Preparing a presentation for a Chartered College of Teaching Creating Excellence conference in July, I came across a definition that, had I been wearing a tie and eating anything at the same time, would have resulted in a visit to the dry cleaners.
It was a definition of “curriculum dumping”. According to the author of the glossary of UK education, it is “a phenomenon whereby politicians, journalists, public figures and commentators identify a need or failure in society and automatically decide that schools should be the ones to pick up the slack of that need; this is usually announced through the press using the headline format ‘Schools should teach X’.”
My presentation is on social mobility and mission creep in schools, so you can see why I’d potentially be scraping egg off my tie. This is satire at its very best - not because it made me laugh, but because you might just be able to slide an emaciated razor blade between it and reality.
In the famous words of an old-school journalist, “here-today-gone-tomorrow politicians” feel at liberty to use today’s schools as a kind of Swiss Army knife for social reformers. Rising obesity levels? Prise open the PE department. Social media at anarchic levels? Where’s that pesky PSHE teacher? Not enough people voting, or voting incorrectly? Up pops citizenship teaching.
Teachers need to remind anyone and everyone who dumps on them in this fashion that their job is to teach children things they don’t know, usually in fairly large groups. If doing that has knock-on benefits for those kids, or for the nation as a whole, so be it.
Speaking, but saying nothing
Year after year, schools have to deal with this kind of unwarranted, externally imposed pressure - a classic case of which comes in the form of external speakers.
In a 30-page 2016 report on how charities can work best in the school system, 58 separate charities working with schools were referenced. When I searched the charity commission’s website for charitable initiatives providing training or services, and added the keyword “schools”, it stumped up a list of 3,675. I’m happy to assume a substantial proportion of these are putting external speakers into schools to get some socially improving message or other across.
I was lucky enough in my teaching career to work at a school that had, over many years, established an impressively effective procedure for inviting in speakers. In the time I taught there, we had a home secretary, a foreign secretary, a poet laureate, the nation’s most famous living playwright, the BBC’s political correspondent, a national newsreader, an England football manager and a rock star come in to speak.
Not one of these visitors came in because they had an agenda or represented a charity. They visited the school and spoke to the children because of an unspoken assumption that they might have something to say that would interest, inspire or even, God forbid, actually educate the pupils.
Since I left and as a parent, I’ve seen probably about the same number of visitors to other schools, most of them speaking to parents after they’ve addressed the pupils. Apart from one, and a range of ex-sportsmen and women, none of them has had anything interesting or inspiring to say.
Often, the medium is not the message. How these speakers behave is indelibly linked to the message they wish to convey. They embody curriculum dumping. A video clip would be just as effective and cheaper.
Funding merry-go-round
The financial folly of this is the fact that it is a merry-go-round of taxpayers’ money: central government often supports a charity to carry out social-improvement initiatives for schools to purchase with money given to them by central government.
Schools should carry out a formal audit of precisely who they’re planning to invite in next year to talk to the kids and ask one simple, sensible question before committing anything to a budget: is this person going to help us educate our pupils?
If the answer is “I don’t know”, then don’t bother. The costs of not doing this to the school are not just financial, but are profoundly cultural, too.
Far too often, children and parents pick up on - and run with - the message that things are no longer their responsibility. Things such as sex education, diet, personal and domestic economics, adult responsibilities (which when you bother to interrogate them, often hide fundamentally ethical as well as practical difficulties) are quietly and slyly passed over to you, the teacher.
You are the one being dumped on by the parents and everyone else who sees your school as a potential source of income for their charitable works.
It doesn’t take much effort to connect the reality I’ve just outlined with the recent YouGov survey that found primary school teachers are spending less time teaching and more time wiping bottoms. That is a very slippery slope indeed. It’s hard to imagine a more basic parental responsibility that that one - but please, feel free to try.
Joe Nutt is an educational consultant and author. To read more of his columns, view his back catalogue
