83. SCHOOLS ARE GETTING IT WRONG AGAIN - It's Not The Uniforms, It's The Entire Broken System
My school is doing that thing schools do when they feel that a re-set is needed: focusing on school uniform. Covid protocols have led to some sloppiness in that area. The open windows have meant coats - once banned from the classroom - are now allowed to be worn in lessons. Lack of Covid-secure changing facilities for PE and Games have meant students who have such activities being allowed to wear their sports kit all day. Masks - specifically the ties around the ears - have made discreetly embedded earphones harder to spot and the hybrid combination of online and offline teaching has meant sometimes that electronic devices - also previously banned - have crept back into the classroom, even at times when they are not required. Furthermore, because students have been kept in year group "bubbles" (which - I reiterate - have never actually been bubbles), with the teacher coming to them instead of vice versa, our classrooms, once the well-loved domain of each subject teacher, have become abandoned husks of what they once were as, for ten minutes every hour, during the turnaround from lesson to lesson, students have been left alone to do what they will in them; a former thirty minute daily recess transformed into three not-quite ten minute "breaks" in which to spill food and drink and create other ingenious messes which all contribute to a general sense of disarray.
There is a sense the wheels have come off. And so the idea is we need to "get back to basics". Administer punitive sanctions for loose ties, untucked shirts, off-brand hoodies, phones and earphones. Get the kids to stand up behind their chairs in silence when the lesson begins. Ask them to remove their coats if the temperature no longer requires one. The argument goes that if the students look ready to learn, they will be ready to learn...and conversely, their currently sloppy appearance must therefore be a sign that they are not in the right mindset to do well at school. And, indeed, that latter conclusion feels like it has some credence. Classes are getting harder to start as they emerge from their ten minute turnaround; the quality of work does seem more superficial than it used to be - minimum effort rather than best effort; homework, when it is required, is seldom done; and because of the perception that the last two years have seen exams "cancelled" (which - I reiterate - never actually happened) those groups just starting their GCSE and A-levels certainly don't seem too bothered about passing them. They'll believe their exams are actually happening next year when they see it.
I agree with my colleagues that there are undesirable attitudes right now from many students at school, but I disagree that the solution is to get strict on uniform. I don't think the inconsistency with uniform is even a symptom of the problem. Look at great schools in other countries - Finland, for example - that don't require "smart" uniforms, or even uniforms at all, yet still achieve fantastic outcomes for students, and look at the universities we hope our brightest and best students will one day attend - places of the highest learning where no uniform is ever worn. Not to mention home-schools, free-schools, and self-taught individuals who have no uniform and learn in a wide variety of places - some tidy, some untidy. (Full disclosure: my desk at home is a chaotic mess, most of my learning takes place with loud punk rock playing in the background, and I am almost always wearing a hoodie while doing it). The problem is that we - as a country, as an education system, not simply as an individual school - have completely lost sight of what education is supposed to be.
I started this blog in recognition that philosophy is more than the four topics on the AQA A-level specification and more than the philosophical "themes" shoe-horned into the Religious Studies specifications at GCSE. That philosophy can be found in anything you turn your mind towards. My students, when I tell them this in person, can see that and over the years we have many lessons "off spec" - the origin of the name “Philosophy Unleashed” - devoted to broadening the range of philosophy on offer. Yet even in my own school, with students who understand and agree, it has been difficult to get many of them to take the time to write me an essay about something that interests them. The bulk of the writing on this blog remains my own, despite the open invitation to all to contribute. When I push students further on the reasons for their lack of essay submissions the answer is always the same - they haven't got time to write an essay they won't get qualification credits for. There's already too much GCSE/A-level work they have to do for them to willingly choose to add anything further to their plate.
And this really is indicative of the problem: we do not educate in schools anymore, we examine. And if it is not part of the exam, not going to lead to a qualification, then it is not worth doing.
As a result of such attitudes, when a pandemic takes away two years of final examinations, suddenly students in every year can see that the previous motivating argument for why they sit in the classroom from 8:30-3:30 five days a week is now gone. Because it turns out that when you teach English, Science, Maths, History, Languages, Music, Art, Geography, Drama, RE, PE, Philosophy or any of the other subjects I may have forgotten, not for the love of English, Science, Maths, History, Languages, Music, Art, Geography, Drama, RE, PE or Philosophy, etc., but for assessment in a final high stakes exam that will make you or break you in terms of your future, there is nothing left to motivate students - or some teachers - once that end goal is gone.
When teaching has no intrinsic value and becomes purely instrumental as a means to the final qualification, it’s not just the exam classes that suffer from a curriculum designed to achieve high attainment in a standardised final exam, but all classes. Currently the trend in UK schools is for "curriculum design" or "curriculum mapping" - a way of showing that from the start of their time in your subject to their final exam, the lessons were planned in an effective "sequence of learning". Although much of the language around such sequencing speaks of "learning", when translated through the filter of what learning in our schools actually means such "learning" has to be quantified, turned into "data", and that "data" ultimately means exam results. So most curriculum mapping is looking for logically structured courses which will be effective in getting students to pass their exams after a period of time. As the exams are not created by the teachers, but by outside exam boards, what this means in practice is emphasis on the arbitrary areas of a subject specified by an exam board and the particular methods they have chosen to examine that knowledge: exam technique. A student soon learns that the true thing they are being tested on is memory - can you remember the right bits of information and articulate them in the right way for this sort of question - not actual subject understanding. As a result, "learning" is often checked through similar structured memory tests: retrieval practice as it is commonly called. A sensible idea if what we want is people excellent at retrieving memorised facts by themselves without reference to any resources or collaborative checking, but not necessarily an important skill in a world where most fields are collaborative and resources are plenty and readily available. (Check out the bibliography, references list and acknowledgements page in any academic book - a writer who wrote "from memory" alone would not be taken seriously).
So in a secondary school setting, a well mapped curriculum might see Year 7 students new to the school learn the basics of some concept which will be revisited (interleaved) in Year 9 in more depth, and gone into greater depth still in Year 10 just so that a particular exam question can be answered in Year 11 (or developed even further for A-level examination in Year 13). Lots of “spaced practice”, as it is sometimes called. Questions might be devised that mimic the exam-style questions a students will be given at the end of the course, or which subtly teach the skills required for them. For example, in RE, we might prompt our students to support their answers at all times with a quote from scripture. On the one hand, this is good practice regardless of examination, because it shows understanding of the origin of some religious beliefs. But that's not how students see it. They soon see it as a box to tick on the “assessment objectives”, plonking in any old quote - often completely made up - to show us that they deserve a mark. The smarter ones memorise multi-use teachings - "love thy neighbour" - which they can use in any setting (questions on Jesus, questions on Christian ethics, questions on God as benevolent, questions on the problem of evil and suffering, etc…), even if the quote used is not actually the source of the belief they are writing about. They will still get the marks for this most of the time and it is a recommended exam technique, even if it doesn't actually mean that they truly understand the scripture in question. A sadder example comes from a Year 10 class I taught last week. "Why do we do debates in RE?" I asked them. "Because they are 12 mark AO2 essay practice" was their response. They weren't wrong - but we also debate issues because debating ideas is the very essence of critical thinking and, especially in issues of religion, showing that there are multiple sides to a particular belief can be an important step towards seeing through dogma and recognising the wide varieties of legitimate scriptural interpretation. We debate because, at its best, debate is philosophy. We do not accept a proposition just because it is asserted - we analyse and scrutinize until we can say something justified.
But for a student, within this system, a debate - however enjoyable - is just a stepping stone to an essay plan and, ultimately, a good grade. There is little intrinsic value to the act of debating itself, or any other task, beyond the role it might play in gaining the student a grade.
Which brings me back to behaviour. The students we see "on their phones" when they should be looking at us are often on there learning something. It just doesn't always seem that way to us because we're not familiar with the content or the pedagogy. A YouTube tutorial, perhaps? How to edit a video for TikTok? A heated discussion with a peer on an important issue of the day? Not every student - of course - some are playing games and goofing off: but there's value in both of those things too. Games teach strategy and emotional resilience, among other benefits. Goofing off is a necessary stress reliever which all of us partake it whenever we can - teachers too. From goofing off we learn how to take care of ourselves, and also where our stressors may be. Right now I am writing this blog post during a free period at school when I should be marking exam papers. Last week during this same period, I spent an hour making a Spotify playlist instead of marking. It turns out Thursday afternoons are when I reach my breaking point on marking workload and I need to decompress. If a student is on their phone at the start of your lesson every week at the same time - maybe something is going on the lesson before? Maybe your lesson is a cause of stress? Perhaps by observing their behaviour, rather than policing it, we can learn something from them?
But more to the point - how often do we as teachers reflect on why students might be so disengaged by the thought of our lessons? Because this happened long before COVID shut down the schools or brought technology and hooded sweaters into the classroom. Maybe our lessons are boring - not because of the subject, not because of our teaching (although it could be that too), but because we are building them on the premise of forcing students to learn a pre-defined and non-reflexive set of arbitrarily specified facts and skills in a particular way only so that they can jump through hoops and satisfy exam boards to be graded and ranked. Because, of course, the intent is not for everybody to succeed. No A*s or grade 9 for everybody - that would mean the exam isn't challenging or rigorous enough. (As soon as results get too good too often, the old exam system is scrapped and replaced with a new one). A classroom of students know that at least some of them in the room will do badly in that subject - the system is explicitly designed with fluctuating grade boundaries that make it necessarily so. So all it takes is for the idea to get into their head that they will be one of the necessary failures and just watch them switch off. Then there's the students who simply don't care about the grade because they don't want to do the subject but either had no choice or had to choose the best of a bad bunch. Why wouldn't they switch off in a lesson designed only to help them achieve an accolade they have no desire to achieve? What use is exam technique to a person with no intention of ever using it?
Behaviour, ultimately, comes from "buy in" - and when education becomes reduced only to examination, and facilitating examination, then exam success is the only "buy in" we can offer in a curriculum built entirely around that endeavour. Students suspicious of exams, or not interested in them, are left with very little to interest them once the subject becomes secondary to the terminal assessment. And a bored or disinterested student will, of course, behave "badly" (or completely naturally, if you lose the judgement and recognise it as a logical response to being stultified). They will see school only as a place to have a laugh with their friends and cause some disruption because they, quite legitimately, don't see it as a place of learning, only a place they are legally obliged to attend each day. With very little learning going on - just rote regurgitation wearing fancy new "evidence-based" clothes - why not take a snooze on the desk instead of wasting your attention on the life-suck? You can always cram the night before and do a decent enough job.
Which brings us back to clothes.
Schools like to focus on getting the uniform right because it is a visible signal. "Tuck your shirt in and straighten your tie" suggests to students that they are being watched and a well presented student suggests to the world a person proud of their appearance and invested in their education. But really, it is a distraction from the real behavioural issues facing the classroom: how can we get schools to become places that actually educate their students so that the students themselves choose, without coercion, to engage in the learning on offer? And why do we stay so committed to a system that offers them little more than unfair division and categorisation based on arbitrary memory tests?
On the day this piece will be published my Year 11 students will have been back in our school for over two months since the government re-opened places of education following the Winter lockdown. In that time, we have taught them nothing new and instead rigorously examined them for weeks. Multiple exams for every subject. Over thirty exams per student. The exams are still ongoing. When they finally finish the exam period, they will have been with us for nearly a quarter of a year - and that’s after two months in lockdown and the previous term full of disruptions and prolonged self-isolation - and they will have received nothing that looks even a little bit like education in that time. The same is true for our Year 13s, but we let them go on "study leave" a few weeks ago to revise at home. This is British education in 2021. Nothing being taught but a lot of data gathered. Data that is generated through unrealistic and unnecessary testing of memory and regurgitation. Numbers generated so that the students can be categorised and sorted for their "next steps" into further or higher "education". Successes and failures. Winners and losers. Dressed neatly in suits and ties, shirts tucked in and stood in obedient lines, waiting for the next pointless tasks they are assigned. Ready to work in the world.
Author: DaN McKee
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