As a teacher I believed you should love every child in your class. People would laugh out loud if you said that now.
How children are treated as inferior species due to the extreme competitiveness that has infiltrated the education system, with Professor Diane Reay
Professor Diane Reay grew up in a working-class mining town in Nottingham; became a primary teacher in the seventies and then moved into academia. Now, she is Professor of Education at Cambridge University, and author of Miseducation: Inequality, education and the working classes.
But it was Diane’s 2022 FORUM article: ‘The slide to authoritarianism in English schools,’ that led me to her, as at the time I was writing pieces on ultra-disciplined behaviour policies for The Lead and New Humanist.
One of the things we most urgently have to address when it comes to children’s rights and policymaking is: Just because something is hard to define, doesn’t mean we should ignore it. And I feel like this chat really covers how this is playing out in schools, with Diane arguing that the most important parts of education have been marginalised in favour of the endless pursuit of metrics.
In a similar vein, the damage that’s being done is insidious. Children are treated as inferior species she says, with working-class children in particular being given the message, “that they have nothing to say that’s worth listening to, because no one is listening to them.”
I hope you find this chat as insightful as I did.
Diane Reay, Professor of Education at Cambridge University
We have a toxic school system today and it is making children ill
It’s degrading their mental welfare. What we've done with the academy system has been to turn state education over to very rich, right-wing white men, and they’re now running the educational system at the taxpayers’ expense.
As part of my research [for the FORUM article], I spoke to a number of young teachers who said that senior management stand on benches, screaming at children because their ties aren’t the right length
Or there’s something wrong with their shoes, and they get immediate detentions. One teacher who actually said, “you can get a detention for anything in this school.” One kid did for yawning.
Forty years ago, I went to New York on a research trip and I was shocked to see there were boys facing the wall for two hours at a time [as a punishment]. And that's what we're beginning to have in our schools.
Children are not an inferior species to adults. At the moment, that's what we're treating them like
We can see that in all these lost children after COVID: they experienced school as a punishment and so a lot of them stopped going regardless of the consequences. I think that's a real indictment of how we don't give children rights, we impose things upon them.
New Labour started the academy programme and it was particularly focused on ‘failing schools’
But what people don't ever pick up on is they mean schools in poor areas. Working class, low-income, high-poverty schools. They’re failing schools because they don’t resource them enough. It’s shocking, but the most disadvantaged children have the most inexperienced teachers, highest turnover rates and the lowest amount of resources in their classrooms.
Most of the really important parts of education: empathy, collegiality, creativity, critical thinking are immeasurable, so they’ve been totally marginalised
Instead, education has become directed towards metrics - GCSEs, English baccalaureate, A levels. As a result, a lot of predominantly working-class, ethnically diverse secondary academies are starting GCSE syllabus the moment they get into secondary school - year 7. They are bored stiff, getting drilled with a whole lot of facts to get A-C at GCSE.
Some of them may be brilliant at art and creativity, but they're not getting enough time to develop the skills and competencies because of the narrow focus on an academic, objective standard. It’s so short-sighted. At some of these schools, the kids are going in at 7am to revise for their GCSEs.
But what we need in our education system is to realise the potential of all children
And actually, we are not going with the evidence. When you look at the Education Endowment Foundation it says that we shouldn't be setting and streaming children and that actually, mixed-ability teaching, as long as it’s enforced in a way to enable it to succeed, is better for all children, particularly those who was struggling more. But the top performers don’t suffer.
Parental choice has a corrosive impact on social mix in schools, but social mix is really important for developing a healthy conception of citizenship and participatory democracy. We’re damaging wider society by allowing developments in our schooling that are focused on individualism and hyper-competition.
When I was a teacher I honestly believed the most important thing was to love every child in my class. People would laugh out loud if you said that now
But I believe that there should be care and compassion to children's voices and opinions and I don't see how we can have a functioning democracy unless we enable all children to feel that they have been listened to. In the private school sector, it’s considered really important to get children engaged, even if what they’re saying is wrong. It’s about getting them to say it aloud, to constantly participate, to be autonomous learners. Whereas I think the message that most working-class children are getting is that they've got nothing that's worth listening to, because no one is listening to them.
During my teaching years there was also had a real sense of teamwork and collegiality
People shared resources and supported each other, but the teachers I interviewed last year said it's a very competitive environment now. We’ve got unhealthy, disaffected teachers and that makes for unhappy, disaffected children and young people.
I’m a visiting professor in Finland and spend six-to-eight weeks per year in Japan. Their cultures are so different - they’ve got such a strong sense of the common good
Whereas in England in particular, we’ve lost that sense; we see the differences much more than similarities. So while in Finnish/Japanese schools, child participation is seen as really important, as is critical thinking and creativity, we’re producing children and young people to fit into the status quo.
The problem here is, when we introduced state education for all in the 1870s, it was all about control and pacifying the masses. It’s not about empowering them, so I think something really fundamental needs to shift.
As a parting shot, OECD and PISA [Programme for International Student Assessment] have had an enormous detrimental impact, because our government has really focused on getting us reasonable PISA results
To do that, they made children constantly work on the same bit of the curriculum over and over and over again. But to get the test results they also cheated - when we fed our data to PISA, we used a non-representative sample, including too many affluent and not enough free-school-meal children. We were only midway up the table and that's with cheating. That’s a very grim metric.