Educate yourself!
Why do we keep forgetting what education is for?
How many times have you been told to ‘educate yourself’ because you said something off-message, unorthodox, heretical - in short, common sense? You can be sure that the person screaming this at you, usually via the medium of X or some other social media platform, isn’t urging you to get around to reading The Complete Works of William Shakespeare or Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. Far from it. They are usually just avoiding getting into an argument they are very likely to lose, by referring you to whatever the latest in pseudo-academic wokery is telling its followers to believe.
Which is a shame. We really should be making more of an effort to educate ourselves. To read the classics, to engage with great ideas - be they philosophical insights, historical tracts or great fiction that gets at the truth of what it is to be human. Of course, most of us would love nothing more than for our kids to be steeped in learning, and excited by the breakthroughs of the past. It is not the blue-haired kids with hare-brained ideas that are the problem here. It is the educational establishment that has allowed bad ideas to go unchallenged in the absence of any real commitment to the project of providing a ‘good education’ for the nation’s kids. While educational standards have been on the rise in recent decades, the experience of learning has in other ways diminished considerably.
We have seen, as one parent Jon Bryan describes it, the persistence of a ‘lockdown mentality’ in which the importance of face-to-face education has been downgraded to such an extent that not only a virus but even bad weather can shut it down. The concurrent ‘dangerous’ rise of a therapeutic education, in place of the old subject or knowledge based education, is, according to Kathryn Ecclestone and Dennis Hayes, ‘turning children, young people and adults into anxious and self-preoccupied individuals rather than aspiring, optimistic and resilient learners who want to know everything about the world’. There is also increasing discomfort with, and even opposition to, the teaching of Relationships, Sex and Health Education (RSHE). It’s focus on adult intimacy and the promotion of values, doesn’t sit well with many parents particularly with the introduction of contested ideas over sex and gender.
The provisions in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill are also a worry. While it promises to ‘protect children and improve education’ some argue that it will do anything but, on both accounts. The stringent requirements with regards teacher training might seem fair enough, but some of our best schools have flourished with unqualified (but very experienced) individuals teaching their kids. They will now be deprived of these non-blob expertise. The standardisation of pay and conditions will also impose a degree of uniformity that may intrude unhelpfully on some schools’ autonomy.
More importantly, the same standardisation and uniformity will apply to the allocation of school places, and to the teaching of the new as yet to be unveiled curriculum. Again, these freedoms until now allowed to Academies, to determine these things for themselves, will be removed to the detriment of those schools and the children attending them. While ‘forced Acadamisation’ for failing schools may not always be the best solution, the reforms seem aimed more at keeping schools local authority controlled than making sure they provide a good education. The centralisation of control over children’s education, despite the successes consequent upon the greater freedoms allowed to some schools by reforms beginning in the late 1990s, will surely not end well.
Those of us with kids with special educational needs may find that a good or even an okay education is hard to come by. So much so that we are forced to seek out alternatives to traditional schooling, whether that is special or specialist provision, home schooling or a mix thereof. The latter may take the form of Elective Home Education or something called Education Otherwise Than At School (EOTAS). As Nicole Lee, a solicitor specialising in special educational needs, puts it: for some children with more significant needs by the time a plan for their child is agreed ‘their needs - or needs that have developed through inadequate SEND provision - have become so severe that any type of formal educational placement wouldn't work’. Parents are left with little option other than to assemble an alternative of their own.
In short, if anything we need even greater freedoms than those associated with previous reforms, if the quality and the variety of provision is to meet children’s needs. The new Bill, by reversing the presumption that parents have the right to educate their children at home, will make things much harder for parents already struggling to find any provision for their child. It was, in an unfortunate coincidence, introduced to parliament as the sadistic parents of Sara Shariff were sentenced for the abuse, torture and murder of their 10-year-old daughter. During which the judge commented on ‘the dangers of unsupervised home-schooling of vulnerable children’.
This will have no doubt cemented in the minds of many a relationship between the brutal killing of a child and the parents’ claim to be homeschooling; rather than with parents desperately trying to find a solution to their child’s inability to attend any kind of school provision. Not only will parents ‘no longer have an automatic right to home educate if their child is subject to a child protection investigation or under a child protection plan’. Fair enough. ‘For all children, if a local authority deem the education and/or home environment unsuitable’, we are told, they ‘will now have the power to intervene and require school attendance’. It will be up to Councils, the bodies that shut down schools for many months, to decide whether parents are ‘providing a good, safe education’, and that it is both ‘suitable’ for their child and ‘in their best interests’.
The Bill will not only remove the limited freedoms some state schools enjoy. It will also remove the freedom of parents to decide how to educate their own children. Whatever you think of home schooling - I’ve tried it and failed badly - it is a fundamental right and we shouldn’t give it up. Of course, children must be safeguarded from significant harm. While rightly introducing a requirement that parents are involved in decision-making where children are at risk of going into care, and strengthening the requirement of schools to be involved in safeguarding arrangements; the legislation is otherwise far too top-down and tech-driven in its orientation to the business of protecting children.
Instead of addressing why society and the state too often fail to intervene in the most glaring and avoidable examples of horrendous familial abuse; or doing anything to address the group-based child sexual exploitation by ‘grooming’ and rape gangs that nearly brought down the Bill - it is introducing an administrative change. There will be a common identification number for all children (a ‘consistent identifier’) that will be used across public services to ensure that children won’t fall through the cracks. While, of course, it is important that the authorities are able to track those suspected of carrying out abuse, does that justify the identification of all children in this way? Can safeguarding be reduced to data sharing protocols anyway?
And, as have I, it is easy for education to get lost in all this noise about other things. Whether its identity politics, lockdown, therapy, sex ‘education’, children’s welfare and protection, or the politics of who runs our schools - none of it has much to do with education. As a former school governor, I can honestly say I don’t remember ever having a committee meeting where we discussed what our children were being taught. Not really. While, of course, you might expect administration, cleaning contracts, the finances and much else besides to be a big part of the governance of schools - surely all of us, parents, teachers, governors, need to have a much bigger say over what is the whole point of sending them to school in the first place.
That we don’t - this says a lot about the neglect, at every level. Not just of our kids’ safety but of their education too.
Image: Alessandro Patelli
