Personal Troubles and Public Issues in Primary Education. What is to be done? by Andrew Pollard The pressures and challenges facing primary schools have grown and grown in recent years. Quality is maintained and children’s needs are met day after day in most schools - but only because of enormous teacher commitment and professionalism. Signs of systemic stress in England include very high levels of teacher workload and deep erosion of job satisfaction. This is leading to career reappraisal for many, mental health problems for some, and thus to early job changes and retirements. Is the pleasure which comes from responding to young children’s needs and from enabling their learning now being completely overwhelmed? There are also growing levels of pupil disengagement and anxiety as significant numbers of children struggle with the tightly specified core curriculum of English and Mathematics. Demand for special needs provision is rising and so too, when all else fails, are rates of exclusion in both temporary and permanent forms. Further, the pressures of formal assessment never seem to be far away. Headteachers are in the front line in terms of overall responsibility, with inspection being a particularly high-stakes concern. Most headteachers act to ameliorate external pressures when they can, and thus protect both teachers and children – but it is also commonplace to hear of schools within which managerialism appears to have taken over. Everyone, in one way or another, is struggling to cope with the situation. However, children, teachers and headteachers are not responsible for the circumstances that they now face. In part, the challenges reflect the decisions of particular governments. Indeed, in England we have had a decade in which ‘austerity’ has been imposed as an act of policy, with dire consequence for levels of poverty, inequality and public services. As if this were not bad enough, we have also had the introduction of a new national curriculum with all sorts of problems.
I contemplate the impact of this new curriculum with concern and regret, particularly because of the failure of my 2011 attempts, with Mary James, to promote curricular innovations inside the Department of Education which were evidence-informed and educationally principled. In fact, we were unable to change the thinking of Michael Gove and Nick Gibb who insisted on a highly specified, narrow, knowledge-based core curriculum. Whilst the Ministers claimed that this would enhance attainment for all, others advised that the levels at which the subject matter was pitched was likely to generate failure for many. Some readers may recall that whilst Mary James and I, by resigning at one point, forced a reappraisal and further period of consultation, the eventual outcome was that most of the available professional advice was ignored. I decried this in a blog which received considerable media coverage (note 1) and we published our entire correspondence with Michael Gove (note 2). One hundred academics wrote a letter, published in The Telegraph (note 3) warning of ‘the dangers of the new National Curriculum proposals’. Why were the Secretary of State and Minister for Schools so intransigent? They claimed to want to reduce teacher workload, to increase teacher autonomy and, above all, to provide better opportunities for all pupils. But the imposed result seems very different. The educational thinking of Ministers has, at times, seemed ‘ideological’ – in other words, it has appeared to be based on beliefs which are impervious to reason. Simplistic and selective use of reinforcing evidence is favoured over balanced, evidence-informed judgement of multiple experts and representative professional
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