What exactly is a school? If you had to choose one metaphor to describe the school you worked in, what would it be? Business? Charity? Learning hub? Would your students say the same?

This question of the governing metaphors we (perhaps subconsciously) work to is an important one. Because - with money so tight and the debate over grammar schools, charitable status and the ideologies behind multi-academy trusts (MATs) still so fierce - the ways in which different stakeholders answer it can profoundly affect decisions about how schools are funded, managed and nurtured.

If a philosopher were tasked with helping us to dig deeper into the words we use to define a school, they might begin with a more simple question. Rather than starting with something as complex as a school, they might ask us to define a table. We could list the attributes of tables and the things they are used for, perhaps arguing about what the difference between a “table” and a “desk” was, and quickly degenerating into the relative merits of Ikea’s various flat-packs and the best ways of removing chewing gum from particle board.

Infinite complexity

The move from “table” to “school” presents difficulties because the list of attributes becomes both large and contentious very quickly. When we say “school”, do we also mean “Sunday school” ? We might scoff and say of course we don’t, but the question of what stops a class for religious instruction being seen as a school turns out to be a live one, especially with the Department for Education’s recent first prosecutions over illegal, unregistered schools.

The Al-Istiqamah Learning Centre in Ealing, West London claimed it “simply provided tuition to home-schooled children”, but the courts decided otherwise - that lesson plans and homework diaries suggested it was doing more than this. Beyond simply being a place where children learned something, it was acting as a school.

We require schools to be registered because they are doing more than passing on information to young people. They are undertaking the hugely responsible task of preparing children to become mature members of the community, and teaching the values of the society that they are set to join as adults.

Thus, throughout history, schools have functioned as mirrors of the societies and communities they served. In the ways they are run, they reveal what it is that a society values, and what it is investing in building.

For example, William Shakespeare would have begun his education, aged 5, in a “Petty School”, where, typically, a local housewife would teach two things: behaviour and the catechism. Aged 7, because of his father’s position, Shakespeare went to the local King Edward VI Grammar School. Although his contemporary, Ben Jonson, ribbed him for having “small Latin and less Greek”, his education here would have been almost entirely focused on Latin composition and classical works from Cicero, Virgil, Ovid and Seneca.

What we see is a school system designed to teach all young boys obedience to the church, and the richer boys what they would need beyond that to become useful civil servants in the burgeoning administration of the monarch. (In a society that barred women from taking these roles, there seemed no point in girls attending school.) The governing metaphor here is of school as monastery, with hard discipline and rote learning of the classics preparing boys for a life of service.

By the Victorian era, this has changed. Schools are now like factories, with students batch-processed and pressed, the whole thing run on bells. The curriculum is now broader, as are the expected careers of those who study it, but the focus remains on industry. Most will go on to be cogs in the machine; only a few will see any profit.

As heavy manufacturing collapsed in the latter part of the 20th century it is perhaps no great surprise that so many “bog standard” schools in these areas struggled, too, unsure what kind of society they were preparing their students for. Margaret Thatcher famously said that there was “no such thing as society”, which, by extension, nicely summarised her view that - in education, just as in the wider world - the market ruled all.

When I became a teacher in a large comprehensive in south-west London some 20 years ago, we were just beginning to see the dawning of the digital age and the tyranny of numbers. Perhaps the overriding metaphor that springs to mind about these years is of schools becoming data centres, always searching for more efficient technologies to cram more data in, while the panoptical Ofsted analysed and computed output tables down to the last bit.

The bottom line

With the rise of the MAT, it feels as though schools have shifted again to be seen as businesses, with a huge focus on branding, highly paid chief executives, mergers and acquisitions. When a school is a business, it makes perfect sense to “off-roll” those who have a negative impact on your bottom line. When this is your governing metaphor, students who do not “add value” are creating losses; they need to be removed before the market gets jitters and the stock of the school is lowered.

As money gets tighter, ever more creative ways need to be found to make the numbers come good, and so it is no surprise when the books get cooked and reported figures are massaged. In stark contrast to the life of public service Shakespeare’s peers were being prepared for, seeing students as “customers” mirrors the dominance of the corporate sector in modern British life.

And so to the recent furore at Ninestiles in Birmingham, a secondary where students have been told they are forbidden to speak as they move through corridors between lessons. What does this tell us about the kind of society we are preparing children for?

The school has responded to the uproar over this seemingly draconian rule by stating: “Ninestiles is committed to the highest standards of behaviour and we know that students arriving to lessons ready to learn can be further supported by doing so in silence at certain points in the day. This is already an expectation for arrival at exams and during fire drills and, as such, is simply an extension of that code of behaviour.”

Parents have said that measures like this risk turning the school into a “concentration camp”, but for me the governing metaphor is more about a school as a “situation room”. Every day is like exam day. Every moment is like a fire drill - an emergency situation.

For a society living in a time of lockdowns and terrorism drills, and hearing regular reports of mass shootings, perhaps it is unsurprising to see a school leaning towards military discipline and constant preparedness, keeping everyone permanently on Defcon 1. Perhaps students are reporting unprecedented levels of anxiety and stress because we are readying them for life in a society that reports the same.

A home from home

Is there another way? Through all the changes I have witnessed in my career, the phrase that has endured more than any other is “in loco parentis”. For a number of hours each day, we stand in the place of parents in order to widen and enrich the sense of familial belonging that each child experiences.

This isn’t to sentimentalise the work we do. Families strive to sustain themselves economically. They discipline and sanction. They can be messy places, and all of us know that, sadly, sometimes school is the best and most stable home some of our students have ever had. Families are sometimes noisy, and sometimes demand silence, sometimes have high expectations and - at their best - look for each member to succeed in whatever area they labour at, valuing all equally.

In this sense, the idea of education has always been that all students are “home-schooled”, in that a school should function as a kind of home from home. It is an enlarged place, where many families are gathered, and this is why we say that it takes a village to raise a child - not a business, nor a garrison, nor a factory, because these are not places where children are nurtured.

In these uncertain times, when talk is so often of division, with countries divorcing their neighbours and others building walls, perhaps the best thing we can do is to commit a small act of resistance by a subtle reversal. Rather than being a microcosm of the society we serve - defying those who exert market forces and economic pressures on children through the constant drip of competitive exam anxiety - could schools instead model the kind of society we want to our students to go out and create in the future?

Kester Brewin is a maths teacher and writer. He tweets @kesterbrewin