The kids who come last
The big problem with school and how to fix it
Ranking children based on their academic performance is an unavoidable feature of school. We all have an interest in ensuring smart diligent people become doctors, teachers etc and it’s far fairer to allocate scarce opportunities in higher education on the basis of objective, national exams rather than any alternative, where family connections and looking/sounding the part would almost certainly carry more weight.
This basic feature has a bug though, a problem that affects all schools to varying degrees and acts as a drag anchor on their efforts to provide quality education to all their students. The problem is that it’s awful being in or near the bottom of that ranking. Imagine you’re one of the hundreds of thousands of kids aged 11 to 16 currently getting 1s and 2s (old money Fs and Es) whose target grades are 3s. How would you approach school? Try your hardest to prove that you’re dumber than the average kid, even though turning those 1s into 3s makes virtually no difference to your opportunities post 16?
Why try?
The incentives for children in this position are terrible and so it’s unsurprising that few of them are enthusiastic collaborators in the learning process. Their problem is compounded by the fact that refusing to cooperate with school creates a cycle of punishment and defiance, so that in addition to leaving with no good qualifications they often develop bad attitudes and behaviours that make it even harder succeed at work or further study. It’s a shame on a human level that for a substantial minority of children their introduction to work and public life is a humiliating one and on an economic level that their potential to be productive citizens is wasted.
When you’re assessing to find the best you also reveal the worst; there’s no avoiding that. We tried solving this problem with vocational qualifications which were meant to be different from academic ones yet equally respected. It turns out they’re neither so this didn’t work, but the idea of something different in the curriculum is a sound one. We know that some kids will fail academically so we need to ask what else can school offer them that can be a source of pride and set them up for success in later life?
Get down to business
Enterprise can be part of the solution; put students in small groups and have them set up and run their own businesses. The big difference between this, and say BTEC Business, is that they could earn money. This makes it radically different from anything currently in the curriculum, acts as an olive branch to reset strained relations between students and school and creates a powerful incentive for those students to improve their behaviour in order to be allowed to participate. Money talks but this is not a mere bribe. To earn this money students would need to develop a product or service, market themselves to find customers and then keep them by consistently delivering on their promises. This would be truly general vocational education. Vocational, because the output is actions not words and general because the skills developed are highly prized across all sectors of the economy. There wouldn’t be any pigeonholing of these kids, as there is with some vocational programmes, as doers of a specific job like hairdressing or car repair.
Conceptually we know this can work as many schools have Young Enterprise like schemes as extra curricular activities. These just need scaling up so that they run for the entire 11-16 secondary phase and are given teaching time, which can be allocated from the vocational qualifications currently sat by around 40% of students and which do little or nothing to improve the future prospects of their candidates.
Running businesses would promote teamwork in a way that groupwork, the school system’s current means of teaching collaboration fails to do, because the success of the team would matter and all its members would have a concrete stake in it. The market does the assessment; all the teacher needs to do is publish a league table of the companies ranked by profit. The competitive dynamics are healthier here than in the academic domain because the correlation between effort and reward is much stronger in the case of a cake stand or car wash than it is with algebra or poetry criticism. Furthermore, while in any field few people can aspire to be the most successful individual, everyone can aspire to be part of the most successful team.
Love’s labours lost
Another area of the curriculum that could provide more opportunities for success is the arts. We treat these as academic subjects so what we call, say drama, on the timetable is the study of drama and the end result is an assessment where the teacher/exam board determines how well the students understand and write about drama. Imagine if instead of that, students rehearsed in those lessons and put on termly shows. By the time your child was fourteen you could have seen them in a series of nine plays; how amazing would it be to witness their development as a performer like that? Combine that with exhibitions of their art work, concerts, festivals. Schools have the opportunity to create affordable, enjoyable events for families to enjoy while giving their students a chance to shine somewhere other than the exam hall.
Go panthers!
Having regular arts events combines nicely with businesses because you’re bringing a customer base onto school premises. Sport can fulfil this role too. I always felt a pang of jealousy watching Friday Night Lights that in parts of America it’s apparently normal for a whole town to come out and watch school kids play sport - why can’t we have that? It’s cheap entertainment, it strengthens the bond between school and community and it’s another chance for kids to hone their entrepreneurial skills by selling drinks, snacks and merch.
Some view the negative impact of coming bottom at school as a problem with competition itself and seek to eliminate situations where one child wins and another loses. This is disingenuous because school itself is a giant contest with significant economic consequences for how you place and it’s also disrespectful to those who come bottom academically as it implicitly denies their ability to win anything anywhere. The issue isn’t that academic achievement is a competition; it’s that this competition completely dominates the school experience. In other words we have too little competition and not too much.
The proposed changes to vocational and arts education above are steps to remedying this problem, another tool is the house system. Dividing students into houses and having them compete is powerful because it drastically lowers the barrier of entry. Eleven kids can play on the school football team; house team you’re taking anyone willing to put on the shirt. Sadly, in state schools there’s a tendency to see it just as a means of organising pastoral care, but it’s the range of competitions and the celebrations of them in assemblies and notice boards that make it a valuable addition to school life.
Evidence of learning
Over the past twenty years schools in England have have made heroic efforts to boost academic achievement and have made real progress. But narrowing the focus to just exam results has negative consequences for those whose exam results are bad. If instead of a print out of grades, students left school with a CV that listed their academic results, their experience running a small business for five years and the highlights of their sporting and artistic achievements then many more of them would be able to say to prospective employers “this is why you should hire me”. Counter intuitively this could lead to improvements in overall academic performance. The main drag at the moment is the difficulty of motivating low attaining students. If those students were successful at something and had a more positive attitude towards school as a result, it would be easier to convince them to try in areas where they struggle.
“You win some. You lose some” is a healthy lesson for children to learn. The big problem with school is that some kids win everything the school deems important and other kids lose. The kids that lose are angry, dejected and often rude but can you blame them?
We can’t change the fact that some people are smarter than others, but we can change school so that those who are less intelligent have a chance to succeed at something other than essays and exams. It won’t be the case that every academic failure is a stunning success on the stage, the sports field or the boardroom, life isn’t fair like that, but some will be and they deserve the chance to prove it. All children should have a shot at leaving school with their head held high.