These two words somewhat leapt out, off the page, into the soul from this article
Education: Expand academy model into the primary sector, says thinktank.
from the Guardian this morning.
Apparently it comes from a book by these guys.
The full report is here.
I’m sure they are not talking about the staff in any Primary School. We’re too busy: being LEA advised, targetted, monitored, league tabled, performance managed, observed, ofstedded, being creative, thinking about our wellbeing, working on the work / life balance, renewing our literacy strategy and numeracy strategy, using ICT across the curriculum +++++++……….. to be in any way complacent. Quite apart from teaching, preparing, marking, assessing, reflecting and thinking about the children.
Further down the article they mention Sweden as a good model for Primary Academies. The Nordic countries have a greater income and wealth equality and a long tradition of local ownership of schools supported by state finance which doesn’t favour an English version.
The core of the argument seems to be these three.
Contestability, innovation and best practice
The first of these is contestability, which, applied to public
services, calls for a continued flow of new and alternative
models to ‘compete’ within a system of guaranteed
provision. Contestability in this model becomes a spur to
improvement.
The second feature of private markets which we sorely
lack in public services is innovation and experimentation.
There is plenty of top-down change in public education,
but this is very different from bottom-up experimentation.
The latter is much less likely to happen in a system where
all schools consider themselves alike, and where there are
uniform objectives and uniform control, than in a system
brought to life by the contrasting visions of multiple
sponsors and providers.
The third is the rapid transmission of best practice. In
private markets, companies constantly try to learn from
and improve upon their competitors. Compare this to
British public education, whose deeply engrained resistance
to change is one of its most defining characteristics.
Suffice to say experimentation from the bottom up has not been encouraged by the swathe of stuff coming from above over the last 20yrs and now market DNA will solve this?
I’m sure teachers on the ground have always wanted to try out new ideas, it’s in the nature of the job. The engrained resistance is born of experiencing the effects of unworkable suggestions from above not from any resistance to change for better teaching. The whole way bottom up ‘action research’ was derided by influential figures is a good example.
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