Who and what is education policy for?

Another week, another Gove-led shake up of education. GCSEs are going to be “tougher” and more “rigorous” which are politician words not words that academics use about the reality of learning and teaching. Gove has a vision for what he believes education is for and about. I personally think it’s the wrong vision – stalled in a faux-idealised 1950s vision of grammar schools and short trousers. But Gove knows who his audience is (parents and Tory activists who also have a stylised vision of a “golden age”) and he plays right into their sweet spot. No wonder his stock as a potential Tory leader is on the rise.

The joy of having a conservative outlook is that you can look to the past as a model to regress to and call it progress. And a system that works really well for some, works really well for some – and really badly for others. The game is to make sure you play the odds and ensure that the winners are powerful enough, well connected enough and loud enough to drown out the voices of the disempowered losers.

It seems to me there are four groups of people that education policy can be aimed at: parents, teachers, pupils and the adults they grow up to be.

If you were to listen to the Tories, you’d believe that Labour’s education policy is set entirely at the gift of the teaching unions and the interests they represent. If you talk to many teachers about education policy under Labour, they’d tell you the opposite – that life got harder and education less of a vocation. They would tell you that the regime of league tables and inspections were aimed at the same parents Gove’s policy is aimed at.

Everyone will tell you they have the best interests of the children in mind, but will also give you completely conflicting ideas as to what that best interest is. Policy is aimed at voters and children don’t vote. So instead of working out what it is that children really want and need from their education, we all allow ourselves to be informed through proxies – their parents, their teachers and our prejudices. We have allowed the debate to become polarised between those who want to focus solely on the development of a child’s intellectual development and those who believe that school is simply a training ground for employees of the future.

At the moment, I don’t think we have a clear understanding of what we want our offer to pupils to be. Not our offer to parents, not our offer to teachers, not our offer to support staff but to the pupils and their futures. We know that Gove has the wrong solution, but we need to lay out properly not just why he’s wrong, but what right is and why. How do we balance the importance of teaching pupils to think for themselves and to develop intellectual curiosity  with the knowledge they need to equip them for the modern world that they will go on to work in.

Kids don’t vote, but they are the future. What they need and want must be more important than hustling votes through simplistic ranking systems and nostalgia. We need to work with young people to set the priorities that kids at all levels – not just those at the highest academic levels – need from their schooling experience. When I speak to them their responses are usually pretty sensible. They want to enjoy learning, but be prepared for their futures.

Policy making should be done to make good policy – not just good politics. It isn’t until we let the needs of non-voting children lead our education policy that we will get it right.