The problems in our education system are about much more than pay
This is my weekly newsletter for Reaction subscribers, but I’m on summer holiday this week. Unlike last year there’s no Tory leadership contest, so I’m taking a proper break. This involves flying to Naples, jumping in the sea, ordering a Campari spritz, reading and sleeping. Max Mitchell from the team is standing in. At the heart of Reaction is our Young Journalists Programme, providing paid training and mentoring for the next generation. Max has just joined the YJP. I’m sure you’ll enjoy his take. I’ll be back in mid-July. Thank you for being a subscriber.
Iain Martin, Publisher, Reaction.
All the attention given to the NHS this week on its 75th anniversary meant that health dominated, rather than education, although Sir Keir Starmer did try to make a speech on schools. Education needs more attention. This week, teachers have been striking over pay and pensions. Statistics out last month showed that 40,000 teachers in England left the profession last year – a record 9 per cent of all teachers. Unions blamed the material conditions of pay and workload, but I wonder if there isn’t a different reason, beyond pay, for the exodus.
A recent survey published by the DfE said that teachers lost six minutes every half hour to misbehaviour. The report also showed that although 90 per cent of head teachers thought their school’s behaviour was good, only 64 per cent of classroom teachers and 47 per cent of students agreed. Are these students just hyper-sensitive to bad behaviour by their contemporaries? Or, are they more honest than teachers about the state of behaviour and what it does to their educational experience? I think the latter.
No doubt, schools across Britain are struggling to cope with the influx of students. There are 300,000 more senior school pupils than there were four years ago. The teachers directly bear the brunt of this pressure – and it’s true, they don’t get paid enough for it.
It seems like too many schools are becoming horrible places to be. This is partly because many of the kids are in a bad place post-lockdown and schools aren’t giving them what they need to rise above their issues. In 2021, one in six kids in England aged five to 16 was identified as having a probable mental health problem – up from one in nine in 2017. This is only rising after the devastation of schools being closed for far too long during Covid. The charity Mind found that 68 per cent of young people had missed classes because of their poor mental health. For older high school students, half of 17-19 year-olds with a diagnosed mental health problem had self-harmed or attempted suicide.
Many specialists, authors and thinkers have been trying to get to the bottom of why our young people are so miserable. One immediate stand-out cause is the rise of social media. Young people are more online than they ever have been. In a piece for the New Statesman back in March, Jonathan Haidt highlighted some damning data on the link between social media use and the despair and hopelessness that many teenagers are feeling, particularly young girls. He said: “For boys, moving from two to five hours of daily smartphone use is associated with a doubling of depression rates. For girls, it’s associated with a tripling.”
When asking why the data shows this crisis happening after 2012 and particularly in girls, he lays the blame solely at the door of Instagram. “The iPhone 4 was released – the first smartphone with a front-facing camera. In 2012 Facebook bought Instagram…By 2015, it was becoming normal for 12-year-old girls to spend hours each day taking selfies, editing selfies and posting them for friends, enemies and strangers to comment on, while also spending hours each day scrolling through photos of other girls and wealthy female celebrities with (seemingly) superior bodies and lives.”
Rather than young girls spending time with friends and family, or at clubs or learning instruments, they are often adrift in a bubble of delusional vanity constantly critiquing every which way they don’t look like an airbrushed model. One easy step in making our schools better places could be to remove smartphones. As Haidt concluded last month in The Atlantic: “They impede learning, stunt relationships, and lessen belonging. They should be banned.”
These are external pressures that are making kids’ lives harder and consequently teachers’ lives harder. Thankfully, it’s a pretty simple fix – reduce access to smartphones – which will just take some guts from the adults.
But here is the deeper, more sinister problem for education policy. The rise in recent decades of “student-led” learning combined with a therapeutic turn has defenestrated much of our teaching profession. The curriculum, protocols and legislation are all designed with good intentions but they are disastrous for the teacher-student dynamic where there has to be an asymmetry of authority for it to serve both parties. Teachers have to be in charge for students to learn properly.
Let’s take student-led learning. Sometimes it’s referred to as “student-centred” learning – a terrible phrase when by definition teaching should centre on the student. A quick Google will take you to a host of sanctimonious educational websites extolling the virtues of “student-led learning”. Here’s some info from one such site: “In student-led learning, the teacher is a guide and facilitator, walking around to ask reflective questions or guide students to ask their own questions.” Teachers, it is said, should encourage student-led discussions, student evaluations of each other, student feedback to each other, student-led conferences and student as teacher sessions. There’s no real need for the teacher at all in this model of education.
Although this is of course intended to expand the autonomy of young people, it is actually an abdication of adult responsibility and authority that kids need to stop them from questioning absolutely everything.
This is the theme of The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education, by Kathryn Ecclestone and Dennis Hayes, first published in 2008 with a second edition in 2019. According to the authors, therapeutic education is making children and adults anxious and self-preoccupied, rather than encouraging them to aspire in an optimistic and resilient spirit.
These pressures – smartphone culture and a dangerous shift of power away from teachers – are making too much of the next generation miserable and harder to teach. The problems in our education system are about much more than pay.
Period drama dross
I’ve been too busy of late (blame Iain Martin, who is back next week) to be as cultured as I’d like to be. I’ve been meaning to get round to seeing Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City and having a go at Laura Cumming’s new memoir told through 17th-century Flemish art. Alas, instead I have been fed on the gruel and stale breadcrumbs of the Bridgerton spin-off Queen Charlotte. My girlfriend forced the six-part series on me, and I’m ashamed to admit I enjoyed some of it. The conclusion was pathetic and made me question why I had allowed it to consume eight hours of my life, but the sets were lovely.
The price of a shave
With my masculine accoutrements still stuck in Glasgow and not having the time to shave in the madness of last week’s post-graduation partying, I’ve been deprived of a clean shave for some time. Last summer when travelling around Sicily, I stopped at an old-fashioned barbers on the island of Ortigia, the historic centre of Siracusa. An old gentleman who spoke no English gave me the finest haircut and shave I’ve ever had. I later found out he was a Sicilian legend by the name of Corrado Sororo. As the fiery Mediterranean sun blazed on the white stone of Siracusa – the only place in Europe that grows papyrus abundantly – in his cool, dark shop, Corrado used London’s finest Truefitt & Hill 1805 range of products and I’ve used them ever since. As a result, I thought I might treat myself to a hot towel shave at their St James’ barbershop last week. But at a preposterous 55 quid, I’m afraid I’ll remain hairy for a while yet.
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