Education! Education! Education!: Managerial Ethics and the Law of Unintended Consequences

“This book is a call for discernment… and finally it is a call to action.”

― The Tablet

“A biting collection of essays.”

― Journal of Applied Philosophy

“Raises issues that should be widely debated in the media and which should inform educational manifestos for the next election.”

― Network

“The first thing that struck me was the diverse range of contributors [divided between ‘old-school Tories’ and those of a more liberal persuasion], united however in their disdain for the new positivism in education policy.”

— Mike Cole ― Educational Review

“1977 British slogan on the cover ― ‘Education! Education! Education!’ ― is a challenge for any professor. Stephen Prickett, one of editors, sadly notes: ‘Each new measure, even as it is announced, subtly reinforces the opposite message: that teaching is a low-status profession, prepared to take almost anyone prepared to stand in front of a class’.”

— Liviu Drugus ― The European Legacy

Stephen Prickett
Introduction

In March 2001, together with several thousand of my colleagues, I received a letter from a recruitment agency asking if, as a full-time university teacher, I might like to spend some of my spare-time school-teaching. As an added incentive, I would also be paid £100 per person for anyone else I could find willing to do more than two days teaching. No questions as to teaching qualifications or classroom experience were raised. Considering that a recent survey by the Association of University Teachers suggests its average member works more than a sixty-hour week, and that under the latest time-management survey (called, naturally, a transparency review ), everyone at my university has to complete a detailed form stating exactly how long they devote per week to teaching , administration , and research , the whole exercise smacked of fantasy or desperation. Or both.

Meanwhile teachers are recruited from Europe, from New Zealand, from Australia from anywhere. Since prestige, pay, conditions, and facilities for teachers in many of those countries are generally far superior to those in the U.K. we can guess at the likely quality of such recruits. Those prepared to work in London are offered an extra £10,000 per year. British graduates prepared to train as teachers are offered a golden handshake of £6,000. Meanwhile Scotland strikes out on its own, offering teachers a 20% rise over three years. Each new measure, even as it is announced, subtly reinforces the opposite message: that teaching is a low-status profession, prepared to take almost anyone prepared to stand in front of a class. How did Britain, well into the second term of a government that in 1997 proclaimed its priorities as Education! Education! Education! , come to this extraordinary pass?

One clue may be found in the strident insistence of those exclamation marks. Such stridency rarely implies a laissez-faire attitude; exclamation marks usually denote moral indignation and its close companion, more control. Charges of poor teaching, low standards, and complacency in schools, coupled with accusations of poor research records and publishing output in universities have been met by a manic belief that the answer lies in ever more elaborate tests, regulations, and evaluations of every part of the system. The regular testing of pupils and of teachers, begun by Kenneth Baker and perpetuated by Chris Woodhead, has now become an institutional fetish of state education in the U.K., dominating the horizon not merely of schools, but of colleges and universities. Originally devised with the wholly admirable aim of measuring the attainments of pupils and the performance of their teachers and schools, the result has been a series of disastrous unintended consequences. Schools now regularly devote huge proportions of time and resources to preparing for inspection.

In higher education, a succession of bodies dedicated to subject assessments and whole-institution audits have now been brought together in the Quality Assurance Agency. Week after week The Times Higher records the attempts and the frustrations of the higher education system and individual institutions to influence for the better the operating procedures of the QAA, whose cost, in bureaucracy, time and the erosion of institutional autonomy and professional concerns has made it unquestionably the fastest-growing section of education. Universities now have teams of professional staff seconded on a permanent basis simply to study the data for Research Assessment Exercises and Total Quality Assurance (i.e. how well they are seen to teach), and to monitor their own progress (not to mention studying the success or failure of rival institutions). For a growing body of academics, insecure about their own scholarly futures, inspection has created a whole new career path, with power and influence within the institution undreamed of by most of its professorate. A recent conservative estimate of the annual cost of quality control, audit, accountability and research assessment systems in higher education in England alone puts the figure at £250 million enough to pay the fees of 250,000 students; the annual cost of five universities, or the salaries of 10,000 lecturers. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland spend proportionately the same. Even this astonishing figure (based on detailed studies of the two Universities in Leeds) is probably an underestimate of the time taken by university teaching staff in accounting for their activities to their own internal audit systems, if only because the staff concerned cannot quite believe how much of their own time is being spent in this way. According to its own figures, recently published by the Quality Assurance Department of another major university (apparently as a proud mark of its own diligence), the entire staff of that university now spends more time in administration , mostly of their own research and teaching, than they do in either research or in teaching itself.

Given the greater size of the primary and secondary school systems in the UK, the real costs to those sectors are unlikely to be less than this figure, and are probably much more. The difference, of course, is that schools do not have the same auditing and accounting systems as universities, and thus the time so costed comes directly from the teachers own time. In other words, in addition to the irritation and frustration caused by the quality assurance system, at least £250 million of teachers time has been taken away from teaching children to be devoted to auditing that teaching. The fact that much of that time would be out-of-school time is irrelevant. This is precisely the time that the good teacher would otherwise be using for marking, preparation, and organizing new projects. Anecdotal evidence suggests that it is these good teachers who are the most frustrated by the loss of this time, and who have been leaving the profession in the greatest numbers. [cont.]