Truancy, Behaviour, Illiteracy – It’s The Student’s Fault!

As he correctly reminds us, we can only teach kids who are actually attending, (but conveniently ignores the fact that they can still learn, even when not in school!). So, he has a host of solutions for those excluded from school and those who are truanting. Estimating that over 1 million kids are missing between 10-20% of school, he draws a highly contentious link between attendance and passing exams (only 1/3^rd of those missing 10-20% of lessons get the required 5 good exam passes, compared with half of kids attending all the time). Does he really think that kids, who are so bored or unsuited to conventional schooling that they withdraw themselves, are going to do any better if forced to attend?

And his assertion that ‘if they’re not in school when they’re 16… they’ll be on benefits, in gangs and on their way to young offenders institutions’ is ludicrous – tell that to Simon Cowell, Richard Branson, Sir Phillip Green, Ray Croc (founder of McDonalds), Frank Lloyd Wright, Thomas Edison, Walt Disney and Henry Ford – none of whom were in school at the age of 16, and many of them never attended school.

But Rambo needs to catch the bad guys, so, (biff!) there will now be ‘no notice’ inspections of schools with poor attendance records and (bash!) increased fines for the parents of young truants.

Oh Dear. Rather than find ways to increase fines for parents of truanting kids (because they are spending their money on satellite tv, alcohol and cigarettes, according to Mr Gove) perhaps we should look at how to adjust pedagogies so that these kids will want to be in school?

But pedagogy seems to be the least of Mr Gove’s interests. His preferred teaching style seems to be ‘sit ’em down, and make ’em have it’, so his criticism of Pupil Referral Units centres around the fact that ‘there is often no academic learning’. If he’d spent any time with kids who get excluded, he’d realise that it’s often precisely because of the transmissive delivery (whether that’s lecturing, copying from the board or rote memorisation) that these kids ended up in the PRU in the first place. Simply giving them more of the same isn’t going to work.

As we saw in ‘The Wire’ (and indeed in Jamie’s Dreamschool), it’s insulting to describe these kids as an educational underclass, and they are most definitely not stupid. Put them in real-life learning situations (for example, alongside the corner dealers on the streets of Baltimore) and they’ll show that they can calculate, negotiate and arbitrate with the best of them.

Mark Moorhouse is a deputy headteacher at Matthew Moss High School in Rochdale, one of our Learning Futures schools. The school is located in a difficult area, yet their discipline issues are considerably lower than most inner-city schools, partly because Mark believes that ‘95% of discipline issues are really pedagogical issues’. The fault isn’t always laid at the door of the student mis-behaving. All kids study transactional analysis and neuro-linguistic programming while in their first year of high-school. Literacy and numeracy is, of course, of paramount importance in the school. But so is project-based learning, learning how to learn, and valuing and respecting a learning community where kids respect adults because they themselves are treated in an adult manner, and their views given equal merit.

There may well be, as Mr Gove asserts, ‘an ironclad link between illiteracy, disruption, truancy, exclusion and crime which we need to break’. But there’s just as strong a link between boredom and disruption, and Mr Gove needs to appreciate that schools that are forced into drilling-and-killing a love of learning in their students, in order to game the system and thus escape censure, need to be encouraged to promote a values-based curriculum and be given the freedom to find the teaching methods that work best for all of their students, not just the academically inclined.

The Secretary of State is overly-fond of citing another of the Learning Futures participating schools, the Harris Academies, in South-East London, claiming their successes are down to ‘strict discipline, smart uniforms and respect for your elders’. Whilst there may be some truth in this, it’s only part of the story. For the Harris Academies instigated a student-led investigation into what makes great learning, and how their schools can become more democratic environments. They knew that sitting them down and making them have it would get you so far, but, they also knew that if students aren’t equal partners in their own learning, and co-designing innovative programmes, things will start to fall apart again.

Mr Gove may feel much better now that he’s apportioned blame (Pupil Referral Units, mobile phones and social media, a vicious, immoral minority, and irresponsible parents), and the right-wing tabloids  momentarily vindicated.  But, if Spinoza was right to say ‘the more we understand, the less we blame’, it’s also true that the more intractable the problem, the more we need to understand it – and bugger the political soundbite.