Debates in Art and Design Education

Nicholas Addison, Lesley Burgess, Nicholas Addison, Lesley Burgess

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415618878, 9780415618861
• eBook ISBN: 9781136232022
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Debates in Art and Design Education encourages student and practising teachers to engage with contemporary issues and developments in learning and teaching. It introduces key issues, concepts and tensions in order to help art educators develop a critical approach to their practice in response to the changing fields of education and visual culture.

Accessible, comprehensive chapters are designed to stimulate thinking and understanding in relation to theory and practice, and help art educators to make informed judgements by arguing from a position based on theoretical knowledge and understanding. Contributing artists, lecturers and teachers debate a wide range of issues including:

• the latest policy and initiatives in secondary art education

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• the concepts, skills and dispositions that can be developed through art education

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• tensions inherent in developing the inclusive Art and Design classroom

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• partnerships across the visual arts sector

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• creativity in the Art and Design curriculum

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• visual art and globalisation

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• establishing the significance of 'Design'

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• art practice as educational research.

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Debates in Art and Design Education is for all student and practising teachers interested in furthering their understanding of an exciting, ever-changing field, and supports art educators in articulating how the subject is a vital, engaging and necessary part of thetwenty-first century curriculum. Each chapter points to further reading and each section suggests reflective questions to help shape art educators' teaching. In particular, Debates in Art and Design Education encourages art educators to engage in research by providing an essential introduction to critical thinking around contemporary debates.

Part I

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Cautionary tales

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Chapter 1

Art and design education at the crossroads

John Steers

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Causes for concern

‘The Future of Art and Design in Schools’ has been a frequent theme of art and design education conferences and publications for as long as I can remember. The reason is obvious: the subject too often is perceived as under some sort of threat in one way or another. It could be argued that art and design teachers are more paranoid than most, but it is worth remembering that even if they are, nevertheless the threats are sometimes real. Following the election of the coalition government in May 2010, all teachers concerned with creative and cultural education in English schools have very good reason to be more than usually concerned. Arts education is at a crossroads or, just as likely, precariously poised on a cliff edge.

Why? The short answer is the coalition government's education policies, experimental and ideological initiatives driven by Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Education at the time. These include the introduction of the ‘English Baccalaureate’, a ‘root and branch’ review of the National Curriculum, proposed far-reaching changes to initial teacher education and student funding. Further concerns include the possible outcome of a Department of Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) review of ‘Cultural Education’ and the consequences of the decision by the Department of Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) to stop all money for teaching the arts and humanities in universities and specialist higher education institutions. All this is compounded by little evidence of any joined-up government thinking and a long list of likely unintended — or possibly intended — consequences. Each of these concerns is addressed in turn in this chapter.

The English Baccalaureate

The English Baccalaureate or ‘EBac’ was the first initiative to have a significant effect on art and design education in secondary schools. The government's White Paper ‘The Importance of Teaching’ included an announcement of the introduction of the EBac and the news that it was to be reported in the School Performance Tables in January 2011 as an additional measure of a school's performance. The stated intention was ‘to provide a powerful incentive for schools to drive the take up of individual science subjects, humanities such as history and, especially, foreign languages' (DfE 2010: 44). It was claimed the EBac together with a reformed National Curriculum will give schools ‘the freedom and the incentives to provide a rigorous and broad academic [my emphasis] education’ (DfE 2010: 45).

The widespread concern expressed by schools immediately on the introduction of the EBac was not only because it was applied retrospectively, but because the range of subjects included was felt to be too narrow and not in any way inclusive of all students in the school.

It was immediately apparent that the term ‘English Baccalaureate’ is a misnomer. As currently adopted it is not a qualification, and the intention expressed in the White Paper that achieving the stated combination of GCSEs ‘will entitle the student to a certificate recording their achievement’ (DfE 2010: 44) has yet to materialise. No organisation has accepted responsibility for issuing certificates to individual students and, at the time of writing, the websites of the awarding bodies make it clear they have no plans to do so. The House of Commons Education Committee (HCEC) in their critical report on the English Baccalaureate proposed that plans for such certification should be shelved and they pointed out: ‘We have not seen any evidence, either, that the cost and logistics of certification have been fully thought through’ (HCEC 2011: 36). The Committee commented further:

We do not believe the EBac — the hybrid of a certificate and a performance measure, named after a qualification — is appropriately labelled: it is not a baccalaureate, and as it stands the name can therefore be misleading to parents, professionals and pupils. The Government should assess the extent to which the name might cause confusion.

(HCEC 2011: 13)

Therefore, as it stands the EBac is a government initiative deliberately privileging specific ‘academic’ subjects in secondary school and setting additional, arbitrary, standards for measuring the ‘success’ of the English education system.

The lack of any clear rationale for the academic subjects that have been included or omitted in the English Baccalaureate is curious. For example, many perceive the definition of humanities and languages GCSEs to be arbitrary — why include Ancient Hebrew for example? Why exclude the arts, design and technology, citizenship, religious education? John White observes:

[Gove's] new English Baccalaureate is virtually a carbon copy of the 1868 Taunton report's curriculum for most middle class schools, as they were then called. The new award will be given to all 16-year-olds who have good exam grades in ‘English, mathematics, the sciences, a modern or ancient foreign language and a humanity such as history or geography’. Taunton's list is identical, except that it makes both history and geography compulsory. How is it that a curriculum designed for clerks and shopkeepers in Dickens' England is at the cutting edge in 2010?

(White 2011: 27)

It was immediately evident that many schools would now guide their students towards the named subjects at the expense of a broad and balanced curriculum and experience shows that coaching for GCSE examinations will often start in Year 7. The Times Educational Supplement published evidence for how the EBac has skewed the option choices that students are being given in 2011–2012: in 48 per cent of schools the curriculum had already been changed or was due to change to ‘suit the demands of the English Baccalaureate’ (Exley 2011: 22). Options to study subjects like art and design, music, religious education, drama, technology, business and information and communications technology, as well as vocational subjects, are being much reduced or even removed. An earlier (June 2011) indicative survey carried out by the National Society for Education in Art and Design (NSEAD) showed that teachers expected the numbers of students who opted to study art and design at Key Stage 4 to fall by 50 per cent in 2011– 2012. At the same time teachers reported a 39 per cent fall in numbers opting for vocational courses, while 38 per cent expected the number of art and design teachers to decline and 57 per cent reported a cut in the capitation for their department (NSEAD 2011).

I had an early opportunity to question Michael Gove and Schools Minister Nick Gibb about the immediate impact of the EBac at the launch of the National Curriculum Review in January 2011. Ministers repeated that they wished to see a ‘broad and balanced curriculum’ and Gibb said that it was up to head teachers to choose what they offered. Nevertheless it is obvious that non-EBac subjects are being perceived as less valuable by schools, students and parents as a result of this government initiative. I was drawn to the obvious conclusion that — regardless of the ongoing Curriculum Review — the government is determined to slim down the curriculum and focus on academic subjects, and that the EBac was a pre-emptive and not very subtle lever for achieving this outcome with more or less immediate effect. Inevitably more students will be successful in achieving the English Baccalaureate targets in the next two years — purely because significantly more of them will have been entered for the qualifying examinations. The probable ‘improvements’ in school performance that thus will appear on paper will not directly reflect better teaching or higher student achievements. It will not provide a true, comparative measure of previous school performance although, doubtless, ministers will claim it as such.

Concern has been expressed that some schools have encouraged students to follow ‘easier’ courses — those that might have a too highly rated tariff for GCSE equivalence — in order to improve their position in the league tables. While this so-called ‘gaming’ issue needed to be addressed not all vocational courses should be tarred with the same brush. BTEC (Business and Technology Education Council) diplomas in art and design are rigorous and widely accepted for entrance to university art and design courses. The HCEC commented:

The Government needs either to remove or revalue qualifications appropriately within the performance tables. We therefore welcome the Government's response to the Wolf review with regard to vocational qualifications and their league table tariffs. However, we remain unconvinced that the EBac is an effective way to redress the perverse incentives generated by existing performance measures (indeed in some ways it risks generating its own perverse incentives) and we feel that the EBac serves as a distraction rather than a solution in this context.

(HCEC 2011: 35)

Ministers seem obsessed by opening up opportunities for admission to preferred Russell Group universities to the exclusion of other reputable institutions. ‘Russell Group’ seems to be Nick Gibb's shorthand for excellence. This begs the question ‘where do specialist institutions like the independent art colleges, the Royal College of Art or the University of the Arts, as well as the art and design faculties of 80 or more other British universities fit into his world view’? It should be recognised that for those students who wish to pursue a career in the arts, especially art and design, the Russell Group have relatively little to offer.

I concede that a redesigned EBac might conceivably have a role as a ‘leaving’ certificate for students if it recognised student achievement in core skills and a range of ‘academic’ and ‘practical’ subjects — I dislike this pejorative distinction as I reject the implication that the arts are not cognitive activities and just as intellectually challenging as any other subjects. Wider educational achievements also should be included. It would need to be carefully designed, piloted and reviewed by teachers, academics and employers. There are some existing models on which to build. The Welsh Baccalaureate is a qualification for 14- to 19-year-olds that combines personal development skills with existing qualifications to make a wider award. It aims to help students to develop the knowledge and skills that higher education and employers want school leavers to demonstrate. The well-respected International Baccalaureate also provides a reasonable model from which to start. It has none of the limitations of the EBac that, as it stands, will damage the education of far too many young people and alienate them from school.

There is ample evidence there that the government's preferred choice of subjects is far from being the only route to success in so many fields — just take a look at the many stories on the website ‘A Better Baccalaureate’ (2011). We know that children learn in different ways, at a different pace and with different interests. Yet we hear Matthew Arnold's dictum on education often misquoted as a justification for a narrow academic curriculum. Arnold actually said: ‘… culture [my emphasis], the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world’ (Arnold 1873: xxvii). That one word change makes a considerable difference to the meaning. If distant bearded sages are to be relied on for insights into twenty-first century education then it is worth remembering two epithets often attributed to Rabindranath Tagore (1861– 1941). First: ‘Don't limit a child to your own learning, for she was born in another time’. The second is also worth pondering on in this context:

[A]dults, because they are tyrants, ignore natural gifts and say that children must learn through the same process that they learned by. We insist upon forced mental feeding and our lessons become a form of torture. This is one of man's [sic] most cruel and wasteful mistakes.

Let us hope that Mr Gove and Mr Gibb, and any future education ministers, take heed.

It is axiomatic that everyone should have a good basic education in core skills and knowledge. But curriculum breadth is also very important, and all should have an education up to the age of 16 that includes the humanities and languages, creative arts, physical education, mathematics, science and technological study alongside the development of other essential skills and values. Students should be encouraged to keep their options open rather than specialise too early — in reality in many secondary schools preparation for GCSEs begins in Year 7. There should be a focus on what young people need to equip themselves for a future in the twenty-first century — not the nineteenth century.

There is an obvious danger that the EBac will be a disincentive to learning for more students than it will help, if it steers them to study courses which are inappropriate for them. Although I am aware that academies, free schools and independent schools are not required to follow the National Curriculum, I have little doubt that the EBac will be a very real factor in determining the curriculum in many such schools. Nick Gibb told the Select Committee that art and music would be fine because there would be 30 per cent of curriculum time available for such options (or 20 per cent for those who opt for triple science). This all seems highly unlikely and back of an envelope calculations suggest that there will be room for only one option choice for most pupils beyond the EBac subjects, plus statutory religious and physical education.

The Council for Subject Associations in its submission to the Education Select Committee's inquiry into the EBac advised that the government should cease to use the current English Baccalaureate as a performance indicator for schools. Instead, after careful deliberations, it should introduce a carefully planned EBac qualification to assure a broad and rounded education for students up to 16; and provide a leaving certificate that recognises a range of achievements and has currency with employers and for access to future education. This also was broadly the view of the HCEC in the conclusions and recommendations of their report which, despite being couched in parliamentary language, was unequivocal in its criticism (HCEC 2011: 39–42). In one final admonishment the House of Commons Select Committee concluded: ‘We would therefore encourage the Government to take seriously the lessons to be learnt from [the introduction of the EBac], especially if, as we hope, the Government is to be successful in building greater respect for front-line professionals' (HCEC 2011: 37).

The curriculum review

The White Paper decreed that a new approach to the curriculum is needed, ‘specifying a tighter, more rigorous model of the knowledge that every child should expect to master in core subjects at every key stage’ (DfE 2010: 10). A review of the National Curriculum was announced with the aim of ‘reducing prescription and allowing schools to decide how to teach, whilst refocusing on the core subject knowledge that every child and young person should gain at each stage of their education’ (DfE 2010: 10). Over time it became apparent that this involved ‘slimming down’ the curriculum — that is removing subjects, and concentrating on ‘core knowledge’ to the exclusion of all else including any advice or guidance about related pedagogy.

Responses to the Curriculum Review were due by a deadline of 14 April 2011 and to the DfE's apparent surprise over 5,000 were submitted. The Department attributed this to unusual ‘interest’ but perhaps ‘concern’ would have been a more appropriate word. An Expert Group was established under the chair of Tim Oates from Cambridge Assessment. Oates (2010) had previously written a pamphlet entitled ‘Could Do Better: Using International Comparisons to Refine the National Curriculum in England, that had sufficiently impressed Michael Gove to persuade him to write the foreword and make this appointment. The pamphlet argued that:

although the National Curriculum for England has been subjected to a protracted process of revision, the latest round of revisions failed adequately to draw from emerging analysis of high-performing systems around the globe.

By taking a wrong turn in revision strategy, accumulated problems were not confronted an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Cautionary tales
• PART II Debates within the classroom
• PART III Debates beyond the classroom
• PART IV Debates in-between
• PART V Forever changes
• Index