Educating Ruby (16 page)

Honywood’s approach to engaging parents is similarly thoughtful:

You’ll remember that the CBI called for closer cooperation between schools and families, as one of their headline recommendations. Here it is in vibrant, successful action.

Each of these very different schools has in some real way demonstrated that it is possible to offer educational experiences that systematically develop confident and agile minds – and get great results. But a smattering of schools, you might argue, can hardly change the world. In addition to these living examples of the way forward we need ways of disseminating and scaling up what they are doing. And there are indeed tried and tested ways in which such good ideas can and do get magnified and broadcast. Here are a few.

One of the simplest is called a school cluster. Clusters were originally developed in the middle of the 20th century as a means of sharing resources across schools, especially in rural areas. Schools could share expensive resources – a swimming pool, a theatre or a specialist facility. But these days it’s increasingly how schools are organising their own professional development too. (Maybe your school is part of a cluster, sometimes also called an academy chain.)

Under the Blair government, clusters of schools were actively encouraged by the National College
8
as a means of spreading ideas which might improve schools, and it is clear that they did have some success.
9
Most recently, borrowing the idea of the teaching hospital from the NHS, successful schools were invited to become ‘teaching schools’ with the responsibility of gathering clusters of schools around them to share good practice. Specifically they were given the opportunity to organise initial teacher training and organise professional development for teachers. By November 2013, there were 357 teaching schools and 301 teaching school alliances in England. The idea of such alliances is to encourage locally led self-improvement. Sounds like a good idea.

But if we tell you that a school can only be a teaching school if it is graded ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted, then you can immediately see a problem. For if the main criterion for admission is Ofsted’s judgement, then the kinds of activities which such alliances promote may well be skewed towards
the kinds of activities which are approved of by Ofsted, but not the kinds which we have seen at Miriam Lord or North Shore. We know hundreds of schools which would make excellent teaching schools that would be graded merely ‘good’ by Ofsted. Their ethos might well be more conducive to real-world learning than those which happened to have got the ‘outstanding’ mark.

In some cases teaching schools have set out their stall with an agenda that is closer to ours than to Ofsted’s. An example of this is St Ambrose Barlow Roman Catholic High School in Salford. Again there is a passionate and well-informed head teacher at work, Marie Garside. Over several years Marie has adopted her version of what she calls the creative curriculum – ‘developing in all students the creativity to be able to thrive throughout their lifetimes’. Recently the teaching alliance she leads has become a hub for expansive education in the north-west. Marie and her cluster of schools have chosen to focus on teacher research. She believes that student outcomes are likely to improve if schools can engage with deep questions about the subjects they teach. The alliance is linked to the two universities in Manchester, which help them to explore science and engineering, as well as research methods, and also has long-standing relationships with cultural organisations such as galleries and museums across the region.

But the reason we mention them here is that we know that clusters of schools working together are great ways of growing and nurturing more innovation. We just need to ensure that the goal of any imaginary ‘Mod School Alliance’ is to create more opportunities of the kind that we have been describing in this book, and not merely to improve test scores in a range of academic subjects.

In a small way we have been involved in developing an extended cluster of like-minded schools under the banner of the Expansive Education Network. The hundreds of schools and thousands of teachers, many from overseas, that are part of this group explicitly choose to associate themselves with three of the core beliefs which have run throughout this book. First, they seek to
expand
the goals of education beyond traditional success criteria to include the kinds of habits of mind we talked about earlier. Second, they want to
expand
young people’s capacity to deal with a lifetime of tricky things. Third, they want to
expand
their compass beyond the school gates. Expansive education assumes that rich learning challenges and opportunities abound in young people’s out-of-school lives of music, sport, community and family activities.

At this point you may be wondering whatever happened to local educational authorities. Weren’t they meant to be doing this kind of thing – supporting groups of local schools to get better? Indeed they were. But, sadly, too many of them became casualties of political warfare, were drained of financial support and shrivelled up, died out completely or became privatised. And some, truth to tell, weren’t very good. But a few remain and are thriving. One is the East London borough of Thurrock, which is small enough to gather all of its head teachers together in a large room to really think things through and large enough to have some capability to support schools to develop. Thurrock is flying a flag for expansive education, with all of its schools being encouraged to experiment with new and innovative ways of teaching children, and all the while engaging teachers in evaluating this. (We know, by the way, from the work of researchers such as Professor John Hattie that when teachers become learners again their teaching improves, as does the
achievement of their pupils.) Thurrock has decided that it can create a climate in which children can be taught to be creative and resilient at the same time as improving test results. To make sure that teachers and parents understand what they are up to, they have launched an annual awards ceremony to make this point.

The London Challenge is perhaps the best-known example of how clusters of schools can join forces to change the way they do things. Led by Sir Tim Brighouse, a highly experienced and inspirational local authority leader, it was conceived with a strong moral purpose: that every young person in London should receive a good or better education than they were receiving then (in 2003). The London Challenge had a powerful focus on leadership, teaching and learning, and pioneered the use of data (information about every aspect of children’s learning and achievements) for the sole purpose of improvement not punishment. The idea of a clear challenge, coupled with a well-defined programme of action, will be apparent as we go through this chapter, and it is one that we return to in the last chapter of the book, as we believe it can be adapted for our purposes as a call to action.

If the necessary changes are going to happen, though, there is a strong need for support – and pressure – from outside the education system as well as within it. We mentioned the main employers’ organisation, the CBI, and their publication,
First Steps: A New Approach For Our Schools
, in
Chapter 1
. As well as saying the kinds of things which we might expect
an employers’ organisation to say – for instance, bemoaning the low levels of literacy and numeracy of English school-leavers compared with many other countries –
First Steps
laid out a different set of demands, prefaced by this powerful statement:

You could imagine, just for a moment, that employers had been secretly studying the kinds of books and papers we have been reading (and writing) over the last two decades. But they may perfectly well have come to the same conclusions by themselves. Here are three of the things they called for:

First Steps
is really a manifesto for a radical change to the way we currently organise schooling. Its central demands chime strongly with our own long-held views. The first of their suggestions – that we should go beyond the subjects on the curriculum to think more profoundly about what it is we think the outcomes of schooling should be – aligns most strongly with the agenda we have laid out. Their second recommendation – that we should empower parents to engage with schools – is the focus of the
next chapter
.

In our research for this book we have spoken with hundreds of parents, students, teachers and head teachers. In the course of our conversations, we were struck by the letter below as an example of exactly the kind of thing the CBI is calling for.

At the end of 2014 the CBI published an ‘end of year report’ on their
First Steps
agenda. On every aspect they rated the government poorly using marks that ranged between B- to D! The D went for the first of their suggestions, that we develop a clear statement of the outcomes that all schools should deliver:

In language which even more strongly echoes our own, they go on to specify these behaviours and attitudes:

The message is obvious. Many employers have a clear vision of what the desired outcomes of school should be for young people, but so far the government is not listening. Hence the
D grade awarded to the Department for Education. But the pressure will mount. Employers in the UK are a powerful group, not to be idly dismissed by governments. They are helping to create a climate in which our balanced approach can and will flourish.