or by commercial outfits who supply this as an educational service.
There are two crucial points about this classroom. First, this is a form of secondary education that scarcely exists in this country - practical, vocational learning - but in the Netherlands (as in several other developed countries) it is part of the mainstream of school life, with 60% of pupils on some form of vocational pathway. And it is on an equal footing with academic learning. Second, it seems to work: by and large, the disaffected Dutch pupils are learning. They are scoring far better results than their British counterparts, particularly in mental arithmetic, science and foreign languages. Their attendance is better, their staying-on rates are higher. They are enjoying school.
The key point here is not the obvious one. This is not about training pupils for vocational careers - although that may be a helpful side-effect. This is about motivating pupils who fail to engage with conventional academic schooling.
The timetable is deliberately constructed so children move between practical classes, where they can use their hands, talk to friends, score some success; and academic classes, which may test their concentration. Dutch teachers say that as a result of lifting their students' motivation in the practical classes, they get much better results in the academic ones. The head of Tabor school, Henk Verreijen, says: "The good thing in our system is that when they come to this school, they study at their own level so they also can get sufficient marks, which is good for their self-esteem. It gives them self-confidence and that is why a lot of children flourish here."
Now come to Barking, on the eastern edge of London, to the college of further education on Dagenham Road, where a group of students in a workshop are working with bricks and mortar, laying the foundations of a house, the kind of vocational training that is normal in a college like this. But these are not the normal students. They are 14-year-old GCSE students, who are based down the road at Robert Clack comprehensive school, and they are part of a breakthrough, explicitly modelled on the Dutch vocational classes.
There are two things you need to know about the local education authority in Barking and Dagenham. The first is that, although its Sats results now challenge national averages, its intake of children has the classic profile of a deprived community and, until 1990, this was reflected in the worst GCSE results in the whole country. Second, it has now become the second most improved LEA in the country by accepting the Department for Education and Employment's campaign for better teaching and management and then, crucially, by moving on to tackle the problems of its intake by adopting ground-breaking new ideas from the Netherlands and Switzerland - and leaving the DfEE scrambling to catch up behind it.
Similarities
Barking turned to Holland not just because of its relative success but also because of its structural similarities to Britain. The Dutch, too, have free parental choice and a market in school places, which is causing problems by polarising schools, so that some of the inner city "black schools" take more than 90% of their children from poor, often migrant families. They, too, have experimented with league tables and become so worried by their inaccuracy that they are now considering returning the business of quality control to their schools. Finally, and perhaps most important, their system is as underfunded as the British one. Despite the Dutch history of generous support for welfare services, their schools sit with the British in the lower reaches of the OECD tables for education funding in Europe.
The Barking officials have been working with ideas from the Netherlands, all controversial, if not heretical. The first is the concept of vocational education.
After a series of visits to Dutch schools, including Tabor, in the mid-1990s the LEA created six new courses for its GCSE students - in engineering, electronics, catering, construction, printing and industrial model-making. All used industry-standard equipment, demanded real skill and provided lessons of hands-on practical work. Demand is booming: 600 of the borough's 2,000 secondary students have signed up for the courses. At Robert Clack school, the special GCSE in construction has been so successful that they are setting up a similar course for sixth-formers. And this demand is coming from the disaffected and difficult students, who usually turn their backs on learning but who were hand-picked for first priority on the new GCSE courses. Barking's technology inspector, Nigel Sagar, said: "You need to have a sense of all moving forward on pathways which may be different but which have parity of esteem and which produce qualifications of equal value."
The key point is that, for the struggling pupil, these courses provoke interest instead of boredom. They offer a chance of success to those who are not academic and who are forced by our current curriculum to fail every day of the week, guaranteed to generate disaffection. The Barking officials think they are on to something of fundamental importance.
However, amid the excitement, there has been a real frustration, for British schools have suffered one fundamental difference from their Dutch counterparts. There, vocational education is established nationally with the full support of its government; in Britain, it has been squeezed through a sieve of restrictive national rules and unchallenged assumptions.
The DfEE argues that it is encouraging vocational courses. David Blunkett, the education secretary, now allows schools to "disapply" the national curriculum for some students, so they can drop up to two GCSE subjects and take up work-related training instead; last week, he announced new vocational GCSEs from September 2002. However, these moves disguise a history of procrastination in Whitehall. The gulf between the Netherlands and Barking remains huge.
Dutch children in vocational streams spend up to 18 of their 32 weekly lessons in vocational classes - running catering outfits that serve meals in real restaurants, building mock houses, wiring and plumbing bathrooms, running shops with goods and tills, printing posters, designing and manufacturing clothes, repairing cars, learning transport logistics by shuttling simulated goods around the country. In Barking, schools have been able to smuggle no more than five practical lessons a week into the timetable. In the Netherlands, the schools have industry-specification workshops for every vocation. In Barking, they have to borrow space from Ford at Dagenham or the local college of further education. In the Netherlands, practical education is generously funded through mainstream budgets. In Barking, the DfEE has provided only £18,000 a year under its "demonstration project" fund for experimental work, and the LEA is now being forced to turn to the European social fund to find £180,000 to set up adequate workshops in some of its schools.
The first fence in this bureaucratic obstacle course has been the national curriculum. Paul Grant, the headteacher at Robert Clack, unilaterally dismantled his timetable, without consulting the DfEE, to make room for a "more accessible curriculum". Ofsted grumbled about this, but he has stuck to his guns and wants to do more to beat boredom.
"Although it has been relaxed, the national curriculum is still constricting," he says. "Nobody has hauled me over the coals for it, but we are certainly running against the spirit of the national curriculum if not the letter. If I was given carte blanche, the children in the lower bands would be working with a very, very different curriculum."
Then there are the league tables, which encourage schools to focus on middle-range children who may be able to score more A to Cs rather than on the least able. Mr Blunkett's new programme to provide special help for "the gifted and talented" exacerbates that trend. LEAs and teachers say it is a move backwards to offer a fast stream to the brightest children if the mainstream is left clogged.
Last week's announcement by Mr Blunkett that he would introduce vocational GCSEs in 2002 is the first sign of a breakthrough in a long struggle. The education department's own advisers looked at vocational study and said: "The pupils attack their work with a seriousness and satisfaction not always found in schools for pupils of their age. They concentrate because they are interested. They have the air of knowing what they are doing and exactly why it is worth doing." That report was written in 1930. For 70 years, while the Netherlands, Germany and Austria were embedding vocational classes in the core of their state schools, Whitehall has turned up its nose at the very idea.
In the 1990s, the government agreed to introduce some vocational courses in secondary schools but insisted that these could not lead to GCSE qualifications. Instead, they made them GNVQs. Teachers say that stands for Getting Nowhere Very Quickly. LEA officials complain that employers do not understand the GNVQ, that it suffers from the lack of any national syllabus, and most of all that it is a second-class qualification, the very opposite of what they want - "effectively pushing the low achievers into the hut at the back of the school", as one official put it. Earlier this year, there were reports that the DfEE was thinking of shunting any remaining GCSE with a vocational element into the GNVQ siding - GCSEs in horticulture, agriculture and nautical studies were all at risk.
Last week's announcement suggests that the DfEE is finally admitting the error of its ways. It was particularly significant that Mr Blunkett spoke of the new courses not just as a source of skill for industry but as a means of motivating disaffected children. However, officials are waiting to see whether this marks a real change of direction. There has been no commitment to providing workshops, without which the courses will be weak shadows of the Dutch ones. Nor has there been any commitment to sweep away the restrictions of the national curriculum to allow headteachers to provide vocational classes on the Dutch scale. Nigel Sagar, an LEA insepector, says: "Unless there is a fundamental shift to accepting this principle of different pathways for different children, the comprehensive system will not achieve Mr Blunkett's objectives. They are trying to drive a broken car."
As the Barking officials dug deeper into the Dutch system, they found more untested assumptions and started to entertain the possibility of increasingly radical solutions. In a sense, all of them revolve around one wicked little paradox. With the small but powerful exception of those who run Ofsted and the Department for Education, everyone involved in Britain's schools has recognised that children are different - their social class, their gender, the position of their birth month in the school year all have a recurring impact on their ability to achieve. For the left in this country, for anyone who cared at all about social justice, the gospel for dealing with this has been to provide equality of educational opportunity. The goal has been to offer all children of all classes the same curriculum in the same schools and to invite children to take the same exams at the same time.
But what happens if you offer a level playing field to children of different abilities? The strong move ahead and the weak fall behind. Equality of opportunity preserves and promotes the inequalities that afflict the children at the outset.
The alternative is to set up a system based on needs, in which all of these elements are varied to assist different kinds of children. Wim Meijnen, professor of education at Amsterdam University and a member of the national council that advises the Dutch government on schooling, says: "The Dutch philosophy is to overcome these problems, in particular of poverty. Pupils who need the most can get the most assistance." The use of vocational courses is their way of moulding a different curriculum for different children. But there is more.
This article is in two parts. Click this link for the second part.
Additional research by Helene Mulholland
Useful links:
NUT
Secondary Heads Association
Teacher Training Agency
DfEE
