Extra Learning

Out of School Learning and Study Support in Practice

Andrews, Kay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134986729
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

A discussion of out-of-school learning (OSHL), study support and extra-curricular activities. It describes why out-of-school learning is essential in helping to develop learning, and how to go about establishing and supporting effective programmes and activities outside the school curriculum.

1
OSHL: framing and funding policy

This chapter briefly examines:

• The changing social and economic context of OSHL and its place in educational culture as a whole.
• The challenge of raising achievement and what is meant by that in the context of wide gaps in opportunity and performance of pupils; the links between educational failure and social exclusion; and the place of OSHL in those policies.
• The role of voluntary and statutory partnership in the framing of study support OSHL policies after 1997.
• The key steps involved in creating a framework, linking Extending Opportunity to social inclusion policies (Schools Plus).
• The introduction of funding for OSHL through the New Opportunities Fund (NOF).

The whole area – crucial to a young person’s education – is notable for the absence of policy surrounding it. Occasionally, it has been cut across by government writing unworkable guidelines on charging for school activities or by concerns about the safety of adventure centres but these isolated debates have not resulted in policy makers thinking coherently and systematically about learning out of school as a policy issue.¹

OSHL: Facts and Fiction

Extra-curricular activity is hardly a new idea. It is an old idea with a history of voluntary commitment and excellent practice. The developing concept and practice of OSHL/study support invests both concept and practice with new significance, reinforced by new knowledge and applied to new imperatives. While schools do make a difference, there is a mounting conviction, informed by academics, teachers, pupils and parents, that they do not make all the difference; and that what happens outside school matters just as much as what happens in school, since it reflects the complex set of relationships and influences that impact upon the school-age child. The key change over the past five years is the recognition of how much learning does take place out of school hours, how this can be most effectively organised and evaluated, and how valuable this is in terms of short- and long-term educational objectives.

OSHL has, however, a long tradition, not least in the history of the community school which, by definition, sees its role as a learning centre for the community, open all hours and for all ages and abilities. Historically, the idea of the community school is perhaps the most perfect expression of the links between schools, families and communities and the concept of social inclusion.² Most recently, this fusion has been made clear in the blueprint for greater mutual involvement of schools and communities in the Policy Action Team report Schools Plus: Building learning communities which made a series of recommendations for the promotion of community education and lifelong learning as levers ‘with which to promote schools as a resource for the whole community’.³

Another early and innovative strand of provision in OSHL was the growth of supplementary schools, run by minority ethnic groups in the UK.⁴ There are over 1,000 supplementary schools in London, reflecting the fact in part that over 250 minority ethnic languages are spoken in London schools. They operate as supplementary schools, Saturday schools, ethnic minority language classes, or community classes: ‘Whatever the name, they are independent educational providers that operate outside state-maintained education … ‘Some of these supplementary classes focus on the National Curriculum subjects, particularly maths, English and science, and sometimes Black history and culture; others on mother-tongue classes and culture. The provision, the organisers stress, is ‘entirely supplementary and … a positive response to the minority ethnic child’s socio-educational needs … Its mission is to contribute to the holistic development of the child without being a substitute for formal schooling.’ All of them aim, through the strong cultural input, to ‘give children a real sense of their position in society’.⁵

Alongside this modification of an older ideal, however, extra-curricular provision for school pupils threads its way through the history of schools themselves.

Forty Years on: The Extra-Curricular Habit

The modern phenomenon of extra-curricular activities per se provides a transparent link to the defining characteristics of Victorian liberal education. This tradition, in itself, took many years to develop. For the early part of the 19th century, at schools such as Harrow, Marlborough, Uppingham, Lancing and Loretto, ‘masters atoned’ for their obsessive concerns with the classical curriculum ‘by an almost total indifference to the way in which a boy employed his leisure’. The boys’ free time was their own, and games were hardly part of an extra-curriculum which consisted largely of roaming the ‘glorious, unspoilt countryside’. At Marlborough, for example:

A large part of the boys’ free time was spent in exploring the countryside, fishing, hunting small animals, poaching and nesting … duck hunting and beagling … they were [also] given to frog-hunting and killing. The diary of one schoolboy in 1851 recorded playing ‘chess, music practice, egg blowing, watching bathing, lying around in fields, high jumping, and general packing.⁶

Gradually, the freedom to ramble over the countryside, go fossil hunting or killing birds gave way to long afternoons given over to team sports, the competitive institutions of houses, mission badges and shields, and the notion of service to the school and the community.

For the majority of people, the image of the public school, outside personal experience, is principally informed by the school story- or by its cartoon companion. Specialists in children’s literature have observed that this canon is primarily a narrative of exploits, activities, relationships, developing outside the classroom. Indeed, without any reference to what went on outside the classroom, most school stories would be very thin gruel. While sports offered the opportunity to develop leadership, discipline, and team work, the natural history societies, so popular among adults as well as pupils across the 19th century, enabled the public schoolboy and the city grammar school pupil to connect with a rural memory.

The grammar and secondary modem school traditions, faithfully modelled on the public school, reproduced the positive practice of voluntary activities after school, reflected in the traditions of school sports, debating, natural history, music and drama clubs, offered and accepted on a voluntary and school-spirited basis. The major difference, however, was that unlike the public school with its long, free afternoons, these activities in the maintained sector of education were on offer after the school day had ended.

In many instances fictional grammar school pupils seem to have had a richer and more successful life outside the classroom. The activities of the Colham Grammar School Natural History and Field Botanical Club (CGSNHAFBC) – or ‘Cigars and Nuts’ as it was known to Willie Maddison and Jack Templeton – proved a welcome outlet and also reflect some contemporary concerns:

On Saturday and Wednesday afternoons, membership of … Cigars and Nuts provided an alternative to the playing of games and the rambles of the Club were conducted by Mr Worth. In giving his consent to the formation of the club Mr Rore had insisted that its members should remain together and take notes of their observations. For this reason chiefly membership of Cigars or Nuts was considered a poor escape from more strenuous forms of exercise and too much like work. The club suffered from a paucity of members that was more or less permanent except for a transitory swelling at the commencement of term, when new boys were wont to join with the spontaneity of newly-hatched flies blundering into the most hoary spider’s web in the corner of a potting shed.⁷

In the post-war world, the personal histories of Jennings and Darbishire are almost entirely a record of their out of school hours exploits, leaving Mr Carter to observe in Jennings’ first end of term report at Linbury Court, after a story-length saga of selection for the First Eleven, that Jennings ‘enters very fully into all out of school activities and takes a lively interest in the corporate life of the school’. They both exemplify the ‘inventive, industrious and high-spirited’ activities in their after-school hobbies which contrasted formidably with their lack of serious purpose in lessons:

In the common room, the noise made by a group of twenty boys suggested that to be active indoors meant creating enough sound to raise the roof and shake the foundations of the building. Odd pieces of wood were being hammered and chiselled into model yachts; biscuit tins were being beaten into gleaming aeroplane wings; the stage manager of the puppet theatre … was imitating rolls of thunder with a tea tray and a gong stick … Near the rattling windows members of the wireless club with home-made sets tuned to rival stations, relayed grand opera, military bands, and talks in Norwegian all at the same time.⁸

Parallel with the supply of after-school activities in public and maintained schools has also come a concern with the need to divert and control young people’s behaviour outside school. Organised activities, scouts, guides, temperance movements, or youth clubs are part of the dense weave of voluntary provision reflecting public concern with morality, public health and social order which have emerged over the past century. These organised community-based activities, traditionally separate from schools, have been served by different social and voluntary agencies, and been independent of educational policy.

The need to organise the idle hands of children and young people seems to have accelerated, as with so many other aspects of provision for children and families, during wartime. The First World War posed, at national level, the problem of juvenile delinquency. ‘A central juvenile organisation committee (JOC) was set up with local JOCs to organise diversions, like games leagues, and were the first recipients of the first grants to voluntary organisations.’⁹ The Second World War provoked further action on juvenile delinquency, in this instance inspired by the rise in juvenile crime evident by 1941. Intriguingly, in a memorandum issued in June that year, the Home Office and the Board of Education pointed to the fact that the number of children under 14 found guilty of offences in the first year of the war had risen by 41 per cent and by 21 per cent for those between 14 and 17. ‘It was felt that a major cause of these increases, besides lack of discipline, was the closure of leisure facilities due to the war.’ In response, in London, ‘play centres were opened in all areas and staff were sent to the reception areas to organise out of school activities. For older children mixed youth recreation centres were opened, for young people to ‘meet in social intercourse and recreation’.¹⁰

And, of course, to bring the story up to date, Harry Potter himself presents a heroic figure in the Quidditch tournament as surely as he does in facing his adult enemies.

The 1990s: Changing Lives and Changing Priorities

Over 40 years, therefore, the pattern of provision of OSHL changed very little. The extra-curricular tradition, although recognised as fundamentally important to the ethos and practice of the good school, still tended to be seen as extra to the school (and to the community). Moreover, it was characterised as:

• closely linked to the curriculum itself;
• offered on a personal basis by committed teachers;
• unsupported by the school in terms of funding and organisation;
• largely disassociated from the school’s learning objectives;
• unpaid and unprovided for;
• accidental in its benefits;
• undertaken by the already motivated and confident.

By the 1990s, however, the widely held perception, after a decade of difficulties in schools around issues of pay and conditions, was that after-school activities had perceptibly declined.¹¹ This, accompanied by the loss of playing fields and playgrounds, and the increasing proportion of mothers returning to work, saw increased concern about what school-age children were doing outside school hours. At the same time, social and economic changes began to intensify the conflict between the needs of parents and children at the end of the school day. The ‘long hours culture’, which means that parents may be financially rich but time poor, is now mocked by a school-day timetable still fixed by the role of children in gathering in the harvest. At the same time, while very few women worked at the beginning of the last century most mothers of school-age children are now in paid employment. The...