Learning the Lessons

SPTC Director, Jo Beaumont reports on the University of Strathclyde Faculty of Education lecture which was held on October 26th 2006.

The speaker, Brian Boyd has worked at various levels in education, from class teacher to headteacher, from chief adviser to academic. He was a member of the Ministerial Review Group on the 3-18 curriculum which produced the report "A Curriculum for Excellence" in 2004. Brian is a co-founder of Tapestry, an organisation that has promoted creativity in learning since its inception.

Scottish Education for the Twenty-First Century: Learning the Lessons

Brian Boyd set out to look back over a hundred years in Scottish education and this encompassed three generations, three themes and three stories about his son!
His themes were:
- the years 1913-2013 (his retiral date) which had seen continuous improvement in Scottish education,
- the "next stage" with big ideas from Tapestry and how we define and use intelligence,
- and institutional reform plus how to get joined-up thinking.

He illustrated careers as being determined by a series of "choices not always remembered" and showed the audience a Scotland team pihoto including himself and Lou Macari. This team played England in 1966 and won after which he turned down the offer to become a professional footballer in favour of continuing his education at tertiary level.

Brian's mother had not had that choice, leaving education at the age of fourteen with her Day School Certificate which detailed her subjects: English History, Geography, Arithmetic, Cookery, Housewifery, Drawing and Dressmaking. There were simple overall gradings for "studies" and "character and conduct" for which she earned an "E" for "excellent". The projected image was a very stark contrast to the expectations that we have of a record of achievement for school leavers today.

It was not until 1946 that secondary education in Scotland was made universal and compulsory. When Brian went to St Mungo's Academy in Glasgow in 1960, he was one of only six in his school who gained a place at a senior, rather than a junior secondary. This meant that he could continue his studies beyond the age of fifteen. The opportunities were restricted by streaming and grading by simple measurements of intelligence in P7 and IQ testing.

In the 1960s few teachers had heard of developmental theorists like Dewey and Piaget and any ideas that were introduced in training rarely made it as far as the classroom. Nowadays, students are familar with the latest big thinkers and the "Tapestry" organisation has brought some of them to Scotland. There has been a huge leap in Scottish education providing comprehensive education, however although he applauds the improvements Boyd sees secondary education as stifling creativity and in need of more radical institutional reform.

One of the biggest blocks is timetabling. Brian acknowledged his previous pride in having managed to produce complicated schedules that he would copy and exhibit around the school, but then quoted from "Alice Through the Looking-Glass":

"And how many hours a day did you do lessons?" said Alice, in a hurry to change the subject.
"Ten hours the first day," said the Mock Turtle, "nine the next, and so on."
"What a curious plan!" exclaimed Alice.
"That's the reason they're called lessons," the Gryphon remarked, "because they lessen from day to day."

He used this quote to introduce the absurdities that can occur, and how testing and assessment have dictated the shape of learning rather than any consideration of how best to serve the needs of learners. Over the years we have moved from 15 to 20, then 25, then 27, and now a 30-period week; Glasgow is about to impose a 33-period week on its secondary schools. There is no good educational reason why a six-period day became the norm especially when you take into account the fact that children's sugar levels rise and fall dramatically and by period 4 pupils could very well be either hyper or comatose! The school day evolved as a four morning, two afternoon period day to combat disruption and vandalism which occurred mainly in the afternoons.

Thirty periods also suited the 8 Standard Grade teaching schedule and fitted a six-periods per week, five subject, Higher timetable. Now pupils are "NAB"ed to death with three test per subject including dry runs, preparation and feedback time, prelims, (even two sets of prelims in some parts of Scotland). This all eats up time so that there is widespread "teaching to the test" and, as Brian put it: "a collusion" towards the end of the year to hurry and narrow the curriculum into the easily-accountable system of exams. He believes this is paralysing education that should be at its best at the "gold standard" of Highers. Only on returning to school for S6 does there seem to be any space to pick up subjects or pursue some to a greater depth than was possible in S5 and this makes learning at this stage more effective and more pleasurable.

As Boyd said, 33 periods may deliver, but it delivers the wrong result. Scotland needs to consider "curriculum architecture" anew. No-one has asked what is the optimum time to learn a subject to a particular level or how that is dependent on the type of learning conducted. It is argued that we need to prepare pupils for the UNknown and provide opportunities to find creativity and teach them how to rather than "what to" learn.

Returning to decisions and opportunities affecting life chances, Brian recounted the crushing disappointment of being rejected by the choirmaster as "tone deaf" after having been feted for years when he would sing at family Christmas gatherings where he was praised a "a great wee singer". Accepting the tone deaf label, he developed no musical appreciation. However, he did encourage his son to learn the recorder which he enjoyed until history repeated itself when a peripatetic music teacher refused to let him progress to the clarinet as he was also judged to be tone deaf. His middle-class and articulate father refused to accept this decision and manoeured a turnabout and Brian's son, Chris now has grade 8 in both clarinet and piano, plays a "mean" saxophone, belongs to a band and is clearly an accomplished musician.
Brian believes that the current education system is more likely to give people opportunities but our biggest challenge is to ensure the same choice and equality for the most disadvantaged groups who end up in the NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training) group. Educationalists have to realise that they cannot do this on their own any longer. In the face of abuse, poverty and neglect we must develop multiagency working and view it as a trans-generational, long-term problem requiring different forms of accountability and open to informed creative risk-taking. Boyd qualified this by saying that of course, no teacher was going to endanger their pupils' futures recklessly but that they needed to be freed to put new practices into play and try out new methods.

The sting in the tail was a challenge to Brian Boyd's own colleagues in Higher Education to stop cranking up the entry requirements. By doing this they do now allow schools to deliver any change or creativity in the ways they work as they are increasingly held to account by league tables or exam results and cannot shake free of this tail wagging the dog.

Questions followed. On leadership in schools, Brian said that the discourse so far had been shallow and that it stifled the development of responsibility in young people by excluding them from decision-making. Primary pupils rise to positions of appropriate trust and jobs such as representation, buddying and monitoring, only to have that removed in early secondary until they have been deemed to have served another five years apprenticeship. Secondary schools, he said, were not democratic enough and until young people were involved in telling us what worked for them in terms of effective and useful learning things would not improve. Experience has shown that asking young people has produced very sensible responses and so we must listen to them and unlock their potential.

When asked about the McCrone agreement, Boyd described it as a curate's egg - good in terms of the probationary experience and provision for CPD, but poor in the short term and it failed totally on joined-up thinking. It had not taken account of the curriculum review and the move to a coherent 3-18 provision. Meanwhile, resources are being poured into building separate PPP primary and secondary institutions and McCrone time had not been helpful. Lessons had not been learned on "taking the workforce with you" in times of change which was still often rushed and enforced.

After his lecture, I asked Brian if he felt that the current legislation on parent involvement had any part to play in supporting and unlocking the creativity he was seeking. He said that there were some good ideas but that it was being tackled on a far too superficial level.