teaching.mrstacey.org.uk

 There’s a saying in the UK that it’s not what you know that gets you places, it’s who you know.

This was a reflection of the fact that in a Britain divided by class lines as it certainly was until the 1950′s ¹ the people who were successful were (by and large) the product of a public school ² education. Through school and family connections, young people made the contacts that would get them jobs, incomes and political power in their futures

In post-war Britain, with the introduction of a welfare state and extension of compulsory education, academic qualifications were supposed to become the new currency. Qualifications showed what you could do, and in theory at least what you were capable of doing, and have been a large part of the growth of social mobility in this country in the last 70 years. Every educational reform (the introduction of GCSEs and the 2000 reform of the A’Level system) has been designed to maintain the integrity of this idea – qualifications give people the keys to their futures.

The problem is, just as the old system failed to keep it’s currency in the new post-war world, so the system of qualifications is failing to keep it’s currency in this new connected world.

The idea that the skills young people will need can be delivered through subjects tested by formal qualifications is flawed. And even more so when schools are forced to justify their existence on the results of their pupils. Academic qualifications as they exist today are designed to test recall of knowledge, and to a limited extend the degree to which students can come to decisions based on that knowledge. To make the system fair, mark schemes are developed, patterns of answers developed and before you know where you are teachers are teaching students how to pass the exam, rather than focussing on the learning. Any incentive for schools or teachers to try new things are removed from the system by league tables and results analysis which, however well intentioned, reduces learners to statistics and forces teachers to explain why students aren’t doing better than last year.

Learners themselves don’t protest at this because they (and their parents) have been sold the lie that this is what is needed to advance in the world. Meanwhile businesses complain that new workers don’t have the skills they need, and a further tweak is made to the system. Nothing big ever changes, because we’ve all bought into the model as the best thing for our young people.

Rubbish. If this genuinely is the best system we can come with then that shows us as professional educators in a very bad light indeed. The system remains horribly biased towards those young people who have strong linguistic intelligence. Other groups of students are either able to coast through, hopefully learning some valuable life lessons through the hidden curriculum, or find themselves systematically told they are no use and churned out on to the scrap heap at 16. Some lucky ones may find alternative methods of learning (the growth of apprenticeships is one of the best thing to happen to education in the UK in the last ten years). You’ll find the rest at the bottom of our society. The poor (and getting poorer) who are becoming increasingly disconnected from the rest of society and who have very restricted access to opportunities to do anything about that. ³

There are some glimmers of hope. In England, if the proposed diploma system can break free of the political mess it finds itself in, and if actual teachers become involved in the process then it will show that other systems are viable. In Wales the Welsh Bacc looks like it is going to take off in a big way over the next few years and offers another alternative model.

But maybe those of us with one eye to the future should use the other to glance behind us. ‘It’s not what you know, it’s who you know’ may offer us another glimpse at what the connected schools of the future will need to be – a place where students make contacts with people around the world who will help them shape their futures.