In a widely reported speech to  the think-tank Centre Forum,  Ofsted chief Michael Wilshaw has slammed the  ‘One-size-fits-all’ emphasis on traditional academic subjects by secondary schools, declaring that this ‘will never deliver the range of success that their youngsters need’ https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/ambitions-for-education-sir-michael-wilshaw   Wilshaw is not promoting a more student friendly type of learning though, far from it –he despises the ‘misguided ideologies’ of ‘miserable decades of the 1970s, 80s and 90s’ which, he maintains allowed children to ‘pick out their worksheet and learn at their own speed’.  Instead, he argues that  the current secondary curriculum offer prevents ‘less academic’ students from getting the high quality vocational education to get them ready for the workplace, citing other countries with well-developed vocational pathways.  

Barely a year ago, Wilshaw  told a CBI conference that pupils should transfer to different schools at 14 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/11238974/Ofsted-chief-stream-pupils-by-ability-at-the-age-of-14.html.  Dissident Tory Kenneth Baker continues to argue this, gaining cross party support for his University Technical Colleges (UTCs). Now, Wilshaw, careful to avoid controversy about restoring grammar schools, says that vocational specialisation should take place within a ‘truly comprehensive’ system with schools working together in clusters and federations, rather than through the LEA, which would include a UTC, allowing students to ‘transfer across institutions’(!)

Many supporters of comprehensive education would consider the creation of vocational streams and certainly separate schools as a return to the ideas of the 1944 Act, yet Wishaw does appear to be right in his assertion that Germany and Switzerland, countries with established vocational pathways have much lower rates of youth unemployment. Yet this is mainly because these countries, particularly Germany, have a much more regulated youth labour market where vocational education is linked to an apprenticeship system which requires part-time attendance at specialist colleges, but more importantly, largely guarantees future employment for those who complete their training. 

In Germany, this is part of a wider ‘social partnership’, which despite its limitations and the Neo-liberal outlook of most of its leaders’ stands in sharp contrast to the UK (and US) ‘market sate’ approach.  Wilshaw, like others, point to the low quality of many vocational courses, but the real problem is that UK employers have never had the same commitment to vocational education, preferring to recruit candidates with higher status academic qualifications instead. This is the reason why young people, despite fees, sign up for university in droves. Compared to those in Germany and Switzerland, UK apprenticeships are short-term, low-level and dead-end with employers as likely to convert existing staff to apprenticeship status to access government funding as they are to offer young people real employment opportunities

Rather than spend money on lengthy apprenticeship training, UK employers also know they can recruit from a bulging graduate labour force, many of whom are being pushed down into the ‘middling’ jobs that vocational, technical and apprenticeship training has traditionally been associated with. But it’s also the case that many of these middling jobs have continued to disappear anyway as a result of developments in technology. This process being much further advanced in the UK (and the US), compared with Germany for example, which has been able to maintain a stronger manufacturing base and slow down the process of de-industrialisation.

In these circumstances and without other major economic and political changes,  it’s unlikely that hiving off students into vocational courses will improve their employment chances or that young people will be persuaded to sign up for this sort of pathway. Baker’s UTCs continue to open but several are finding it difficult to recruit a full cohort. What’s needed is a good general education for everybody, but this also requires major reform of academic learning –something that most curriculum reformers have not been prepared to address.   Wilshaw like Baker and for that matter, the CBI leaders who complain about schools becoming ‘exam factories’, is not critical of the E-Bacc itself, he wants to preserve ‘high-level academic study’ as a form of learning for the few. For these guys, vocational alternatives are always for other people’s children –never their own.

Martin Allen

Michael Gove’s new National Curriculum requirements might have been finalised, but the debate about what young people should learn and how; must continue. If there is an area where Gove is both weak and wobbly, then it continues to be on the curriculum, where he has made a series of retreats, if not U-turns – starting with the fiasco around the English Baccalaureate Certificates, but continuing with the concessions on History and to a lesser extent English. On all occasions, Gove has faced campaigns of opposition.

Gove frames many of his arguments in the context of what he considers to be the UK’s declining international performance and portrays himself as a ‘moderniser’, looking to the education practices of high performing countries for inspiration.  In other words, his concern about ‘standards’ is justifiable and necessary for the longer term ability of the UK economy to ‘compete’.

‘…the emphasis on effort is particularly marked in the Confucian-heritage countries such as China, Hong Kong SAR, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. The assumption here is that deep engagement with subject matter, including through memorisation where appropriate, leads to deeper understanding.’ (8.6) and ‘Hong Kong… as with South Korea and Singapore also operates with a curriculum model focusing on “fewer things in greater depth”.’ (2010 White Paper 8.10)

This allegation has continued unabated throughout Gove’s offensive. Launching the new National Curriculum that requires 5 year olds to calculate fractions and write computer programmes, 9 year olds to recite 12 times tables and 11 year olds to memorise poetry, Gove told ITV’s Daybreak (08/07/13), ‘I want my children, who are in primary school at the moment, to have the sort of curriculum that children in other countries have, which are doing better than our own.’

Despite Gove’s claims that officials in the Department for Education have spent years examining and analysing the curricula used in the world’s supposedly most successful school systems, this type of comparative justification has always been highly selective and compares very different traditions of education, including those requiring pictographic characters as opposed to phonic literacy! Commenting on this week’s announcement, Kevin Courtney, Deputy General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers, the largest teachers’ union said:

‘Several successful international systems are quoted as the inspiration for the new curriculum but only one of these (Massachusetts) has the same school starting age as England. The rest start at 6 or 7, undermining the argument that more demanding content should be presented to children earlier. In fact, the opposite should be the case. The Secretary of State also quotes Finland at a time when Finland is taking a different direction for its curriculum by emphasising critical thinking over factual content, boosting cross-curricular themes and reducing content to give more time to learning.’

(http://www.teachers.org.uk/node/18815)

Even Sir Michael Barber, architect of many ‘school improvement’ reforms during the last two decades, warned about the dangers of copying policy on the hoof (Guardian 22/8/12).  Barber also pointed out that, as policy makers in the Asian Tiger economies recognise that their economic systems need to become ‘more innovative’ and their schools ‘more creative’, some of the countries held up by Gove are looking to European education systems for inspiration.

Finally, as the Guardian’s Peter Wilby (08/12/2012) has pointed out, the specific OECD international tests on which Gove based much of his evidence have since been declared invalid with officials reprimanded. For example, less than three months after Gove had published his proposals for exam reform, new ‘global league tables’ published by the multi-national education supplier Pearson and compiled by The Economist Intelligence Unit ranked the UK sixth best in the world – although Finland and South Korea remained first and second.  Oxford University researchers have also argued that international test data as a whole cannot be taken at face value and are extremely limited ways of measuring a country’s educational standards. (www.oucea.education.ox.ac.uk/research/recent-research-projects/research-evidence-relating-to-proposals-for-reform-of-the-gcse/)

Gove has claimed ‘unprecedented interest’ in his curriculum proposals. There has been, yet much of it continues to be critical. Now that the NUT and NASUWT have commenced joint strike action against Gove’s  Draconian policies for teachers’ pay, it is crucial that the campaign integrates  the concerns of teachers, some of whom will be bounced into teaching parts the new NC  from this September as the current model has been ‘disapplied’.  With poll after poll continuing to show that parents see teachers as the people who know most about the curriculum and learning, not government ministers, opportunities to involve parents in a general campaign on both teaching and learning, can only grow.

                                                                                http://www.amazon.co.uk/Reversal-Education-Employment-Declining-Economy/dp/0957553803

Since becoming education minister, Gove has largely concentrated on  reforming  the academic curriculum, introducing an English Baccalaureate made up of five traditional curriculum areas, arguing that  A-levels have  to be made harder,  trying to reintroduce O-levels and so on. Though claiming  changes have to be made to bring the British education system more in line with those in high performing economies (DfE White Paper 2010) Gove’s  secondary school proposals  are as much a ‘restorationist’  as a ‘modernising’ project –  supposedly  returning us  to a  ‘golden age’  represented by  the grammar schools  (https://radicaled.wordpress.com/2012/04/12/back-to-the-grammar-school)

Despite his preoccupation with academic learning however, Gove did commission Alison Wolf to carry out a ‘review’ of vocational learning. Wolf is condemnatory of current provision, particularly the specialised vocational pathways for 14-16 year olds, introduced as a result of Sir Ron Dearing’s reviews of Kenneth (now Lord) Baker’s then ‘ten subject’ National Curriculum in the early 1990s and developed further under New Labour governments.  She considers the BTEC style qualifications ‘valueless’ in a collapsing youth labour market,  arguing a generation has been ‘short changed’(Wolf, TES,04/03/11)  when apprenticeships should have been created instead.

Acting on Wolf’s advice Gove is removing the BTECs from school league tables. Wolf also wants greater emphasis on ‘real’ English and maths – stressing not enough young people pass GCSEs in both of these.

Gove’s (and Wolf’s) proposals have not pleased those Tories who continue to adhere to Dearing principles; most notably Baker himself who told Radio 4’s Today Programme (03/03/11) that Wolf ‘doesn’t  go far enough’.  Baker is champion of University Technical Colleges – schools providing specialisms for 14-19 students with the backing of universities and local employers, the first three open this September.

UTC’s would seem to fit uneasily with the new Gove curriculum and Wolf’s proposals for vocational learning, but it’s clear they represent the latest attempt to create a ‘middle’ or technical stream – as much as the ‘two tier’ system campaigners fear.  It’s uncertain  whether  all  UTC’s will offer the 5 E-bac GCSE’s as a core and they obviously won’t be able to comply with Wolf’s recommendation that vocational learning should be restricted to 20% of the key stage 4 curriculum.

Attempts to establish a technical stream in the English education have been a dismal failure however. In reality, 1944 tripartism became a grammar and secondary modern divide –with the ‘middle way’ technical schools thin on the ground, suffering from lack of resources but also according to Baker from  ‘English snobbery’  about ‘getting your hands dirty’ www.utcolleges.org/newsfolder/at-last,-schools-for-getting-your-hands-dirty.  When education minister, Baker tried to establish City Technology Colleges, but most technical /vocational education continued to be provided by Further Education colleges often on part-time ‘day release ’basis supplementing‘ on the job learning where those employers who still needed them continued to run apprenticeships.

More recently, rather than creating distinct schools, the emphasis has been placed on developing  the vocational pathways referred to above within  comprehensives. However, even if the more student-centred learning the vocational approach encourages has been popular with many teachers, most would agree with Wolf that vocational qualifications have little real status.  Apart from  BTECs, the most successful initiative has probably been the GNVQs created in the 1990s, but these suffered from ‘academic drift’ after they were re launched as  ‘applied’  versions of GCSE and A-levels, the very academic qualifications they have sought to provide an alternative to. As a result, many  schools and colleges returned to BTECs.  GNVQs were also followed by the ill-fated specialist diplomas www.radicaled.wordpress.com/pamphlet-a-new-14

Whatever may have been the case in the past  (Baker points to the German ‘dual system’ of academic and technical learning as being a reason for the country’s economic success) with the decline of skilled manual employment, it’s questionable whether this sort of ‘middle’ stream  now corresponds with new economic realities and labour market requirements.

The UTC initiative is also comparatively small – even with another 30 at the planning stage, less than 20,000 students will be enrolled.  Of those opening in September 2012, the £15 million Aston UTC is the most distinct, housed in new premises next to its university sponsor  and with a strong engineering profile – even if after the closure  of MG Rover at Longbridge  engineering employment in Birmingham has fallen dramatically, it may at least encourage some locally living students to apply to Aston.

In sharp contrast, Hackney UTC, which is sponsored by a local NHS Trust and part of Hackney Community College, will specialise in ‘health and digital technology’ but will offer GCSEs in language and humanities. While Central Bedfordshire UTC in Luton – also housed in an existing FE college – will offer ‘product design, engineering and manufacturing’ – presumably using the resources this college already has.

But if Dearing style vocational pathways   for 14 year olds will no longer be available in most schools, will the only alternative for young people be the statutory academic subjects of the English Baccalaureate? The ‘Experts Report’ on National Curriculum reform provides some hints:

‘We are not proposing that all students follow full GCSE courses in the full range of subjects and topics that we envisage being statutory at Key Stage 4. We recommend that evidence should be collected on whether non-certificated provision (with fewer hours’ timetable allocation per week)… would be motivating or demotivating’ (4.20)

This would not only open the door for the creation of new divides, but would mean a sort of watered down secondary modern curriculum for non E-bac students, allowing the additional emphasis on literacy and numeracy Wolf wants. This type of  differentiation also  fits the polarised  or ‘pear shaped’ occupational structures of the 21^st century where – rather than the highly skilled, specialist employment  opportunities promised by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown,  large numbers will only need ‘basic skills’ for  jobs that are either non-specialist or largely routine.  Reformers must campaign for a broad general curriculum for everyone, but first of all they need to seriously challenge Gove’s vision.

Valerie Coultas  examines another aspect of Gove’s curriculum offensive

Education Minister, Michael Gove, believes that educational policy has been in thrall to progressives and who believe that ‘children should be left to discover at their own pace to follow their own hearts’. Gove has a rigid rather than a rigorous approach and that he is opposed to interdisciplinary collaboration and to areas that he conceives of as ‘soft’ knowledge, such as Media Studies.

Gove’s policies for learning are clearly visible in his approach to the teaching of English where he believes that:

‘Our literature is the best in the world… It is every child’s birth right and we should be proud to teach it in every school’ (Speech to Conservative Party Conference, 2010) The New Standards for Qualified Teacher Status, have one clear statement on spoken English and this is the necessity for all teachers to ‘take responsibility for promoting  ..the correct use of standard English whatever the teacher’s specialist subject’. This is the government’s response to language across the curriculum,  all teachers must promote the ‘correct’ use of standard English!

The new programmes of study for English have no separate strand for oracy and the main focus is on reading, writing and spelling and grammar. But the value of formal spoken English  is reinforced and ‘there will be an expectation that pupils master formal English through recitation, debate and presentation’.  The ‘elocution model’ is therefore reinforced and the talk for learning model set aside.

Many teachers and writers , on the other hand, suggest that Standard English is one form of dialect that pupils should be familiar with but that it is not intrinsically superior to other forms of dialect. Pupils should have opportunities to use standard English where it is the appropriate spoken register when in role as a lawyer, TV presenter for example but it does not have to be imposed in more informal discussions.

Though there are some nuances, the links to the authors of the Black Papers, influential on Thatcherite education policy in the 1980s and who were strong defenders of the English Literary heritage and standard English as a superior dialect are therefore clear                                                                                                       

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