This article by Natalie Bennett, leader of the Green Party, was first published yesterday by the Huffington Post, LINK under the title:
Education Reform - Why It's Time to Abolish Dictatorial, Oppressive Ofsted
When I talk to people in the schools system, there's a huge and
growing concern that we are on entirely the wrong path in terms of
institutional structures, teaching practice and direction. These were
all issues addressed when we updated the Green Party education policy at
our Spring Conference in Liverpool.
The policy calls for the abolition of Ofsted, which has become unduly
dictatorial, oppressive and rigid in its views, while also being
subject to political meddling.
It calls for its replacement with continuous collaborative assessment
and for national council educational excellence working closely with
local authorities. To further encourage local accountability and
reaction to local needs, the policy calls for education authorities to
encourage schools to set up parent councils or forums, providing a
mechanism for direct local input, and also for representatives of older
students to be able to attend governing body meetings and have input
into their decisions.
This all reflects the fact that a general revolt against Ofsted is
growing, with schools around the country (and their communities) saying
that its processes are not fair or reasonable, its criteria arbitrary,
and its inspections incredibly stressful and destructive.
From
Hogarth Primary in London, to a range of Stoke-on-Trent schools; from
Oldfield School in Bath to
Sandy Lane Primary
in Reading, and many more, there's grave dissatisfaction at Ofsted's
behaviour and a failure of transparency and apparent fairness in its
decisions.
Schools that serve disadvantaged communities, and community schools
that the government wants to convert to free status, often despite the
wishes of parents, seem particularly vulnerable to negative Ofsted
inspections, despite the views of parents and their communities.
That's in part a function of the increasing pressure on all schools
to produce test results at the expense of any broader quality of
education, and to follow narrowly prescriptive recipes for teaching, of
which perhaps the worst example is the phonics test.
The ideological attachment of our current education secretary to this
single method, based on an extraordinarily narrow evidence base, is
possibly the worst single example of 'goveism' - the attempts to decide
the nature and content of what our children are taught according to the
whims, prejudices and preferences of a single man.
It's telling that when I talk to sixth formers and university
students around the country, one comment that invariably gets
enthusiastic support is my call for pupils to no longer be treated like
the material in a sausage machine, shoved through a series of gauges to
force them into a uniform shape and size, with 'failure' penalised by
them being thrown aside into the 'waste' bin. That's why we're calling
for an end to the current testing regime and rigid age-related
benchmarking.
Our new policy also highlights the way in which free schools, like
academies, lack local democratic accountability and oversight, and calls
for them to be incorporated back into the state system, with oversight
from local authorities.
That reflects growing signs of collapse in the free and academies school systems, with disasters ranging from the
E-Act education charity, which is to have nearly a third of its 34 schools taken off it, to the frankly incredible disaster of the
Al-Madinah school in Derby.
There are huge numbers of empty places in free schools, and the lack
of planning for future pupil numbers is having disruptive impacts around
the country. The government certainly won't admit it, but this is an
utterly failed policy. It was always clear that the free school
programme was an attempt to open the way for private companies to make
profits from teaching our students - threatening the same kind of
destruction and chaos that companies like G4S, A4E and Atos have brought
to so many other public services. But there's increasing hope now that
the whole system will fall apart before getting to that point - which is
great for the long-term future of our school system, but dreadful for
the many thousands of pupils and parents caught up in this Govian mess.
There is an even broader problem with the nature of our education
system that needs to be tackled. We're increasingly being told that its
purpose is narrowly instrumental - to prepare pupils for jobs - despite
the fact that many of the states we're now trying to copy - from
Singapore to China - have released the limitations and problems of that
approach and are frantically seeking to improve their students'
creativity and general skills development.
Training pupils for jobs that often don't exist now, or may well not
exist in the future, is an obvious, enormous waste. We're in a
fast-moving world, and young people need to develop their ability and
desire to learn throughout their life, to have flexible skills, whether
intellectual or hands-on, to deal with what is going to be a rapidly
changing economy and society. To prepare pupils for the narrow
conditions of our failed economic model is a massive error that betrays
our young people.
For more details on Green Party education policy and reforms follow https://twitter.com/GreenEdPolicy
