BRITISH PUBLIC EDUCATION TODAY

In education, parents and teachers have to work together for the benefit of the children. No one would argue with that. However, in modern Europe this obvious principle is in crisis. In continental Europe and the USA the alliance between parents and teachers has broken down with parents siding with pupils to challenge grades and discipline, blaming teachers and even suing them. This is well reflected in this cartoon that has been circulating in the internet for a while now.

Here in the UK this cartoon does not apply. The alliance between teachers and parents has broken down with teachers aligning – or being selected to align – with a Machiavellianly perverse system, perfectly designed to perpetuate itself, in which schools have ceased to be concerned with student learning, and instead look at their own performance indicators and reputation.

And so we ended up with a system of target levels (up to year 9) and tiered examinations (from Year 10), in which students are set targets at the beginning of a course on the basis of a convoluted and cumbersome combination of parameters related to previous attainment, destined to obscure any clear criterion. The process is so obscure that schools pay specialised agencies to do it. The students are then measured against these targets instead of objective benchmarks, and the school can boast that most of their student are "on target". Targets are naturally revised periodically and set low enough so that success rate is high. Student learning and progress come second, if they matter at all.

Under the disguise of adaptation to the students' different abilities and the promotion of personal responsibility, their own progress is left in their own hands with the predictable outcome of a vast majority choosing to work as little as possible. They soon realise that less work is rewarded with lower targets, and even the best intentioned ones soon lose interest in working when they see they can instead have a great time with less effort in studying. There is nothing surprising there - just human nature. Defending this system is at best a naive assumption that teenage students will have their professional future in mind, but, as indicated above, I am more inclined to see it as a deliberate manoeuvre designed to make up school performance.

Another sign of this strategy is that British education has done away with textbooks. Instead, parents have to look themselves for "revision guides" or "exercise books". As was confirmed by a primary teacher to us as parents, books are not just "not recommended", teachers are not allowed to use them. It all makes sense, of course: if the intention is to avoid fixed benchmarks, having books which contain everything that is supposed to be learned at a certain level would betray the lowering of standards. Again, the absence of textbooks in education is disguised under the principle of adapting to learners' needs. Teachers are supposed to prepare tailor-made materials for every pupil or small group of pupils at similar "target levels". Apart from not being practical, or even feasible, as a collateral effect of the desired blurring of benchmarks, this removes a crucial tool to provide equal education to all across "classes" and citizens of different sociocultural backgrounds.

It all comes down to a perverse coincidence of interests between schools and pupils, who side with each other against the parents who care (which is the combination missing in the cartoon above). Teachers side with students in lowering demand. With this system schools can fake their results and at the same time students can get away with working as little as possible, taking home reports full of nice paragraphs from teachers always praising how well they are doing... towards their target levels. To make the charade credible, sometimes reports contain warnings against work being below target, but both teachers and students know that there is nothing to worry about: by the time of the next report targets will have been lowered and they will again be doing brilliantly.

For example, students can be submitted to GCSE exams at foundation and higher tiers, but the school's performance is only measured against the results of those in higher tiers, so schools only prepare those students they deem to be a guarantee of good marks for higher tier GCSEs, exposing the rest to a second class education, with less content, lower demand and capped marks at a C (this is changing now to numeric marks but the principles are exactly the same).

In my own experience with one of my sons I witnessed how he was brainwashed into believing he'd never achieve anything higher than a C. He was given foundation classes, set foundation homework and explicitly advised not to even attempt higher tier questions. His achievement, his career, his life, were capped by teachers who preferred to play safe with the school's reputation than to make the least effort to stretch students little by little to their full potential. The school's walls and website are lined with phrases saying exactly the contrary, that students are there to work to their full potential, and that no one would be left behind. But the reality is quite different. Once we fought and succeeded in having our son exposed to higher tier papers, he started to get Bs, As and even an A* within just a few weeks. I expected improvement, but not so fast. And it must be said that our determination in having him exposed to the full set of contents and higher exams is not an interest in him getting higher marks, but in giving our sons the opportunity to break the vicious circle of low aspirations being rewarded with less demanding work.

Teachers who knew other ways of configuring education and would therefore be more likely to see through these tactics have long been displaced by a generation of younger, inexperienced teachers who have not known other ways to grade students and therefore do not even begin to understand what is talked about when someone speaks to them along the lines of what I have written here.

Children without parents that put the foot in the door like us are condemned to be used --in the worst sense of the word-- by schools to whitewash their reputation in the form of Ofsted reports and the like. When they later in life come to realise that they have been let down by the very institution in whose hands society had placed their education - who will then be held accountable?