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The headteacher half apologised that the children were singing
the old fashioned hymn ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ but reassured
me that they no longer sang the verse ‘... the rich man in his castle,
the poor man at his gate, God made them high or lowly and ordered
their estate’. Yet, metaphorically speaking, in her ostensibly politically
correct school it could be said, as for countless other schools,
that rich men are indeed still sitting in their castles and the
poor at their gates. The junior children are all in streamed classes
and the younger ones are streamed within their classes by the familiar
recourse to the names of large animals, small pets and primary colours.
Children, teachers and parents alike are under no illusion as to
the location of the castles and the gates. They are also aware of
the potential riches accruing to those in the upper streams.
The only change is that the Lord is no longer held to be responsible
for the way in which such things are ordered and anyway we are told
it is not intended for life. But we know and always have known,
that streaming is nearly always for life. At a conservative estimate
it has been reckoned that 88% of all those children placed in streams
or sets, as they now are on government recommendation from four
and a half, will remain in those same groupings until they leave
school. It is peculiarly and oddly British and it is a practice
against which FORUM has been campaigning for over thirty
years, inspired by Brian Simon, its co-founder, to whom many tributes
are paid in this edition of the journal.
In microcosm, the school aims to represent what the government
says it is offering -
social justice. ‘Differentiation’, a supposed example of such justice
is designed to give children of varying ability a fair chance according
to their place in the rank order of such things. It is a use of
the term ‘social justice’ though, that doesn’t bear too close an
examination. In the name of justice or even of fairness, a system
of differentiation continues to exist in schools that we know by
numerous research studies, is of little or no benefit to pupils.
Indeed to some groups it is positively deleterious. Socially, it
is harmful to all and is regarded by many who have experienced it
as the very antithesis of social justice. It is a form of ‘fairness’
that is both suspect and dubious, based as it is on an unquestioned
belief in the notion of fixed ability and/or intelligence. As Clyde
Chitty pointed out in the previous edition of FORUM, this
notion has recognisable historical beginnings and it is not hard
to find the influence of the Eugenics Society. It has now permeated
educational thinking to the extent that we are now seemingly and
even dangerously unaware of the degree to which it influences decisions
at many levels and in many contexts. Brian Simon recognised the
danger and fought against it all his professional career and it
is timely that with his passing we should be re-emphasising what
he stood for.
In this context we are very pleased to publish Susan Hart’s innovative
article on developing teaching free from ability labelling. Based
on an account of a recent research project (‘Learning Without Limits’)
at Cambridge University Faculty of Education, it describes the differing
practices of nine teachers, both primary and secondary, who rejected
the notion of fixed ability. Importantly they did not subscribe
to the practice of mixed ability teaching either. This, as Susan
Hart points out, is but another version of fixed-ability teaching
and one that has bedevilled the comprehensive school argument and
distracted educationalists from properly engaging with the notion
of fixed ability. Instead, their approach can best be described
as the ‘ethic of everybody’. Supported, and in some cases constrained
by their circumstances, these teachers in their different ways,
arrived at an approach to teaching and learning that Susan Hart
has described as one of ‘transformability’ and one that emphasised
not only those things that they did because they saw them as lifting
the limits to their pupils’ learning but the things that they did
not do because they saw them as creating or perpetuating
already existing limits. It is an article that takes forward our
thinking about teaching without reliance on the notion of fixed
ability in a new and important direction.
Michael Armstrong in his tribute to Brian Simon in this issue of
FORUM, writes that for Brian there was always a simple test
for any new pedagogy: does it serve to promote and support the common
intellectual worth of every student? The idea of ‘transformability’
undoubtedly passes that test.
Annabelle
Dixon
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