Making Choices about your Kids’ Education

Having recently been approached by friends for advice about how to navigate their kids through the education system, I thought that it might help to put some of the discussions down in print.

Firstly, I do not proclaim to be an expert. Anyone who does make this claim fails to see that education is a deeply contested area that is driven more by dogma and politics than anything else. However, having been a secondary school teacher since 2003 and now coming to the end of a PhD at the UCL Institute of Education, I have a fairly critical view and might be able to offer some advice about how to make better decisions.

Philosophy of Education

I am assuming if you are reading this that you are a parent and that you therefore went to school at least 10 years ago. If this is a case, then you had a very different experience than kids at school now are having and no doubt than your kids will have. This is due to the ideological foundations of education having shifted in the last decade or so. Broadly, educational theory falls into two camps; the delivery of measurable knowledge is at one end of the spectrum and at the other, relationships, experience, love and play are valued. There has always been an element of both in any curriculum but the former has come to predominate in the UK and globally in the last decade. In a very crude sense, the former might be seen to be creating an individual who can succeed in the world as it is and the latter is interested in creating citizens who will change the world.

Testing

This has increased under global (PISA) and national (league tables) testing and reporting regimes that have created competition for schools and students to get better test scores. In the UK where parents tend to choose which school to send their kids to by looking at the league tables and where school budgets are determined by the number of kids sent to each school, this has resulted in the phenomenon of teaching to the test. At the risk of stating the obvious, coaching to pass an exam is often not aligned with offering a rounded education and the pressure put on kids has resulted in fairly well reported mental health problems and even reports of teenage suicide, something that I have sadly also come across in my professional experience.

The Education Select Committee warned about teaching to the test and the harm that it might do in their report on Testing and Assessment in 2008, recommending that the exam system and reporting of scores was overhauled. Sadly, subsequent governments have doubled down on the competition for test scores since then. While academies and free schools are reported as not having to follow the national curriculum, the reality is that they are opened up in competition with other schools for places and this further catalyses the problem, forcing them and other schools to further teach to the test and to put increasing pressure on students and their teachers. As many teachers see the experience that their pupils have in schools as fundamental to the curriculum, this has presented a very real existential crisis to the profession and may be why there is a shortage of teachers. A schools’ minister was recently questioned by the Education Select Committee about the mental health crisis that faces our kids and suggested that the additional national tests that were being introduced would help kids learn to deal with this. This approach means that our kids are some of the most frequently tested in the world. At the risk of going into too much detail, the tests that I’m talking about are summative assessments where only a score is offered to the kids, rather than suggestions for improvement as might be offered in a formative assessment.

Ofsted reports and league tables might offer you some guidance about where to choose but you need to be aware that (unless you are looking at one of the schools in the top 2%) there is very little correlation between a school’s position in the league tables or their Ofsted rating now and in 6 years’ time.  Thus, the data that you are looking at might not be suitable to predict the type of school that your kid will be sitting their SATs in and then graduating from.

SATs are one of many national summative tests that your kids will be asked to take in school and teachers are generally asked to get kids to a certain level (test score) that is based on the last test that they sat. This self-referential cycle means that whatever score your kid arrives in a class with is a likely predictor of what they will get at the end. I have always found this very problematic. Some parents have chosen to boycott tests like SATs to protect their kids from the stress and to keep them out of the cycle of reinforced achievement and failure.

Things that I’ve seen affect how kids do at school

•  Parents showing an interest in what they are doing – I’ve taught in some schools that are not renowned for good grades but kids whose parents show an interest get good grades (I mean take them to the zoo to support their biology, not spending hours on written homework)
• Parents who come to parents’ evening and ask how they can support their kid in their studies
• September babies do better at school as they are starting a year earlier than August babies – if you’re reading this, it’s probably too late to make changes
• Good teachers are obviously important, and you are also likely to come across ones who you don’t think are any good - In my experience, how charming or offensive a teacher is to you has little correlation with how well they support the kids so be careful with your judgement on this. In any case, there’s not much you can do to choose teachers so keep your fingers crossed and be wary of an excellent but old headteacher as they may retire soon.

National Changes

The amount of money going to schools has changed in the last year. Under New Labour, education budgets increased dramatically and much of this money went to the inner cities. For this reason, schools that I’ve taught at in central London have received over £11k per pupil while some in the provinces got less than £5k. Overall, the funding per pupil has gone down significantly in the last year and the balance has tipped in the provinces’ favour.

I was warned when I was training as a teacher 15 years ago that I must be prepared to become a political football and it has felt a lot like that since then. The teaching unions and Labour have recently been promoting the idea of a National Education Service (like the NHS) and this might swing the pendulum away from the current focus on test scores.

Types of Schooling

As is discussed above, the idea that free schools and academies have a less constrained curriculum is a red herring when they are promoting the competition that is driving teaching to the test.

This probably raises more questions than it answers but hopefully it shows you where not to focus your efforts when making the impossible choice about which school. If your kid starts at a school and they don’t like it, try to support them as best you can and, if all else fails, you can always home school or deschool them.

Rob Faure Walker

19.9.2018