WTF Academy
In the final article of my series on the death of educational theory, the discussion turned to Academies. These are the new private finance initiative schools that have been springing up in cities over the last few years. They have their problems, particularly with teachers being taken off the national pay scale, challenges to unions through lack of centralised staff rooms, as well as often offering authoritarianism as a so-called solution to the problems of “difficult schools”. My work involves dealing with schools a fair bit, and on Thursday this week, I came across the website of The Petchey Academy, in Hackney, which is frankly bizarre, but at least offers an interesting opportunity for semiological analysis.
Along the top reads a slogan “traditional values for a modern age” next to what is frankly the most corporate looking coat of arms I’ve seen in my life. Clearly somewhere along the way some great mind thought that making the school a simulacrum of the old public schools of England would help to improve grades, ignoring the fact that the main reason these old schools do better is they draw almost all of their students from rich, culturally educated backgrounds, and have massive amounts of money to spend on resources, and having small classes. This is carried through to the schools system of having “houses” instead of form groups.
And yet these “traditional values” are blithely contradicted as soon as one begins to read around the website. The page on school ethos reads, “Our approach can be summed up as: ‘Entrepreneurial about learning; in the business of success.” In fact, it appears that rather than traditional values, this school is concerned with the most cynical and prevalent of modern values: the market. And in fact, looking at the page on care of students one reads that ” Each House group are looked after by a member of the Academy staff. This House “Lifestyle Consultant” carefully monitors and supports each student’s personal, social and academic progress.” Excuse me, lifestyle consultant? Is this really what children need? Someone to tell them what their lifestyle should be? Not to mention the section that reads “the architects and The Foundation have paid very special attention to safety issues. At the same time we do not wish it to appear like a prison. […] The building is fully scanned by CCTV cameras throughout the day (and night) and has been cleverly designed to avoid “blind” areas. Scary.
But possibly the strangest of all the signs on this website is the division of subjects into “natural world”, “controlled world”, “communication” and “human spirit”. Apart from anything this makes the whole project sound like a dubious 1980s translation of Hegel, but more worryingly would seem to imply a highly separated view of the world, one in which rather than humans, rather than being subjects, are subjected to the world. The school’s motto of “if I think I can, I can” quickly degenerates into the tautological “If I think I can, I think I can” with this politic present. But overall what is shown is that in attempting to address a challenging school, what is being offered is the pulling together of all sorts of incongruous signs. Tradition, the markets, the separation of discourses, security/monitoring, and the demand for idealism are all on different levels imposed on the students as if the entire jumble of history may offer a means to improve them. What is missing is a concern with the present, a concern with the social situation of students
Reader Comments
Quite agree, this notion that “making the school a simulacrum of the old public schools of England would help to improve grades” seems to be the same reasoning behind encouraging a diverse array of specialised/faith/academy/parent-run schools, on the basis that these schools must be doing better because they’re better schools, not because they attract all the best pupils and resources for essentially arbitrary reasons.
Incidentally, this does seem to be a result of a very constrained conception of market competition in govt policy. For example, I went to a very high achieving state (single sex, grammar) school and it was constantly insisted that its high performance must be caused by the particularly good ethos/running of the school. As a consequence this highly “competitive” school, was given ever more resources in order to expand its facilities (not just expand its size bear in mind- expand *all* its services, i.e. adding huge new sports and drama complexes to a school that had no special aptitude or interest in these areas). By contrast the various failing schools in the area were punished with far less investment; one was simply shut down. Thinking of schools as more “competitive” seems to falsely infer from the case of businesses, where being better simply is a case of being more competitive; schools that are more “competitive” by contrast, are simply better at acquiring good resources and pupils for themselves, not better at schooling. If the government was to appreciate the full implications of the market for education, it would recognise that different actors can compete/fail in the market for completely arbitrary reasons (cf shampoos, they’re all the same, but some are far more successful in the market than others for completely arbitrary reasons, not because they do a better job).
Wait, all shampoos are the same?
The slogan by the crest is “Traditional values in a modern world”, beneath which you tell us that the motto is “Traditional values for a modern age”. Good checking you got there Jacob.
With reference to David’s post, I can see the idead behind the “reinforce success” policy that directs more resources towards schools deemed sucsessful, allowing them to expand and, presumably, do the same thing there doing well for more pupil. Seems to make more sense than directing more to the failing schools, thus reinforcing failure.
But, as David points out, how do you tell if a school that is “successful” is so because of ethos and running of the school, or other, more external, factors? And how do you define “success” for a school? Exam results? University places? Employment stats for Alumni? Happiness of the pupils? Improvement of pupils’ results? Extra-curricular activities? What I loved most about my school, as well as the stability it provided, was that it was good at encouraging and supporting people at their various talents. So the thesps got a good crack at acting, the sports players at sports, the geeks (myself included!) had opportunities for supported extra study, musicians had access to instruments etc…, while providing a good all round education and pastoral care.
Which is all great, but it’s nigh on impossible to measure these things quantitatively. Except exam results, which may be why our headmaster went on about them so much on the final day of the year when all the parents and governers rocked up. And we had more resources than most, so how do you compare that to schools with more, or less resources, selective or comprehensive?
I don’t know the answers……. do YOU?
Roger: Ok maybe not exactly the same, but suffice to say that the luscious locks you see on T.V. advertising whatever the Eton of the shampoo world is, aren’t that shiny purely because of the superiority of the product. Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s a manifestation of class privilege!
Owain:
I can understand the thinking behind dividing resources that way, it just seems a pretty bad way to do so. It’s quite hard to know if a “successful” school is actually good on its own merits. Consider the latest scandal: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8408787.stm. I think the “reinforce success” model is very limited. For one, extra resources often don’t allow expansion in terms of more pupils being taught; my own very successful school expanded its services by gaining brand new facilities far outside its specialism (like a new drama wing despite about 10/1000 pupils studying drama). Secondly I don’t think “reinforcing failure” is a significant factor: school’s can’t, in any strategic sense, be encouraged to fail in order to get more support. The individuals in control will surely be more motivated by thought of their careers, than by gaining more funding. ‘Punishing’ failing schools by limiting funds makes even less sense. As with Foundation Hospitals, applying the logic of market competition just doesn’t seem to work, often you ought precisely to pile resources into the least successful school/hospital.
How much does a cockney spend on shampoo? Pan-tene!
David, I agree with you on the point that it’s very difficult to quantify how or why a school is successful, that’s one of the points I was trying (it seems unsuccessfully) to make.
In terms of reinforcing failure, I don’t mean that they are being encouraged to fail, or that the individuals in the management are trying to fail. I mean you have choices to make over how you deploy limited resources to schools. “Punishing” failing schools, as you put it, by constraining resources, isn’t going to do anything to immediately improve them, and doesn’t seem to make much sense. But “punishing” successful schools, by diverting resources to failing ones, makes even less.
The reinforcing success method does make it testing for schools. And if they show they can change and improve, that success gets reinforced, and they carry on normal jogging. If they can’t then it’s better to send the resources where they can be used to best effect educating children, then used less efficiently in a school with problems. Obviously this is very simplified, and there are lots different ways you could implement this, with lots of different consequences.
Please note, this is not about whether or not a school and individuals in it want to improve, obviously they all want to. It’s whether or not they can. Which is very unforgiving to any part of the system that is inefficient or ineffective at it’s job. It may mean that part being removed and replaced. But if in the long term it improved the efficiency with which we could educate, then we can educate more or better with the same resources, or the same with less. (I’d favour the former, but that would most likely depend on the wider situation at the time). And educating is what the education system is for (I know, I know, stating the obvious, but I like to do that).
You could look at it a different way, and send extra resources to schools with problems, to help them sort out those problems. But that only works if the problems are those that can be solved by extra resources. If they are problems independent of resources, then those resources are effectively being wasted, when they could be used elsewhere.
You’re quite right to state that the model is limited, and there would be lots of problems if you tried to implement it in such a crude way. There’s no guarantee that a school deemed successful will use resources any better than another. It just seems to me that it would be more likely to use them more efficiently. And with lots and lots of different schools and a combined budgets of billions, efficiency in using resources really, really matters. So reinforcing success, as a guiding principle, rather than absolute rule, makes sense to me.
And I’m off to bed, night all!