The headmaster of one of the best comprehensives in the country was once asked the following question by Tony Blair: ‘If you could do one thing to improve state education in this country, what would it be?’ ‘Oh, that’s easy,’ he said. ‘I’d line up every civil servant in the education department and machine gun the lot of ’em.’
No prime minister has ever asked me that question, but my answer would be more diplomatic. It would be to insist that every incoming education secretary memorise the serenity prayer. This is the prayer that members of Alcoholics Anonymous recite at the end of their meetings: ‘God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.’
Phillipson is at least trying to address a serious problem in our schools, which is persistent absenteeism
Had Bridget Phillipson committed that to memory, there’s just a chance she wouldn’t have made a speech last week in which she said schools shouldn’t focus exclusively on ‘exam results’ but give equal weight to children’s ‘wellbeing’. She cited research by the OECD showing that one in three 15-year-olds in England doesn’t feel they ‘belong’ in school – a higher figure than 12 years ago. Henceforth, she wants schools to teach children ‘a sense of belonging’.
That was a disappointing speech from an Education Secretary who boasts of being ‘led by the evidence’ because there’s no evidence that ‘a sense of belonging’ can be taught. Maths, yes. Reading, yes. Which is why, with a focus on driving up standards in numeracy and literacy since 2010, England’s schoolchildren steadily climbed the international league tables when it comes to maths and reading. But ‘belonging’? How are schools supposed to teach that?
As an education reformer, I spent nearly ten years giving speeches trying to persuade teachers that many of the things they passionately want to teach cannot be taught, at least not as stand-alone subjects. These include ‘emotional intelligence’, ‘critical thinking’ and ‘character’. Some of them might be transmitted organically if you do a good job of teaching children what can be taught – such as how to read, write and add up – but trying to teach these nice-to-haves as discrete ‘skills’ is a waste of time. Indeed, it’s worse than that because devoting time and resources to lessons supposed to instil, say, ‘social and emotional literacy’ means less time and fewer resources being spent on, say, the periodic table. ‘A sense of belonging’ is definitely on the list of things that cannot be taught.
Nevertheless, Phillipson is at least trying to address a serious problem in our schools, which is persistent absenteeism. Last month she pointed out that England is facing an ‘epidemic of school absence’, which is true. According to the DfE, one in five pupils is persistently missing lessons, defined as skipping one ‘session’ in ten, where a ‘session’ is either an entire morning or an entire afternoon. That’s 1.5 million schoolchildren missing 10 per cent of lessons. And according to the Centre for Social Justice, 140,000 children in England have simply gone Awol – that is to say, they never turn up to school at all.
But what Phillipson neglected to mention in her speech is that one of the major causes of this problem was school closures during the pandemic, a policy she was four square behind, along with most teachers, the majority of civil servants and the teaching unions. This was completely unnecessary: schoolchildren weren’t at risk from coronavirus. I pointed out it was a terrible idea at the time, not least because attending school is a habit and if you break a habit it’s difficult to re-acquire it.
Between 2014 and 2019, the number of persistently absent schoolchildren in England hovered between 700,000 and 800,000. In the academic year ending in 2022 – the first academic year following the pandemic in which schools were open throughout – that number ballooned to 1.6 million. And to the astonishment of all those ‘behavioural scientists’ advising the government during the ‘public health emergency’, the vast majority of those children haven’t reverted to the pre-pandemic norm. The result is that nearly all those gains made between 2010 and 2020 have been wiped out.
So Phillipson deserves credit for trying to address this issue, but loses marks for (a) not acknowledging her part in causing the problem and (b) coming up with a solution that is the educational equivalent of magic beans. Must try harder, Education Secretary. I know you’re not a fan of ‘rote learning’, wrongly thinking it’s the enemy of ‘wellbeing’. But you could start by learning the serenity prayer off by heart.
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