While the debate over the potential development of new grammar schools rages, I dream of a school that nurtures every person who passes through it by giving them the freedom to grow into their own talents; a school that gives all of our children the skills to make their own opportunities.
Welcome to The Hive.
Here, in our early years department, our children gain a foundation in English and Maths; developing their basic practical, social and self-regulation skills. Their free play is observed to create a profile of their interests, aptitudes and abilities that will follow them into our primary department, age 7.
Our Primary department is the jewel in our crown. Here, our children take part in assessment centres that identify their natural aptitudes across a wide range of dimensions, as they develop. Our children cannot fail. There is no fail. Our children find meaning and motivation by engaging with their strengths and interests.
As a learning community, we support our teachers to pursue their own research and are proud to have the highest level of school teachers with doctoral level qualifications in our history. By adopting a system of supported independent learning, we are able to concentrate the time of our teaching staff where it will make the most difference, and offer our children access to subject specialists from an earlier age.
Specialist teaching in English and Maths continues throughout the primary years with the remaining learning time being dedicated to our children’s work: aptitude and interest led projects. Our teachers help children develop the subject-specific skills and knowledge they need to successfully complete their own projects; they connect them with others who share their interest across the school and suggest extension projects that help children create new knowledge about the subject and their interest in it. Our teachers teach subject knowledge and skills to motivated pupils.
This system is supported by the process assistants who staff our learning areas. Their role is to facilitate the use of simplified, but robust research methodology and processes that keep our children’s projects moving forward. Our process assistants help our children develop grit, initiative, resilience and resourcefulness.
In addition, every child is assigned a mentor who is responsible for their pastoral needs, their achievement record; their social communication skills, their character education and school-parent communication. They help ensure balance within the school by supporting children as they create the project reports that they will, after teacher approval, communicate to their peers. Our mentors help our children understand and express themselves in a positive way so that they can work well with others to reach their goals.
Project reports are reviewed again, in preparation for secondary education, age 14, when our mentors support our children, in consultation with their teachers, to identify the specific academic subjects or other opportunities that will enable them to maximise their strengths and life satisfaction. Subjects and opportunities that are wider because of our exchange partnerships with other learning communities.
It’s quite a dream. How can we extend the parts of this dream that already exist to make that school a reality? Should we?
* Lyn Newman is a Liberal Democrat member with an interest in education.
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28 Comments
@Lyn Newman: “In addition, every child is assigned a mentor who is responsible for their pastoral needs, their achievement record; their social communication skills, their character education and school-parent communication.”
Mentorship may mean different things during child/pupil development. A 16 year old determined to study maths and physics might appreciate the same mentor as a pupil who wants to study history of art. Or a different one. Or that mentor worked for me when I was 14 but I think differently now.
As an adult mentor, I’ve shown how things work — sometimes how things work for me. Show me how things work for you.
There is no such choice as ‘grammar and comprehensive. The existence of Grammar Schools create Secondary Archaic (not ‘modern at all!) Schools whose intake of more able children is reduced.
@ Tony Dawson As my first David Brent type boss said to me: “Don’t bring me problems; bring me solutions. Anything else is just moaning, my dear. Do you want to be a moaner?” Aside from the misogyny, he had a point.
@Phil Beesley Yes, that is the great thing about mentors – they are focused on the person they are mentoring and the mentoring relationship, which can change its focus as the needs of the child develop.
In terms of the focus of the mentoring I propose, the work of the Jubilee Centre at The University of Birmingham has influenced my ideas greatly though, to be clear, they propose teachers. I propose mentors because I think constantly adding to teacher workloads like this spreads them so thinly that it becomes another demand, rather than a pleasure: demoralising and ineffective – but that is only my opinion.
Lyn
Not sure I’m fully onboard with the vision above being practical, but thanks for kicking off a “what should we want” discussion. That is more important than rehashing the past.
If you will forgive my re-iteration -as I think this is an important and developing debate- The Fisher Education Act of 1871 (if I recall correctly) provided for the first time in English history opportunities for children from poor backgrounds (“disadvantaged” might be today’s word) to acquire some useful skills in the “real world”. Literacy and numeracy for example. The opposing (although not perhaps contradictory) view was that the intention was to turn out clerks for industry. Either way it was progress.
What do we need today? (and this is to address Lyn Newman’s question) I suggest numeracy and literacy (including IT literacy) and life or “soft” skills such as team-working, inter-personal relationships and communication skills. Also self-starting skills such as independent research and independent thinking. But why not also develop other skills and talents such as art, drama, the performing arts, science, history, literature (a very good way of understanding human relationships, morals, ideas etc). I recall reading Thomas Hardy’s “Far From the Madding Crowd” as a schoolboy. The Chapter headed “The Hiring” has stayed with me. Is it not unlike the issue of zero hours contracts today?
@PSI That’s good news. That’s all that I hoped to achieve.
@Grahame I totally agree that English and Maths should form the foundation of any education system in the UK. They are crucial for life and the only qualifications that employers ask for across the board.
My experience of children has shown me that they are, in the main, little scientists who have an extraordinary grasp of IT and create their own educationally valuable socio-dramatic play without the interference of adults.
That shouldn’t be taken as evidence that I support autonomous education. I absolutely do not. It does mean that I support the right of children and young people to play an active role in shaping their education on a day to day basis.
If we want to achieve equality of opportunity, in my opinion, we need to look at the way our children think because pushing them harder academically doesn’t seem to making that much difference overall. If we want more equality, we need to help ‘poorer’ children think like ‘richer’ children.
If we look at careers: those at the lower end, request CVs composed of facts in a linear order, not unlike our current curriculum. Each fact fitting into a separate box. Careers at the higher end, e.g the civil service, require applicants to show how their experiences evidence competencies. I would argue that in the 21st century a competency based curriculum would enable students to study the actual subjects they were most suited to while still allowing for robust measurement of progress and comparison between schools. Would you agree that a competency based curriculum might be more appropriate?
I think we need to set up educational systems that evolve and learn and have flexibility built in, not require periodic system-wide legislative kicks from central government to reset them themselves.
For me, that involves questioning what the set-up is like ‘behind the scenes’.
Lyn, in your Hive, what are the relationships the teachers and their managers have with universities, educationalists, employers (and democratic bodies)? What discretion is there to evolve the curriculum / learning approach in response to new evidence and theories (and new economic / social developments) — to what extent does it respond to the local culture, social context, geography and economy and to what extent does it response to ‘national’ priorities?
Who is the advocate for such factors and what level of independence do they have to critique decisions?
Does the institution have the ability and incentives to hold its hands up and admit mistakes, make related changes without crippling fear of heads rolling and funding being cut?
To what extent does this institution work with others locally, or does its culture teach children implicitly ‘we’re not like the people who go to X school’ (for X, Y or Z reason…)?
Lyn Newman
Clearly we are in agreement about basic skills which employers look for. And of course basic skills facilitate the acquisition and development of other skills. It is expected (and I should hope required) that any school whether in the the public sector or the independent sector should aim to achieve. Evelyn Waugh once wrote that there are three kinds of school: very good school, good school and school.
Your direct question is whether a competency based curriculum might be more appropriate.
Certain competencies (as I have mentioned above) are in my view an absolute requirement. I suppose this could be described as the “training” aspect of the education system. What employers want (perhaps what we all want) is teenagers who leave school with sufficient skills and knowledge and personal attributes which fit them for life and work in the community: and this includes an ability for self-discipline, paying attention, life-learning, taking work seriously and so on. Well-rounded people. Unfortunately England is now a country in which it is no longer necessary to grow up. Tell me if this is too harsh a judgement.
In short, evidence-based competencies are a necessity but there is so much more that education can do in developing children’s interests and talents. It is certainly about putting in skills but it is also about drawing out thinking and character and also a desire for further learning and understanding and discovery (which you have appeared to allude to).
Lyn, I am interested in your use of Character Education. We, in LDEA had Tom Harrison from the Jubilee Centre leading us in discussion about that last February. It is important for people to understand what it means; the Jubilee Centre make it clear that it is not about indoctrination or any attempt to mold children into one particular type of character, that some Conservatives might want. They also know from their research that of course parents play the big part in this; that means that your dream school needs to work closely with parents. I would add that it needs to work with the local community and be supported by the local authority and voluntary organisations, since there is strong evidence that how children develop in school is greatly influenced by what goes on outside the school. This highlights a particular need for those from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Nigel, Chair, LDEA
Lyn Newman
My experience of children has shown me that they are, in the main, little scientists who have an extraordinary grasp of IT and create their own educationally valuable socio-dramatic play without the interference of adults
My experience of actually teaching computer programming is that what the outside world thinks of as “good at IT” says nothing whatsoever about their real ability in proper computer science. Surface ability to play around with applications does not mean ability to use logical reasoning and abstraction skills to write code. If anything there’s a negative correlation, as being “good at IT” means they think they know all about it, but they get shocked when they find out that proper Computer Science is very different from what schools calls “IT”.
I have been teaching computer programming at university for 27 years. Students now, who have grown up using IT applications do no better than students when I started, when many would never have seen or touched a computer before coming to us.
grahame lamb
this includes an ability for self-discipline, paying attention, life-learning, taking work seriously and so on. Well-rounded people. Unfortunately England is now a country in which it is no longer necessary to grow up.
Yes, I would very much agree with this.
In my experience as a university lecturer, lack of self-discipline and inability to take work seriously is the major reason for failure. Children seem to be brought up mollycoddled, thinking they are little gods and the world revolves around them, and that makes them ill-equipped when they are put into a situation where they have to work themselves.
When I tell my students they should be spending 10 hours a week on my module, they are visibly shocked. They have 3 hours of lectures and 2 hours of timetabled labs, but they did not realise they are expected to spend about the same amount of time on self-study. They do four modules at a time, and as I explain that adds up to 40 hours a week, which is normal working time for an employee, but they think I’m being really cruel to demand it of them.
Too many students drop out of attendance when the work becomes challenging, and then they are doomed to fail. They have this idea they can catch up by “revision” i.e. mindless memorisation, just before the exam, but it just doesn’t work like that.
I have just marked the resit exam for my module. 50 students were registered for it. I sent a message out to all of them saying the best way to pass would be to work hard in past papers, which I made available to them, and if they did that and sent their attempts to me, I would give them feedback and show them where they were misunderstanding.
How many took up my offer?
One.
Lyn .Now this is the sort of thinking I want to hear about from Liberal Democrats .It clearly child centred offering both support and development .Can this approach be taken through to secondary level ? .Children /young adults don’t all progress at the same pace in each and every subject and mentoring would appear to have some value in terms of individual personal development.
@ Matt
That’s quite a lot of questions, so I will keep my answers brief with the proviso that these are only my answers to those questions.
On relationships between teachers and those “above” them – in this system I would see teachers in schools treated in the same way as professors in universities, which is why I have split their role to give them the space to pursue excellence in their subject.
Discretion to evolve practice – this system would give all parties the autonomy to try, keep or discard new ideas in the context of their own practice.
Response to context and environment – Increased autonomy enables the most able students and the most innovative teachers to thrive and increases responsivity, while robust monitoring of competency based outcomes prevents poor teachers from hiding behind that freedom.
Advocates within the system – By separating the roles in the system, we make sure that all of the important things can be advocated for. Teachers – academic subject knowledge; Process assistants – cognitive and process skills; and mentors – soft communication and social skills. In reality, those people would work together so there would be jointly agreed advocacy which is more powerful, and, with increased autonomy for students, there is the possibility of a pupil/parental mandate.
Ability and incentive to recognise and change bad practice – psychology would tell us that once created, an institution will protect itself so we should probably expect it to try.
Connection to community and culture – gives pupils more autonomy and they will learn about the things that are important to them in their real lives and communities because that is their starting point. The process of this education helps them see this and see beyond these immediate circumstances. For most people, this type of education has to be quite explicit and therefore has to be specific to their context.
@Grahame I see what you are trying to get at when you say people don’t need to grow up. The reality for many young people is that they attend a school where they are encouraged to think big and then leave to get a job flipping burgers in McDonalds. For them growing up doesn’t mean becoming the things you list; it means finding out that they can’t really do the things they were told they could. That life may never give them those opportunities.
The problem there, for me, is that everything in their education is externally driven including the rewards: do this, do it in this way, do it now. The promise is that if they follow direction: external rewards will be theirs. The reality is that they work hard and end up in McDonalds doing this, in this way, now.
My solution is to let them have the opportunity to motivate themselves, to learn how to create their own projects, how to deal with failure and how to recognise that there are very real limits on what any of us can do – but in stages so they can adapt – not all at once right at the very end of their education. We simply shouldn’t expect them to be pleasantly obedient towards a system that raises their aspirations and consistently fails to deliver.
@Nigel Thank you for commenting. I hope that you can see from my responses to Matt that I am certainly coming from the same viewpoint. I’m glad you have already had contact with them in person. I’ve only had the pleasure of reading their resources.
Students now, who have grown up using IT applications do no better than students when I started, when many would never have seen or touched a computer before coming to us
Still as true as ever: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1036.html
@ Matthew I think we may actually be in agreement but have our wires crossed. When I refer to young children (my youngest are 2 and 4) I am referring to pre-school children, before they have their natural instincts eroded by being spoon-fed. My 4 year old understands if-then and other very basic constructs of programming quite easily.
My eldest (23, training to be a nurse) used to come home from secondary and ask for my help so I would sit with her and try and help her think through what she needed to do. Her response: don’t bother, mum. I’ll ask my teacher. Her teacher, under pressure to get results and time-poor, would tell her, word by word, what she should write and then mark it.
We need to give them the opportunity to learn these skills and attitudes through things they are actually to motivated to learn: their strengths and interests, and then, once they are older and can understand the value of studying an externally set curriculum in their area of interest, we can reasonably expect them to embody desirable study skills and attitudes.
Lyn Newman
Regarding the point in your third paragraph, is this the Montessori approach or something different (I understand, incidentally, that Prince George is attending such a school).
Regarding your first and second paragraphs I do not think that schools should make any promises (how could they?) just that they should provide a service, offer opportunities and encourage. Surely encourage. A boy or girl who is discouraged will not enjoy life to the full personally and there will be a general deficit in our communities.
My 4 year old understands if-then and other very basic constructs of programming quite easily
Basic constructs of programming are preconditions, postconditions and invariants, and I’d be very surprised if a 4-year-old understood them.
If-then isn’t programming; it’s scripting.
Thought it might be useful to drop an example of where some of these ideas are being used and the range of different answers that have been provided to some of these questions: http://education.nh.gov/innovations/hs_redesign/index.htm
@ Grahame No-one agrees a “social contract” the state. Does that mean that no such contract exists? No all promises are explicit. If a system aims to raise aspiration; it would be foolish to act surprised when aspiration is raised and then dashed by reality. If a system teaches children to do this, in this way, when I tell you; it would be foolish to expect those leaving the system to enter university ready to interpret this or that in your own way, constructing your own ideas from it, in your own time.
The current system simply fails many children on both counts.
@Grahame Sorry I didn’t answer your first question. I was also talking to my 2 year old, so apologies for the poor spelling.
Re: Montessori – yes and no. Montessori is extremely prescriptive, even though it gives the child the impression of freedom by letting them chose freely from a range of activities at any one time. It has benefits in the early years, particularly in creating competency in self care and social skills.
You are right to sniff it out though: my thoughts have been influenced by Montessori in terms of emphasising competency in the practical skills of life and freedom with robustly measured outcomes.
The ateliers that form part of Reggio and PZ at Harvard also influenced me in terms of improving communication skills and balancing the education of all students by “making learning visible” (PZ).
My 4 year old understands if-then and other very basic constructs of programming quite easily
I would say the basic constructs of programming are abstraction and generalisation. A big problem is those who just don’t seem to be able to move past seeing it just in terms of control structures and variables holding primitive values.
See Joel Spolsky’s famous article here. I don’t agree with all he says here, because the first hurdle where many fall down is failing to understand the abstraction principles of object oriented programming. However what he says here:
If I may be so brash, it has been my humble experience that there are two things traditionally taught in universities as a part of a computer science curriculum which many people just never really fully comprehend: pointers and recursion.
is spot on.
The issue is that to learn things like this there is no other way than to practice, practice, practice. This is where many students go wrong, because they have been brought up to confuse learning with memorisation. Sadly, and disastrously, too many school-level qualifications encourage this damaging misconception. When this is combined with an attitude that causes them to give up rather then push on when they hit something challenging, they are doomed.
Lyn, I am enjoying watching you think. This is much more interesting than the previous discussions about grammars, which readers may have noticed my critiques of…
Is this education al model, ‘The Hive’, a real place or is this a suggested model for education?
I’m reading a lot of jargon in this piece eg: ‘Their role is to facilitate the use of simplified, but robust research methodology and processes that keep our children’s projects moving forward. Our process assistants help our children develop grit, initiative, resilience and resourcefulness’ but am not clear how this is not already the same as schools which already have in place support assistants, subject teachers who discuss individual learning targets and pastoral tutors who teach ‘soft’ skills. Plus many schools already have peer mentoring programmes.
In terms of teaching ‘character’ and ‘resilience’ etc.. schools have tried and tested methods for this – sport, music, drama, activities such as Duke of Edinburgh… Let’s invest in these areas and not do as the Tories are doing, downgrading this vital areas to favour a small number of academic subjects.
As usual there is nothing new under the sun, especially when there is no new money. just a rearrangement of the educational jargon.
@Helen So your proposal is more of the same? If that was working, this debate would not be taking place.
As I said at the end of my post, this is about extending those things that currently exist to create something more effective. You may understand this better if you take a look at the New Hampshire example that I shared in the comments.
On jargon, I have studied sociolinguistics at degree level, so I understand the value of jargon and how it is used in social contexts to perform identity and convey in-group membership. I have used it here because it is appropriate. I could have said: ‘Yow dae read it, did ya luv?’ but unless you’re from a group where that language is expected, it simply wouldn’t be appropriate.
I certainly welcome the vision outlined in the introductory paragraph to this article.
Rather than be dragged by the Tories into the minefield of grammar schools, Lib Dems should be articulating a positive approach to improving the education system in this country for the benefit of everybody.