Is anyone failing our kids?

We’re hosting a debate here at the RSA tomorrow in partnership with Channel 4 to coincide with the Jamie’s Dream School television series. The title is ‘Who is failing our kids?’. Almost half of students in the UK leave school without the government defined minimum of five ‘good’ GCSEs. Something is going wrong – whose fault is it?

We’re hosting a debate here at the RSA tomorrow in partnership with Channel 4 to coincide with the Jamie’s Dream School television series. The title is ‘Who is failing our kids?’. Almost half of students in the UK leave school without the government defined minimum of five ‘good’ GCSEs. Something is going wrong – whose fault is it?

Is it in fact anyone’s fault?

Could we just as easily ask the question, Who gets the credit for serving our children well?

More children are achieving across the board than ever before, more children are staying on post-16 than ever before, and more go to university than ever before. The number of failing schools has dropped so dramatically that Ofsted have had to commandeer the English language (in a manner so bizarre it’s a wonder that children bother at all) and declare that ‘satisfactory’ (OED definition: “satisfying expectations or needs, leaving no room for complaint”) is ‘not good enough’?

Firstly, however, on who’s to blame for what is wrong. Everyone will have their own view who this might be and the list is a long one: is it the parents who are interested enough, teachers who aren’t qualified, schools with the wrong priorities, wider society with its ills (general and specific), the rich with their private schools, the poor with their lack of aspirations, bureaucrats with their targets, academics with their progressivism, the government with its political agenda, universities with their selection policies, employers with their recruitment policies …I could go on.

Why so much disagreement? One reason is that education is so complex, children are so diverse and the factors determining their success in exams are so multiple that categorical answers to questions this broad are difficult to pin down.

Another reason is that we still lack a clear consensus on whose responsibility the education of children actually is and for whose benefit it is carried out. In a recent seminar for the Education and Employers Taskforce Research Group Professor Ewart Keep highlighted the lack of consensus in Britain (relative to other countries) over who the ‘customer’ is in education (students and their parents, employers, or wider society and the state?) and whose responsibility it is to ensure that the economy has the right skills (individuals, the state or employers). If we don’t agree on who is supposed to be doing what and for whom, then how can we hold anyone to account for the fact that we’re not where we want to be?

Now to what’s going right. Why do we find it so difficult to celebrate the successes in the system? Partly because the attainment gap between rich and poor is still shamefully large, and even more so when we compare ourselves internationally.

It is hard to celebrate success that discriminates against certain groups by birth.

It is also partly because education is so politicised at the moment that no government or opposition will not acknowledge the successes of their predecessors (note the current emphasis the Coalition places on the relative decline in Britain’s position in international league tables, as opposed to the year on year improvement in attainment within Britain over the previous government’s tenure).

Finally, though, even without the above reasons, there is still the bizarre and perennial (or annual) claim that as exam results rise, standards must be dropping. If more students are gaining As at A Level then the exams must be getting easier goes the conventional wisdom. In an education system measured by how students do in exams surely this is a no-win situation for the schools, teachers, and students? If all students across the country suddenly did very well in their GCSEs what would happen? GCSEs would lose their currency and we would need to find different means for universities and employers to choose between students. The A* grade at A Level, and the IGCSEs are examples where this is already happening.

Education and in particular the exams sat at the end of it serve the function of differentiating young people for the labour market by their performance.

While this is the case some of our children will be failing (or being failed) because all jobs and all routes to employment are not, unfortunately, equal.

And who are we going to blame for that?