Educating Ruby (21 page)

The last of our three areas assumes that you are wearing your concerned citizen hat. It requires you to use the skills and tactics of a lobbyist. We start with some traditional methods and then suggest a few which are more recent. Remember, education (along with health, the economy and, from time to time depending on what is going on in the world, immigration) is something which voters always say they care about and which, therefore, politicians pay attention to. Before you lobby anyone you will need to work out what you want to say. If you have read the book up to this point and if you have tried the thought experiments, especially the ones at the beginning of this chapter, you will already be limbered up.

Tactics which are generally effective include:

None of these suggestions are mutually exclusive. Using a blend of them you could write to your MP, your local councillor, your local paper or a national paper.

If you want to be more targeted, you could write to the secretary of state for education or a minister responsible for an aspect of education (a quick google of ‘Department for Education’ will get you names and contact information). Or you could share your thoughts with the person who runs any one of the nine public bodies connected with education in England (currently Ofqual, Ofsted, Education Funding Agency, National College for Teaching and Leadership, Standards and Testing Agency, Office of the Children’s Commissioner, School Teachers’ Review Body, Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, and the Office of the Schools Adjudicator). Again, a quick web search will find you the contact details for these bodies. (There is no point in us including current details as one of the features of English educational decision-making is that names and roles keep changing.)

From this list you may only have heard of Ofsted. This is because (a) it’s the most powerful, (b) it has a powerful press agency to share its views, (c) it makes a real difference to the lives of teachers and pupils, both for good and ill, and (d) the individuals who become Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools tend to be people of strong opinions who like these to be heard widely. Unfortunately, some of
the incumbents in the recent past have preferred proclaiming to thinking.

In the great scheme of things one letter is unlikely to change anything. But, increasingly, public bodies are required to analyse the correspondence they receive and publish information about customer/voter opinions (see also the details on Freedom of Information Requests below). So it may not be a complete waste of time.

If you prefer to talk to people rather than write, then you could start with your family and friends. The questions at the start of this chapter might help you to break the ice (I’ve been thinking about schools today, and remembering my own school days, and find myself wondering … Are you happy with your child’s school? As an employer, how well do you think schools are doing these days?). This kind of lobbying is much gentler and more like a conversation. It can take place almost anywhere – over supper, in the park, at work, on a bus.

If you wanted to be more formal you could seek a meeting with some influential people. You might like to start with your local councillor, though remember that, in most parts of England, the councillor may not have direct powers over education. Nevertheless, he or she can pass views on to officers who do have responsibility.

And it is always informative to talk directly to young people about their experience of school. Once they are sure you are not going to nag them about their grades or their homework, or deliver the familiar little homily about how much their grades matter, they may be quite forthcoming. Almost always their views are perceptive, accurate and fair-minded, and will inform and enrich your own.

Two other options are also available. The first is a Freedom of Information (FOI) request. The Freedom of
Information Act (2000) gives you the right to access recorded information held by public sector organisations of the kind we listed earlier. Anyone can request information – there are no restrictions on your age, nationality or where you live. An organisation can refuse your request if the information is sensitive or the costs are too high, but most see it as their duty to answer such requests. Obvious targets for this kind of request at the national level are the Department for Education and Ofsted. Here are some examples of information which has recently been asked for and supplied:

In each of these examples it is easy to see what the questioner is trying to get at. Questions asking about amounts of money spent or numbers of times something has happened work well. Or they can be framed as a more general request for information.

In terms of the arguments in this book you might like to ask about:

To get a meaningful answer you might have to be more precise than we have been. But the point of an FOI request is not simply to get an answer but also to get a line of questioning onto the national agenda as the answers are published on various government websites.

The second specific lobbying option is an e-petition. According to the government’s e-petition website, “e-petitions are an easy, personal way for you to influence government and Parliament in the UK. You can create an e-petition about anything that the government is responsible for and if it gets at least 100,000 signatures, it will be considered for debate in the House of Commons.”
2

At the time of writing, a petition to ‘Reverse ban on holidays during school term time’ is on the front page of the site. In a reasonable attempt to send a message about the importance of attending school, a ban on taking holidays in term time was introduced. But it has had various unintended consequences. Parents with very sick children have been prosecuted, as have parents wanting to take their family to spend time with a dying relative. The ban also poses a
question that is close to the argument of this book: what is it about school that is so sacrosanct that a well-planned trip of a lifetime might not actually be full of more real learning than a few days of school? Could it be that the ban is more about our current obsession with Ofsted, as ‘unauthorised absences’ count against a school in its Ofsted report? Or are schools so geared to the taking of tests and examinations that they cannot think of a creative way to enable a pupil to carry on learning while on a holiday? Bill took his older son on an extended trip to Tasmania during one January term and the powerful learning experiences are still with his family more than a decade on. What teacher can honestly say that this would be true of a month of attending their lessons?

E-petitions cover many subjects. Here’s another educational one currently struggling to get enough supporters: ‘Much needed change to the rules in school with regards to head lice and nits’. It’s tempting to make light of it, but any parent whose child has got nits from her school for the third time in a week will have considerable sympathy with the need for tougher enforcement of nit-free heads on children! (Interestingly the term ‘nit-wit’ comes from this unfortunate consequence of putting children together in a schoolroom!) If you go to
www.educatingruby.org
you can find out more about e-petitions relevant to our attempt to create popular groundswell to rethink schools. We will be suggesting an e-petition every half term until we create enough of a groundswell to change schools.

One of the simplest ways of finding out more and joining the debate about schools and education is to start to find your way around the growing number of educational blog sites. Many are written by thoughtful teachers or parents. Some are clearly mad. Many seem to believe that the answer to everything is technology. Most are deeply opinionated (aren’t we all?). The best combine evidence, analysis of issues and description of promising practices in the way that we have attempted to do in this book. A good way of starting out here is to use one of the many ‘intermediary sites’ which signpost education blogs. You can do this by searching for ‘best education blogs’, for example. Ten years ago one enterprising company with great prescience even set up an annual award for the best education blog.
3
And you can vary your search technique to narrow the field as you wish – for example, ‘most worthwhile education blogs’ or ‘UK education blogs’. On the website which accompanies this book (
www.educatingruby.org
) we have linked to bloggers who seem to us to be thoughtfully exploring the kinds of issues with which we are grappling.

Online videos are a useful source of ideas and a good way of entering into the debate. Set Google’s search capability to ‘Google Videos’ and you can find much stimulating material, often through the medium of YouTube and increasingly using the TED talks format (powerful talks of less than 18 minutes’ duration).
4
In the last few years, TED talks about education have been increasingly popular, with Sir Ken Robinson’s RSA Animate talk, ‘Changing
education paradigms’, challenging the educational status quo and arguing for the power of the arts, being viewed well over 13 million times.
5
Other thoughtful recent contributors include Sugata Mitra on how children’s learning can be hindered by adults and enabled by the web and Jamie Oliver on the need for a food revolution in schools.

The web is full of both useful and distracting websites about the topics we are exploring in this book. Take any of our seven Cs for example – confidence, curiosity, collaboration, communication, creativity, commitment, craftsmanship – and play about with combinations of search strategies such as, ‘how to develop confident children’, ‘how schools can develop children’s curiosity’, ‘creative activities for parents and children’, ‘how to develop craftsmanship in children’. One of our favourite examples is ‘Austin’s Butterfly’, which we have already mentioned. Turn on a few pages and we have included some more suggestions like this to get you started.

We shouldn’t forget the ubiquitous Wikipedia in equipping you to enter the debate. While you will naturally need to apply appropriate caution to its claims, it is a prime example of collaborative learning in action. There is a growing educational movement which is at your fingertips via a search engine, starting simply with searches such as, ‘educational wikis’, ‘educational wikis for parents’ and progressing in whatever direction you want.

There are various existing campaigns and grass-roots movements which may offer you encouragement and stimulate your thinking. These include:

These are just four examples. There are many more from which you might derive good ideas.

Running in parallel with the web are the various social media options. Probably the most relevant here is Twitter. There are people who tweet about policy, research and classroom practice. Tweets can, of course, be utterly banal, but increasingly thoughtful tweeters are using them as a means of signposting more substantive resources on the web. The discipline of the 140 characters allowed in a tweet can also be a useful clarifying and focusing device! On this book’s website –
www.educatingruby.org
– we have a Twitter feed (something that we have only very lately started) as well as links to those we think are contributing to the education debate we want to see. As with everything we have been suggesting in the last few pages, searching for ‘best education tweeters’ and so on will narrow the field.