Creative Schools review – we need to

call time on exam-factory education

Our school systems are now a matrix of organisational rituals and intellectual
‘

habits that do not adequately reflect the great variety of talents of the students
who attend them. Because they conflict with these systems, too many students
think that they are the problem; that they are not intelligent, or must have
difficulties in learning.”

Ken Robinson’s thesis is compelling: we are currently operating a Fordist model

of mass education that is failing to prepare young people for the dramatic
socioeconomic demands of the digital age. What is more worrying is that
politicians, rather than supporting a schools system with the flexibility
and innovation obviously needed, have fallen for a theology of standardised
testing and assessment that is exacerbating the crisis.

Robinson wants a revolution in education, “based on different principles from

those of the standards movement”. And he wants us – you – to be the change.
“The best place to start thinking about how to change education is exactly where
you are in it. If you change the experiences of education for those you work with,
you become part of a wider, more complex process of change in education as
whole.”

Robinson is, of course, a change-maker himself. He might have achieved

international acclaim for his 2006 TED talk, “Do Schools Kill Creativity?”(now
viewed by an estimated 300 million people worldwide), but for more than
40 years he has persuasively made the case for more creativity in teaching
and the curriculum, as a teacher, government adviser, examiner and
academic. Creative Schools brings together this classroom experience and policy
ardour in an elegant, powerfully written manifesto for change. And if the book
occasionally suffers from an overdose of education conference keynote-ese – the
need for “curiosity, criticism, communication, collaboration”; the importance of
“diversity, depth, dynamism” – its informed, avuncular style and unexpected
accounts of inspiring teachers more than make up for it.

The book is part of a growing public discourse on education policy aimed at a

data-and-ideas-hungry readership of helicopter parents, engaged practitioners
and school innovators. There are Doug Lemov and Pasi
Sahlberg on teaching, Paul Tough on character, Andrew Adonis on school
reform, Anastasia de Waal on selection, Paul Marshall on closing the attainment
gap. Then there are the blogs, Twitter feeds, Teach-Meets and EdTech geeks. Add
to that the controversies around international comparisons: Swedish free schools
versus Finnish teaching; New Orleans charter schools versus Singapore
curriculum reforms.

And it is all to be welcomed. The more we discuss education, the better. Not least
because such conversations help to highlight the tricky 40-year gap between
where policymakers think schooling should be heading (preparing for society 20
years hence) and what the majority of the public thinks schools should be doing
(their own halcyon days 20 years past). The role of politicians is to seek,
consensually and pragmatically, to bridge that divide.

But Robinson’s point is that politicians are doing exactly the opposite: scarred by
the media reporting of the Pisa international league tables on school
performance, they have retreated into a self-defeating cul-de-sac of testing and
assessment. As a result, we are at risk of inculcating an industrial education
system producing compliant, linear pupils. “The emphasis on testing comes at the
expense of teaching children how to employ their natural creativity and
entrepreneurial talents – the precise talents that might insulate them against the
unpredictability of the future in all parts of the world.”

The prescription is a richer personalisation of learning – an appreciation of the

diversity of intelligence; the need to adapt teaching schedules to different
learning speeds; a flexibility that allows learners to pursue their interests and
strengths; and a different model of assessment. And, as expected, a strong dose of
arts education as an essential component of schooling. Through a catalogue of
test cases – teaching Shakespeare in LA’s Koreatown; transforming schools
in North Carolina under the A+ arts programme – Robinson shows how taking
the arts seriously is particularly rewarding for high-poverty, inner-urban
districts. Time and again, the arts engage students and raise standards.

If, occasionally, Robinson gets a bit too Californian – with his call for “organic
education” and extensive flirtation with home-schooling – his driving critique of
the “exam factory” model of schooling is well worth reflecting on. Because, in
recent years, English schooling has had too much teaching to the test, too much
focus on C/D borderline, too many early and multiple entries for examinations.
Yet the uncomfortable truth is that there are also large swaths of the English
education system that require more not less uniformity. If all our pupils could
reach some basic minimum standards of literacy and numeracy by the time they
left primary schools, our educational attainment as a nation would be markedly
higher. Similarly, we need much greater consistency in the professional
development and training of teachers.

As much as Robinson decries them, this is the clarifying force of comparisons

such as the Pisa tables: they show how young people in Poland and Germany, let
alone Shanghai and Singapore, are more advanced in many essential subjects and
skills. Robinson rightly makes the case for the rigour of creative learning –
“creativity in any field may involve deep factual knowledge and high levels of
practical skill” – but we always need to guard against the soft bigotry of low
expectations: the worrying trend of play and expression being adequate for
working-class pupils, while leaving the tough stuff, the physics and history, for
their better-off peers.