Academic Debate

This month we welcomed Alasdair Smith of The Anti-Academies Alliance to our final meeting at The White Horse before we move to our new venue, The North End Social Club. 

Choice. It’s a great thing, isn’t it? We can choose from a myriad of toothpastes, tea bags and toilet rolls.  We can take our pick from energy suppliers to undertakers.  So why not have the same option when it comes to the education of our youngsters?

Alasdair maintained that this offer of choice is, in fact, a delusion.  To him it’s a fanciful charade designed to mask a Hayekian agenda bent on opening up the education system to the profit motive with scant regard for the children within its seemingly rapacious grip.

In order to create choice, he argued, you needed surplus places so that children have options to choose between schools. But, in fact, Alasdair quoted figures of there being a chronic shortage of up to 500,000 school places within the next 2-3 years.

The idea that Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove puts forward is that parents will choose to send their kids to the ‘good’ schools and, therefore, the ‘bad’ schools will close down.  This will then improve standards.  But does having a choice actually drive up standards ?  The reality, to Alasdair and the Anti-Academies Alliance is that there is no such thing as choice for the vast majority of parents and kids.  It’s schools that choose the children, not the other way around.  You can’t simply send your child to any school – the various criteria – catchment area, siblings at school, Special Needs – ensure that schools make the decision who attends them.  This is even more pronounced in rural areas where there might be only one school within reasonable travelling distance. Additionally, for those kids in Grammar School areas what choice do they have if they fail the 11 Plus?  If there is any choice it is the monied metropolitan elite who have it.

Alasdair cited evidence that after 10 years of the Academies programme there is no clear evidence that it is actually raising standards across the board and no evidence that what standards are being raised are due to the programme.  Those schools which have improved have changed their in-take and leadership, this is what’s improving the schools rather than the academy model.

So what makes a ‘good’ school?  Alasdair quoted the 2007 McKinsey Report which stated that “the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of the teachers.”  

As a teacher and lecturer in education himself, Alasdair believes that working with teachers rather than actively belittling and antagonising them , as he believes Gove has done, is the way forward.  If we’re talking about choice then what about the choice teachers have to choose which school to teach in?  In Gove’s model good teachers would head for good schools. This means that less able teachers would work in struggling schools.  How will this help to improve the quality of teaching? What’s really needed is the complete opposite – the best teachers in the worst schools with resources targeted towards them.

So what’s The Anti-Academies Alliance solution to all this?  They call for a National Campaign for Education – bringing together the various education campaigns to ensure and joined up approach that covers not just the academies and free schools issue but curriculum, pedagogy, assessment,  the provision of school places and teacher education.  So basically everything.  However, there seems frustratingly little actual detail on what this will actually entail and how it will address what Alasdair refers to as “the long tail of underachievement.”

Personally, it was very disappointing that the Headmaster of the local Free School was sadly unable to attend as promised.  I would like to have seen his response to Alasdair’s criticisms of the academies and free school model.  

However, as usual our audience came up with some good questions.  Many doubted that the Finnish model that Alasdair spoke of in glowing terms could be transferred from a country of 5 million to one of 56 million.  Alasdair agreed stating that what was needed was Education Authorities, like the late Inner London Education Authority, to roll out the programmes in local areas. Rather than attempting to run a  nationwide scheme from central government as Gove has done with the academies programme. Others asked that if why was the UK slipping down the International education league tables – Alasdair said that the UK has the most advanced system in the world for teaching maths and history.  But our league status is dragged down by the earlier mentioned ‘long tail of underachievement’.  By addressing the problems with basic numeracy and literacy we would rise up the tables.  This could only be done by addressing what he saw as the root cause – poverty.

So our tenure at The White Horse ends and we move to the more centrally located North End Club.  However, despite rumours to the contrary we won’t be renaming ourselves ‘Skeptics In The Club’ as that might suggest we are not only in search of evidence based information but also heavy with child. 

NEXT MONTH:  Thursday 17^th July – 7pm for a 7:30 start - Martin S Taylor became interested in hypnosis when he was studying for a PhD at Imperial College, and soon became well known on the student circuit with his science based lecture-demonstration. At first he believed in the traditional view that hypnosis is a special induced state of mind, but discussions with friends and his experience with his own hypnotic subjects led him to subscribe to the 'social-compliance' view, namely that hypnosis is best explained by normal, well-understood psychological principles.

He now makes a living as a lecturer and consultant on hypnosis, talking and demonstrating at schools, universities, and anywhere else they'll pay him. It was at one of Martin's lectures that Derren Brown was inspired to take up his career, and Martin has worked with Derren on a number of recent television shows. Recently he has been a hypnosis consultant for Paramount Pictures, helping them make promotional videos for horror films.

Martin will give an explanation of his skeptical outlook on traditional hypnosis, illustrated with clips from his stage show - and possibly some live demonstrations on the audience.

More details HERE.