The UK's new Department of Education's first bill is to give thousands more schools around the country the opportunity to become academies. One of the often asserted benefits of becoming an academy is increased curricula freedom, but freedom from what exactly? Freedom from overly rigid curriculum constraints is, from the perspective of most, a good thing. But when exactly does the much welcomed freedom to foster innovative and response approaches to teaching and learning become freedom from the responsibility to give our children a broad and balanced education? How can we facilitate the former whilst avoiding the exceedingly unfortunate scenario that the latter presents? How are we to react when we hear of schools dropping entire subjects at whim solely in order to improve league-table performance?
These are the kinds of questions stimulated by a report published by Civitas last December called 'The Secrets of Academies' Success' by Anastasia de Waal (2009).
In this report de Waal finds that academies' exemption from the Freedom of Information Act, and their general reluctance to make known their GCSE and equivalent results by subject, means that it is actually very hard to determine why and how academies have proved the success story they have been claimed to be. I would also question how, without such information, we can be sure that the education that academies provide can in any way be said to be 'successful' by the usual liberal yardsticks: that is, a comprehensive and balanced education for all young people that enables them to better understand themselves and their world? As we saw in the previous post, many educationalists have argued that being initiated into the disciplines provides the surest way to such an understanding.
On this score, data collected by de Waal and in another study by Titcombe (2008) do show some cause for concern. Out of the 16 academies that were prepared to release their results for de Waal's study, one did not have a single entry for GCSE geography, and many other academies in the study show considerably low entry rates for both geography and history (de Waal, 2009: 46). Titcombe presents us with one academy that offered no GCSE science at all in its curriculum, with just 1% of pupils gaining an A*-C in history and only 6% in geography, despite of which an OfSTED investigation managed to find that the curriculum was 'sound' and the school 'improving rapidly'! (Titcombe, 2008: 54) There is no reason to suppose that this state of affairs is restricted only to the academies who agreed to take part in these studies and indeed I have heard that there are many academies that do not offer geography as a GCSE option.
Both of these authors think that the cause of these dwindling GCSE subjects lies in a greater emphasis in academies on vocational or, as they are sometimes derogatorily referred too, 'soft' subjects. According to Titcombe, vocational courses on the NVQ model offer no more than "training in how to respond to the circumstances required in a specified job application" and that "such teaching is carefully structured to make minimum possible cognitive demands and is unconcerned with general intellectual development." (Titcombe, 2008: 57) To put it bluntly, as Titcombe himself does, the relatively unchallenging nature of these qualifications and the high level of student success are what ultimately enable academies to shine in the league-tables. It would be unfair to suggest that it is only academies that display such worrying trends and it is rather symptomatic of a zeitgeist that is affecting school curricula as a whole. Titcombe stresses that he does not mean to devalue vocational education outright, and I second this. However, we should surely be disturbed by this overall trend, for there are good grounds for supposing that every young person's opportunities should remain as broad and comprehensive as possible, and this includes having access to subjects such as geography and history.
It sometimes feels as though there is an implicit assumption these days that young people from disadvantaged backgrounds will be necessarily better served by a 'relevant' and vocational curriculum, and these reports suggest that academies risk limiting the curriculum that these students get to experience in just such a way. This is a rather chilling thought for me. I myself grew up and was schooled in one of the 10% most deprived wards in the country. The schools I attended sadly failed to provide me with a satisfactory education in the humanities (the secondary school has since become a 'Business & Enterprise College' so I doubt the matter has improved). Meanwhile, I spent many happy hours as a kid with a pack of educational picture cards displaying the kings and queens of England and according to my mother I could chronologically recall the monarchs of our country from 1066 to the present day. At the end of every school day I would rush joyfully to the library where my 'real learning' could begin, where I could pour over books and learn fact after glorious fact about distant countries and their ways of life.
This was all very far from the world of local and immediate circumstances and premature worries about filling in job applications. I summon up all of these memories not because I hold the rather reactionary belief that everyone should know the kings and queens of England off by heart, or that children ought to be all as enraptured by books and the knowledge contained therein as I once was. The plain fact is that a great number of people just aren't interested by these things and it seems unclear as to what purpose is served by forcing anyone to engage with such knowledge beyond the age of 14. However, what I do argue passionately for is our responsibility to keep open a space in which the opportunity of accessing such knowledge exists. How can one know that one is 'turned off' by academic study unless one has had a significant and prolonged chance to discover whether or not this is the case? It seems absurd to have to make such a philosophically simple point, but it seems as though it is one that can be all too easily forgotten.
The knowledge I acquired from reading my books, and learning by rote my kings and queens, has not necessarily served me materially by landing me a better paid job then my peers. Nor is it likely that it has made me more healthy or happy or provided me with any kind of flawless character. But I would nevertheless not want to swap it for either material advantage, nor for perfect health, happiness and well-being. For me, education is far too important to be utterly reduced to questions of 'competence' in dealing with immediate circumstances and to supplying children with the technical skills required to merely 'get along' in life or improving their health and well-being. This is precisely why the trends reported above in our academies are such cause for concern. The prospect of a curriculum centred purely on these concerns is unnerving. For all who believe in real curricula freedoms - the freedom that a young person has to decide who they want to be without being hastily co-opted into vocational studies - this cut-rate curriculum must be resisted with all our strength.
I need to make it clear, if it isn't so already, that what all of this amounts to is not an argument against academies. My conclusion, as is de Waal's, is simply that our new government needs to ensure that there is more transparency on the part of the academies. We also need to make sure that young people from disadvantaged backgrounds are at least given an opportunity to study subjects such as geography, history, science etc. This has to be the case if Michael Gove is to avoid contradictions with what he has said very clearly elsewhere about the essential place of what he calls 'traditional' subjects.
I am not saying that I would necessarily see eye to eye with Gove's idea of what a subject should look like, but at least I can say that we would share some common ground here...
References
de Waal, A. (2009) 'The Secrets of Academies' Success'. Civitas. Available at http://www.civitas.org.uk/pdf/secrets_success_academies.pdf
Titcombe, R. (2008) 'How Academies Threaten the Comprehensive Curriculum', Forum, Volume 50, November 1, pp.49-59.
Available at http://www.wwwords.co.uk/rss/abstract.asp?j=forum&aid=3194
Photo is by Flickr user Thomas Hawk and is made available under a Creative Commons license
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