The importance of good teaching and the need to recruit, support and develop good classroom teachers was the key theme of a Times+ debate on education last night.
Three of the panellists gave a qualified yes to the question: are our schools fit for purpose. All agreed, however, that it was the quality of teaching rather than the school itself that was central.
Brett Wigdortz, founder and chief executive of the education charity Teach First, was most critical, saying that the education system could not be fit for purpose while a child’s chances depended heavily on where he or she lived. The biggest predictor of how a child aged 6 would perform at GCSE was parental income, he said.
Pockets of excellence do exist. He pointed to two schools in Tower Hamlets, East London – Mulberry School for Girls and Bethnal Green Technology College – that have higher proportions of children on free school meals but outperform other schools because they have “fantastic” heads and good teachers.
Dylan Wiliam, of the University of London’s Institute of Education, said that a parent’s choice of school for their child made no difference to the performance of 90 per cent of children because every school has great teachers. What mattered was the classes in which they are taught.
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In classrooms with the best teachers children learn four times faster than they do with a poor teacher. The challenge, Professor Wiliam said, was therefore to improve quality of teaching – not just of trainee teachers or with targeted programmes such as Teach First but for all current teachers.
He asked why schools did not use differentiated pay scales to reward the best teachers rather than raising teachers’ pay automatically in line with length of service, and called for a “relentless focus” on teacher improvement.
“We need to move away from that kind of system towards a system in which every school and every teacher expects to improve their performance every single year until they retire or die,” Professor Wiliam said. “Every teacher working in the state sector should accept that no amount of success is enough.”
Baroness Morris of Yardley, the Labour peer who was Education Secretary in 2001-02, praised developments such as expectations of high standards for every child, collaborative working between schools and agreement on the importance of school leadership and teacher quality.
But she criticised political interference, such as insisting on the teaching of synthetic phonics in reading or setting children by ability without evidence to support such policy. This was peculiar to education, she said – would we tell doctors to use penicillin rather than any other antibiotic?
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“Somehow in education politicians butt in to make decisions about pedagogy. There is a real role for politicians in education, but it is not to make decisions about pedagogy. The reason they do that is that the quality of our research and its connection with policy-making practice is far, far, far too poor.”
Politicians often made the mistake of seeking quick solutions in changing structures just as the education system had focused on the central issue of high quality teaching and leadership, said Lady Morris, who was applauded warmly.
Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, who spoke without notes, said that England’s schools were fit for purpose but must do better. A legacy of underachievement for disadvantaged children led to an assumption that if a child fails it is their fault.
“The assumption that a minority of children are never going to be capable of grasping the core elements of an academic education – that view is not held in other countries,” Mr Gove said. High-performing school systems elsewhere shared three basic characteristics of school autonomy, strong accountability and a focus on teacher quality, which we must follow, he said.
He highlighted particularly the freedom that academies have to vary the school day and term.
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“One of the things that is striking about other countries which do far better than we do is that children are in school for longer,” he said.
“Why? Because the learning is engaging. Why? Because in those countries teachers want their children to do better and better and better and they are far more concerned about childrens’ outcomes than they are about sticking to the letter of a workforce agreement that has been signed on their behalf by their unions.”
Before taking questions David Aaronvitch, the Times columnist and chairman of the panel, asked for a show of hands from the lively audience at Wilton’s Music Hall in the City of London which showed that about a quarter were teachers or education professionals. A much smaller number were parents of children at school.
Asked if the teacher workforce was ready for the challenge of improvement, Professor Wiliam said that well focused professional development would improve teaching radically if it focused on classroom craft rather than on subject knowledge.
In response to a later question from the audience by Martin Stephen, former High Master of St Paul’s independent boys’ school in London, on the importance of a teacher’s passion for their subject, Professor Wiliam said that thorough understanding at the level being taught was critical rather than more advanced knowledge.
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Mr Gove was challenged from the audience about excluding religious studies from his new measure of core academic GCSEs in school league tables, the so-called English Baccalaureate, which he justified by saying that religious education remained compulsory to the age of 16 while geography and history are not.
There were shouts of disagreement from some in the audience and calls for his evidence when the Education Secretary said that academies were popular with teachers who were “voting with their feet” to work in academies because their freedom allowed greater innovation and career development.
“If you look at the number of teachers that work in academies then you can see the numbers growing,” he said. “And why wouldn’t you want to work in one when you have greater freedom and control over the curriculum, when there is scope for greater freedom and they are a great model that are improving the education of children at twice the rate of other schools.”
This was challenged by Professor Wiliam, who drew applause by saying that the first wave of academies, which took over failing inner city schools, had much lower exam results and started from a lower baseline.
Compared with schools with the same level of achievement and which remained maintained schools, academies improved at exactly the same rate despite receiving about 10 per cent more in funds per student, he said.