Results or Creativity?

We are in a results led culture. Young people need good results to progress through the stages of education towards the best job prospects possible. This now applies to everyone as the Government expects all young people to stay in education and training until the age of 18. Schools too, are judged by their results by students, parents, the local community, the Local Authority and Ofsted. When Ofsted last visited us, it was very clear that, no matter what they saw or were told, all judgements would be made based on our last set of results. You are only as good as your last set of results!

Yet when I first came into teaching the driving force was creativity. I was trained to try and understand how children learn. It was important how you presented work, the questions you asked and how you inspired young people to want to learn rather than just do as they are asked. As a young teacher in my first job, I was teaching a course for which there were no text books. We wrote all our own materials and we were engrossed in producing work that inspired our students, gave them responsibility for their own work, offered them choices, honed their study and research skills and yet ensured they learnt the key teaching points. Time was not so much of an issue and if students got really involved with their studies then you let them carry on.

In the mid 1980’s the introduction of the National Curriculum imposed a different driving force on education. There was a body of knowledge that teachers had to deliver and that body of knowledge was huge. The driving force was getting through the materials and delivering the course. It had many advantages in that you knew exactly what to teach and you knew that everyone else was teaching it too. Text books were focused on teaching the National Curriculum but, if an area of work wasn’t in the syllabus, it was never going to get ‘air space’ and there certainly wasn’t time to go off at a tangent. In the pursuit of delivering the content, the skills of how to present materials in an exciting way were set aside. It was all about ‘what we taught’ not ‘how we taught it’.

Looking back on it now, things needed to change. We needed sharpening up as a profession and made more accountable for what we were delivering. But, as is so often the case in education (and probably other areas of life), the pendulum swung from one extreme to another and, as a result, a lot of good practice was lost. So is it impossible to have an education system where results and creativity are inclusive? I don’t think so; there are changes being made now that give us a chance of bringing the pendulum towards the middle and our students gaining advantage of both.

At Key Stage 3, there have been changes to the programmes of study that are less prescriptive and content led. The changes give some subjects more choice about the examples they can use to exemplify teaching points. The content has become less heavy. In addition, there is a growing emphasis on skills, in particular thinking skills, moving us more towards the application of knowledge rather than the consumption of it. At Rodborough we have begun to take advantage of these changes. We have been working for over a year on the development of our own thinking skills work. Starting in September 2008, Year 7 are to receive three thinking skills lessons during the year from every subject they study. The work developed by staff uses a common language and approach with the intention that students can see the links between subjects and apply their skills to any situation. It is early days yet but early indications show that students really enjoy these lessons and are motivated by the challenge of them. Teachers have also gained much from working together as a team to deliver a coordinated project across the school. The emphasis is definitely about ‘how students learn’.

We have no intention of losing sight of our responsibility to help young people to achieve the best results they possibly can. These are the passport to their future. We would, however, like those young people to leave us, enthused about learning and with the skills and confidence to be independent learners for the rest of their lives.