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From supply agency to demand agency
Taking back control
JL Dutaut Lucy Rycroft-Smith
This book is meant as a follow-up to Jelmer Evers’ and René Kneyber’s incredible volume, Flip the System. It was after a presentation by René at a researchED conference that, both looking to recover our professional pride after a bruising few years in Special Measures, we found a new purpose. Those had been years of disempowerment and all-consuming workload, of CPD as cruel and unusual punishment and of health-destroying stress. Now, we would fight back to fitness, not just for ourselves, but for the profession. In the very incubating chamber of neoliberal reform, we would seek out the other voices of dissent, and we would make them heard. We would look beyond their divisions and identify their commonality. We would analyse our findings and we would use them to define teacher professionalism, and to write the teachers’ manifesto. We would transform the education system in this country – not with a view to rewriting its curriculum, nor to delimiting its pedagogy, nor still to restructuring it, but to give teachers back the power to effect those very changes. We would show that any education policy that failed to take the profession into account – and that is every education policy since education policy became a thing – was doomed to failure.
We wouldn’t stop there. We would show, too, that the system as we know it is nothing more than a heap of those failures. Indeed, every new Secretary of State, at least every one that represents a new Government, makes a point of telling us so. Unfortunately, they do so only rhetorically, to justify their own efforts to sort out the mess. The heap gets nicely decorated for a while, with a new coat of 21st-century progressive sheen or a trendy, matte, traditionalist upcycling. Then the Minister moves on to great office or to the back-benches. As for money, the great Secretary giveth and the great Secretary taketh away. Jobs and talents are lost, or they fail to be developed properly. Then the Government moves to the opposition benches. Rinse. Repeat.
And underneath the heap of those failures – the most recently buried still visible between the cracks, still gasping for air and knocking on a hollow pipe in the hope of rescue – are valiant efforts to educate children, to prepare them for adult life as British citizens, as socially adept individuals, as productive workers.
It is time for a different way of working. It is time to flip the system – to unearth its buried treasures and to recreate it on solid foundations instead of continuing to pile detritus on top of an over-full landfill site.
What we have discovered in our research, what we sensed in our lonely years of classroom isolation, is that where the system promotes networks at all, it only promotes the kind that are predominantly exclusive. Designed to suit the political agenda of the current DfE incumbents, they connect limited numbers of people to limited ideas, with limited knowledge and limited collective effectiveness. The importance of these three features emerges from all the contributions we have received. We have grouped them according to their authors’ main priorities, though you will find overlaps and deduce others. Together, they are dedicated to defining professionalism, which we interpret to be the attitudes and behaviours of individuals towards knowledge, towards their colleagues, and towards the ethos of education. More than that, it is clear throughout the book that it isn’t enough for teachers to be consumers of knowledge, invitees to collaborations, or receivers of standards. Teachers must also be creators of knowledge, of collaborations, and of purposeful action. In short, they must have agency.
Following these initial sections of the teachers’ manifesto, demanding cognitive agency, collective agency, and ethical agency, we look at policy-making itself – of all the networks, the most closed and exclusive by far. Our contributors here show a consistent and disturbing truth: it is this very exclusion of teachers’ knowledge, collective capacity, and/or ethical views that results in the system’s failure to adequately and sustainably implement policy and reform. This section of the manifesto demands greater political agency for teachers.
Finally, we have found, consistent with the original work of Flip the System, that the problems we face in the UK are not isolated, and that we need not face them alone. In a world where teachers are set up to compete against each other for coveted places at the top of the tower of PISA, where any learning from each other is mediated by the very same exclusive network of policy-makers, flipping the system means reaching out beyond our national boundaries for a global agency. Not only should we never be isolated in our classrooms, but we should not be isolated in our systems. Our agency must be as global as it is national, as national as it is local, and as local as it is individual. The only idea agency excludes is exclusion itself. It is a professional right and a professional duty which can’t be given, and can’t be taken away. It is the very nature of professionalism.
We offer this book as a manifesto in five parts to define, demand, and devolve professional agency for teachers across the UK. Who are we to do this? We are teachers, and you’ve made us use our teacher voice.
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Part I
The teachers’ manifesto
Cognitive agency
JL Dutaut Lucy Rycroft-Smith
Knowledge input
As teachers, we are called upon to know and make use of a range of information, from student data, through curriculum, to pedagogical knowledge. While an exhaustive list of all the things we need to know in order to function effectively in our education system is beyond the scope of this book, our premise is that all knowledge that is necessary to our performance is equally valuable and valid as professional knowledge, be that the family circumstance of this or that pupil, or the latest research in cognitive psychology. Further, as professionals with agency, it is our contention that it is incumbent upon us, in active collaboration with each other, school and system leaders, to produce new knowledge, and to make decisions about prioritising it. The unchallenged imposition of knowledge input (what teachers ought to know) is in fact an act of prioritisation taken out of our hands, and a restriction on our professionalism with devastating consequences for our ability to teach.
In this part, we chart the development of new forms of powerful teacher knowledge through research engagement that is grassroots and, if not totally unmediated, at least more so than has previously been the case. Tom Bennett describes the research revolution he and thousands of teachers have lit the fire under. Peter Ford tracks the atrocious policy-making that led to the need for this knowledge revolution and reminds us of the importance of universities in developing the research revolution. For too long, he argues, the relationship between schools and universities has itself been mediated by policy-makers. Jonathan Firth charts developments in education research that present new powerful knowledge for teachers, and argues that the research itself demands teacher agency in order to be adequately implemented.
Knowledge output
Some forms of knowledge are more valued than others by the education system. Ironically, these most valued datasets are often the least useful in terms of improving outcomes – being, as they are, summative in their nature. From data gathering for half-termly reports that say little to parents about their children’s true performance to government-mandated data collection for the purposes of monitoring, league ranking and policy justification, this knowledge, albeit valid and valuable, is given an importance well beyond its true worth. Indeed, it often hampers the development of other forms of knowledge that could have more impact. Our contention is that this form of policy-making is nothing more than the imposition of practices of knowledge output (what teachers ought to communicate). It is a further de-professionalisation of our role, with equally destructive effect.
Here, David Weston argues that schools should be more than data-rich – swimming in piles of data as Scrooge McDuck does in piles of cash. Schools, David argues, should be data smart – leaner, but investing shrewdly for development and growth by allowing teachers the autonomy, the agency, to prioritise the data that is of use to their practice.
Here, too, David Williams describes the Welsh experience of mandated practices that bear little relevance to the job of teaching. As a case in point, David looks at reforms in assessment, and the perverse incentives of policy-making that prioritise political accountability over school and teacher accountability.
David Williams goes further. As a thought experiment, he proposes an entirely new way of conceiving of and carrying out assessment. Our contention, and his, is not that it is necessarily right, or right for everyone. As editors of this book, though, we are entirely convinced that teachers will not only offer different solutions, but different types of solution altogether, to the problems facing education in the UK today.
Julie Smith and Zeba Clark offer this section on cognitive agency two concrete examples of teacher-generated, teacher-centred solutions to developing and nurturing professional knowledge. As a senior school leader, Zeba makes the case for internal over external accountability in a forthright, evidence- and experience-based way. Julie, a director of teaching and learning, describes the transformative power of practitioner-led research.
In this way, the following contributions not only demonstrate that the education system undermines the professionalism and status of teachers in the sphere of professional knowledge, but that teachers like Tom, Peter, David, Julie and Zeba exercise that professionalism regardless, often despite it. The UK deserves better for its teachers and their students.
Demand cognitive agency
The teachers’ manifesto demands that teachers develop and be empowered to develop their professional knowledge, continuously and according to their own priorities, in collaboration with their colleagues. This must include:
•Teacher involvement in academic research as consumers and producers;
•Qualifying and professional standards that require evidence of research engagement;
•Working conditions that make possible the continued attainment of such standards;
•Teacher involvement at every level in the design of policy that requires:
•Any reform of the standards themselves;
•Any reform that impacts on the knowledge required of teachers to perform their duty, especially with regard to curriculum, pedagogy and monitoring;
•Any reform that impacts on the knowledge required of teachers to account for the performance of their duty, especially with regard to data collection, assessment and monitoring.
•Accountability measures for all stakeholders and policy-makers that require a commitment to, and the monitoring of performance in, upholding the professionalism of teachers with regard to their cognitive agency as defined above.
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Chapter 1
There are no ninjas
Why the research revolution might rescue teaching
Tom Bennett
“The teacher or school that pursues self-guided, amateur research can easily fall prey to every bias and preconception they are attempting to escape.”
In 2013, I started researchED when I was a full-time teacher in a London inner-city school. I was frustrated with the number of pointless tasks teachers were asked to execute that seemed to have little evidence to substantiate them. From Brain Gym to compulsory project work, in the UK at least it seemed that to be a teacher meant having very little say in how and what you taught. To some extent this is understandable – teaching isn’t a hobby, nor is it free to provide. The public purse demands and deserves input and o...
