Lessons of experience

13th January 1995, 12:00am

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Lessons of experience

https://www.tes.com/magazine/archive/lessons-experience

Crisis in the Primary Classroom, By Maurice Galton, David Fulton 12.99. 1 85346 245 4.

Mary Jane Drummond on the failure of the national curriculum at primary level. This is the story of how an optimist changed his spots; back in 1988, Professor Maurice Galton agreed to take the National Curriculum Council shilling and signed on as a member of the Interim Primary Committee. He believed that by doing so he could help to support primary teachers in coming to terms with the new demands of the national curriculum.

Six years on, sadder and wiser, having been misquoted both in the tabloid press and in ministerial documents, Galton has come out; this book sets out to establish, once and for all, that there were fundamental flaws in the national curriculum as originally designed and implemented, that “few if any” NCC officers “had any understanding of the principles of effective reform”, and that the government’s policy, all along, was “to have primary teachers use methods more commonly associated with single-subject secondary teaching, with greater use of banding and even streaming”.

The remedy for these ills is not to be found in the Dearing Reports’ (“essentially political and not educational documents”), since they neglect a number of key issues. Galton selects for discussion the concept of entitlement, and its relationship with excellence, the issue of grouping practices (by age and ability), and the long-term implications of the Grants for Education Support and Training budget, dedicated to improving teachers’ subject know-ledge.

But the real problem is none of these; it is the continuing lack of any serious interest in pedagogy. Galton argues that the “science of the art of teaching” has been ignored for far too long. To get ourselves out of the swamp, we need to establish our pedagogic principles, and this is a task for every teacher and educator, since “standards will only rise when the study of pedagogy . becomes a central element of a teacher’s professional development.”

In elaborating this basic position, Galton makes a number of points that will sound like music in many ears. For example, the official (NCC and HMI) position on good practice, in which teachers’ subject knowledge, planning and organisation are seen as key factors, is sharply contrasted with another view, in which day-to-day classroom relationships, between teacher and pupils, and between pupils and pupils, are seen as of paramount importance. The limited view of pedagogy as “planning and preparation, managing of input and monitoring” looks distinctly shabby when presented alongside Galton’s alternative: a commitment to “principles of learning and . ways of motivating children to learn”.

Stirring stuff, likely to make many in the audience of weary and demoralised teachers nod appreciatively. But this is a whole book, not a rabble-rousing key-note address; some of the rest of the package will have a very different reception.

The chapter “The Mess that is Assessment” reaches some uncompromising conclusions, and makes some cautious recommendations, but only after an exhausting and breathless survey of the current debates, in which I, for one, got badly left behind, bogged down in the impenetrable tables showing some Pearson Correlation Coefficients. This failure of stamina may have been due to the shock of seeing my own work referenced as Drummond (1933), a date some years before my birth.

But the most controversial chapter is an extraordinarily detailed analysis of the 1992 Alexander, Rose and Woodhead discussion paper, and Alexander’s 1991 Final Evaluation Report on the Leeds Primary Needs Programme. Galton quite gratuitously, it seems to me, goes back over the contemporary press attacks on Alexander, quoting at length, and constantly referring to the “Three Wise Men” (who become “Three Unwise Men?” in the chapter title; it is long past time to abandon this feeble little joke).

The bulk of this chapter consists of a line by line appraisal of the final evaluation report, which, according to Galton, “brought the `Three Wise Men’ into existence” - a curiously muddled exaggeration. This critical analysis is “not meant to be over-critical nor indeed hostile of (sic) Alexander’s views”; nevertheless, the tone is distinctly unfriendly,a cold magisterial reproof, like a disappointed tutor failing a promising student’s dissertation. This is regrettable, since some of the points Galton makes are worth further discussion, though it was not strictly necessary for him to cite his own work quite so often.

In the discussion of Alexander, Rose and Woodhead (1992) that follows, Galton is on firmer ground, though once again the ORACLE studies come in for especially generous and sympathetic coverage. He ends with a catalogue of omissions, and announces that he will proceed to remedy one of them in the next chapter, with the “missing part of the report, the part, perhaps, that Professor Alexander wished to write, but under pressure of time, and for a variety of reasons, was not able to”. I call that bare-faced cheek.

And talking of omissions, there are many to be noted in Galton’s own text.There is, predictably perhaps, virtually no attention paid to teaching and learning in the early years, at key stage one and before, and no mention of the growing number of four-year-olds who have quietly become honorary five year olds and, as a result, national curriculum fodder a year too soon. More damagingly, there are no references to the literature in which the practice of pedagogy, as Galton defines it, has already been described.The work of Chris Athey and Vivian Gussin Paley, for instance, in the early years, and Michael Armstrong in the later primary phase, are shining examples of teachers paying profound attention to children’s learning.

The interesting discussion of self-esteem and self-concept in chapter 5 (the one Robin Alexander did not write) does not draw on the useful concepts of “mastery” and “helplessness”, which we now think may be important in the lives of even very young learners. There is an encouraging emphasis, throughout the book, on the realities of classroom life; but the classrooms in Galton’s mind’s eye seem to be centred on tasks, set by the teachers, performed by the children. The life of the imagination, and the creative arts, have been given precious little place.

On balance however, the good news dominates. There is a crisis, though not of teachers’ own making; there is a way forward, though not yet recognised at the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority or the Department for Education. There is a place for theory, for empirical enquiry and for professional expertise. There is still work to be done on the aspirations of the Plowden Report, particularly in re-establishing the principles of justice and fairness - which is the note on which Galton concludes his openly ideological plea for a better deal for all children.

Mary Jane Drummond is tutor in primary education at the University of Cambridge Institute of Education.

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