ABSTRACT
It is a fact of life that everyone remembers their best teacher. It’s also true, as conversation will reveal at a dinner party where you happen to let slip that you are a teacher, that everyone also remembers their worst. As a teacher you have an inordinate amount of power and influence over young people, a force that exerts itself upon them throughout their entire lives. Churchill once said that, ‘Headmasters have powers at their disposal
with which Prime Ministers have never yet been invested’ (Churchill 1930) and it is true. The government can only control what goes on in classrooms by fooling us into thinking it can. In other words, if we let it. It is powerless though, and necessarily so. Try as politicians might to exert some form of gravitational pull over what goes on in the classroom, at the end of the day, the direct impact on those children is created by you and you alone. And it is an impact that has a direct effect on who and what they are
and who and what they become, an influence that extends, as we have seen, even as far as the very physical architecture of their brains. The influence you have over the future of the world – and the over-
whelming global economic need for you to do your job well – led top business consultancy McKinsey and Co (the company where Tom Peters worked when he wrote In Search of Excellence) to undertake a major global research project on just what it was, exactly, that made good school systems good. Co-authored by erstwhile chief advisor to Tony Blair, Michael Barber, the 2007 paper, entitled How the World’s Best Performing School Systems Come Out on Top, created headlines around the world. According to the report, governments worldwide spent US$2 trillion on
education in 2006, yet ‘the performance of many school systems has barely improved in decades’ (Barber and Mourshed 2007). (We are not immune to this fact in the UK. The report quotes a 1996 study published by the National Foundation for Educational Research that showed that ‘despite 50 years of reform, there had been no measurable improvement in standards of literacy and numeracy in English primary schools’ (NFER 1997).) They
wanted to try to identify what made the difference in the systems that were not only performing well but also improving quickly. The main source of information they drew on for assessing the quality
of an educational system was the OECD’s PISA programme – the Programme for International School Assessment.1 This is a massive international exercise that has taken place every three years since its inception in 2000, looking at reading literacy, mathematics and science but with a particular focus on one of these each time. The TIMSS tests2 that Malcolm Gladwell refers to in Outliers (where the success in the test could be predicted by how much effort students put into filling out the lengthy questionnaire that comes with it; those who persisted and completed the questionnaire, it turned out, were the ones who did best in the actual maths, suggesting that it’s not more maths we should be teaching but better resilience) is ‘dedicated to improving teaching and learning in mathematics and science for students around the world’. As such it is quite an academic test. PISA looks more at the real-world application of what has been learned in the classroom across nearly 90 per cent of the world’s economies. For example, in 2006 it was the turn of science to be the special focus under the heading, ‘Science Competencies for Tomorrow’s World’.3
The organizers set out to assess not only the quality of classroom teaching as reflected in the performance of 400,000 15-year-olds across 57 countries, but also students’ ‘awareness of the opportunities that scientific competencies bring as well as the environment that schools offer for science learning’. Whereas it is the countries of the Far East that do consistently well in the TIMSS tests, it was the Western countries that fared better in the PISA tests. (Finland was top – again – and the UK came ninth, just behind Germany but well above average. Don’t ask about the US … .) What the PISA project does, too, is look behind the headlines and seek
to assess the background and attitudes of the students involved. For example, they were able to identify that students from higher socio-economic backgrounds were more likely to ‘show a general interest in science’, and this was especially the case if a parent was involved in a ‘science-related career’. What they also found was that ‘streaming’ students amplified the effect that their socio-economic background was having; the earlier the streaming process began, the stronger this impact was. What’s more, ‘Schools that divided students by ability for all subjects tended to have lower student performance on average.’ I always used to half joke when I was teaching languages that we ‘set’ students according to parental income – here is the proof that not only is it so, but also of how debilitating such a vicious cycle is to the young people who need our help most. What the PISA report makes very clear, and the McKinsey report picks
up on with a vengeance, is that the answer to improving the quality of an
educational system does not lie in throwing money at it. According to the PISA press release:
