ABSTRACT
The first of the seven lenses views educational practice through the vagaries and contradictions of policymaking, re-visiting from Conservative to Labour and Coalition governments the same intractable dilemma of schools and teachers simply not doing what they’re told. Viewing things through a more jaundiced lens a critic might argue that it is, in fact, through teachers doing what they’re told that genuine ‘improvement’ still remains such an elusive goal and why cheating by both pupils and their teachers has been progressively on the rise. Testimony to a Government Select Committee in 1998, and then again ten years later, raises the question as to whether anything has changed in the interim despite David Blunkett’s claim that ‘we had a crap teaching profession. We don’t anymore’. This view through the first lens begins with a reflection on two decades of policy by the chair of the Government Select Committee, Barry Sheerman.
