A newly released survey of early years and primary
professionals, released at the launch summit of the Save Childhood Movement on the 27th and
28th of April and prepared in partnership with the Barrett Values Centre, has
revealed an enormous disparity between the values that teachers feel are
important for the education system and what is actually going on.
- While 67% of those surveyed thought that education should
be child-centred as a matter of priority, only 2% thought the current system
fulfilled that.
- While 60% of respondents thought creativity should be
prioritised, less than 2% thought the current system supported it.
- And while 50% believed that early education should
emphasise the importance of play, only 2%
thought the current system did that.
- Only 2% of respondents thought that the current system
cultivated a passion for learning, and 0% believed that it fostered empowerment.
When asked which words best described the current state of
British education as they experienced it, the most common words were:
focus on targets, bureaucracy, results focus, top-down
pressure and adult agenda.
In contrast, when asked which words they believed should
characterise education the words most commonly chosen were:
child-centred, creativity, importance of play, passion
for learning and empowerment.
The gap between the values held by the practitioners
themselves and those of the education system as
a whole revealed a level of 'Cultural Entropy' (meaning the degree of
dysfunctional or fear-driven behaviour) that the Barrett Values Centre terms "a critical situation requiring leadership
changes to avoid organisational
failure'.
The survey examined the values of 177 early years
professionals including childminders, nursery and primary school teachers and
headteachers, school governors, lecturers and academics and was conducted
between the 10th and the 17 of April, 2013.
Wendy Ellyatt, Founding Director and CEO of the movement,
shared her own deep concern about the current situation -
" It is simply unacceptable that there should be such a
disparity between the values that teachers themselves hold and the systems that we are
then asking them to work within. How we can expect them to be the creative,
spontaneous, passionate and empowered adults that we really need around
children when they are empowerment, constantly ground down by the demands of the system? We
need something better and the movement is determined to help fight for
this."
The movement hopes to soon extend this survey to include a
much more significant percentage of the
teaching profession.
