M26: What happened and what happens next?

NUT activist Gawain Little looks back at the strike and stresses the importance of the strategy of building alliances between unions, parents and communities…

In spite of attempts by the government to say otherwise, yesterday’s national strike by the NUT was a huge display of strength.  Not only was there a fantastic response from teachers across the country but the NUT clearly won over a huge proportion of parents and the public.

Part of this is to do with the fact that we won the arguments with government in the media.  Interview after interview showed the NUT come out positively in the face of government intransigence.

But this itself, is due in large part to the fact that we picked the right ground from which to fight.  For possibly the first time in this long-running dispute, we managed to successfully broaden our message from pay, pensions and conditions and to link it with the quality of education.  This is not to say we haven’t tried to do so before.  We have always made the link between pay and pensions and the recruitment and retention of teachers.  More specifically, on pensions, we have argued that forcing teachers to work to 68 will have a real impact on children’s education.  But previously, there has been a large section of the population who have dismissed this as simply ‘dressing up’ teachers’ demands in ‘educational clothing’.  No-one could have made this accusation yesterday.

So what were the defining differences in approach?  Well, the focus on workload helped.  The NUT ran a successful campaign to force the government to publish its 2013 workload survey.  The results were impossible to ignore.  When the government’s own figures show secondary teachers working an average of 56 hours a week, and primary teachers an average of 60 hours, the ground on which they can attack us is significantly narrowed.  Especially since both figures are up from an average of 50 hours when this government took power.

This was a great tactical move by the NUT but it cannot wholly account for the shift in attitudes.

The key difference is of course the Stand Up for Education campaign, launched by the Union in the weeks running up to the strike.  Obviously, the campaign is separate from our industrial action.  We could not legally take action over questions such as a child’s right to be taught by a qualified teacher due to Britain’s restrictive anti-Trade Union legislation.  But we know that the threat this government poses to children’s education motivates many more teachers, parents and others than concerns over pay and pensions.  And when it comes to pay and pensions, it is the damage that a deregulated education system will do that is forefront in teachers’ minds, not narrow financial concerns.

The power of these issues to bring people together is easy to understand when you apply the framework of Mobilisation Theory to them.  Central to encouraging collective action is an attributable injustice and an organisation to challenge that injustice with a reasonable prospect of having an impact.  This is clearly all there.

But it is not just the mobilising power of this campaign which makes a difference.  It is the fact that it addresses the core of the government’s programme in a way that a campaign on one aspect, such as pay or pensions, does not.

The dominant trend in education – which has been referred to as the Global Education Reform Movement or GERM – is towards a deregulated, privatised, for-profit, state-funded education system.  Schools operating as businesses, accountable to no-one but their shareholders, would hire whoever they want, regardless of experience or qualification, to provide a commercial service paid for by the state.  The only regulator would be the market and consumer choice.  The purpose of education would be to attract consumers so as to draw in income, cut costs in order to maximise profits and to meet the narrow needs of the labour market by providing “human capital” for the economy.

This is not simply a British phenomenon.  On 24^th May, the NUT will be hosting an international conference with academics and activists from five different continents to discuss developing resistance to GERM.  This will be a hugely important conference in sharing international experience of the drive to privatisation and building an understanding of GERM amongst our activist base.

Neither is it a recent phenomenon.  The DfE referred to schooling as being the creation of human capital as early as 1996, under John Major’s government.  The academies programme was created by New Labour.  The key moves towards marketization were made in the 1988 Education Reform Act under the Thatcher government.

This is why a focus on the quality of education, and its purpose in the 21^st Century, is such a powerful argument – because it is the core of the question.  If we are able to build our campaigns against pension cuts, pay deregulation and excessive workload in this context, with an understanding of what the end product of these processes looks like, we are much better equipped to win.

It will also mean expanding the campaign on other fronts.  Firstly, building on the five key demands of the Stand Up for Education campaign, but then also looking at key issue like accountability which are used by the Right to force change.  We have a potential opening on the question of accountability with the recent criticism of OFSTED and the scrapping of levels.  But we also know, given where those moves come from, that the intention is not to replace the current accountability system with something more conducive to the development of a broad and balanced education.  We must ensure that we have a clear approach to accountability, drawn from our broader approach to education, around which we can begin to build wide support both amongst teacher unions and teachers, and amongst parents and policy-makers.

There is the potential for many of these ideas to be drawn together into a national education conference on Education in the Next Parliament to be held before the 2015 General Election.  This would be an opportunity to build further support for our vision of education and to pressure political parties to adopt, or respond to, our proposals.

However, there is one important aspect of mobilisation theory I left out earlier and that is the existence of local leaders who can give cohesion to a group and begin to build a movement.  We have a great opportunity, building on the success of this strike, and of the Stand Up for Education campaign so far, to start to recruit these local leaders, amongst our members and in the wider community.  There is real enthusiasm and engagement around this campaign, we now need to make that sustainable.

I hope that local activists will continue to build the Stand Up for Education campaign with the same energy we did in the run up to the strike and that the national Union will support them to do this.  Over the coming weeks and months, this campaign needs to develop a coherence and deeper roots in local communities and we can all play a part in that.

NIck Wright: Genetics and schools policy

In this article, Nick Wright looks at the work of Michael Gove's former special adviser Dominic Cummings and places it in the context of the history of genetic determinist theories of education. 

Ever since the intellectual case for school selection based on intelligence quotient testing was found to be grounded in faked statistics there has been an unceasing quest to find a new theoretical basis for a school system based on differentiating children.

The talmudic text deposited at the DfE by Michael Gove's departing policy advisor suggests that genetics may be the new great white hope for those who need the appearance of intellectual rigour to cloak their preference for selection. Only a political innocent would think that an argument that dismissed the value of much education, trashed teachers and claimed for heritability a privileged place in determining children's ability would go unchallenged.

Michael Gove's special advisor or Spad, Dominic Cummings – the author of a 250 page reflection on government, politics and education* – is reportedly returning to his career in the ministerially-favoured 'free schools' sector.

Already the practical case for such schools – freed from curriculum requirements, the necessity to employ qualified teachers, pay agreed pay rates or appoint head teachers with teaching experience – is unravelling more speedily than the faked science that underpinned the introduction of the 11 plus.

To recap – for any ministerial aide whose Oxford degree in Ancient and Modern History missed out the 20th century – Cyril Burt, knighted in 1946 for services to psychological testing – based his conclusion that the superior performance in his tests of upper class children in private preparatory schools was due to their greater inherited intelligence. He reached this conclusion in 1909 and by the time he died (in 1971) the idea that tests at the end of primary education were an accurate predictor of general intelligence, and by extension, future academic performance, vocational aptitude and positioning in the social structure, was under assault.

Burt based much of his research on the performance in intelligence tests of monozygotic twins.

Within a few years both the identity (even existence) of his supposed collaborators in field work and the statistical reliability of his key evidence was questioned. By the end of the decade his intellectual reputation was irredeemably tarnished and his friend and biographer Leslie Hearnshaw had concluded that Burt's data – critically important in the political case for selection and the post-war tri-partite division of secondary education – was fraudulent or could not be relied on.**

Remarkably, the evidence of this fraud has been challenged and a lively polemic has ensued in which the strongest suggestions that Burt's findings remain valid have come from people who still cleave to the proposition that the genetical heritability of intelligence as measured by IQ scores has decisive utility in education policy.

While this puts the question firmly into the contested terrain of ideology and politics Cummings claim that: “There is strong resistance across the political spectrum to accepting scientific evidence on genetics. Most of those that now dominate discussions on issues such as social mobility entirely ignore genetics and therefore their arguments are at best misleading and often worthless" is a transparent bid to claim the evidential high ground.

Relying on the work of US behavioural geneticist Robert Plomin he claims for genetic factors a decisive role in determining intelligence and educational attainment.

Plomin enters the back story at this point. In a speculative Spectator article this July he takes a swipe at Leon Kamin, the author of a 1970's book The Science and Politics of IQ which analysed Burt's statistics and found the correlation coefficients of monozygotic and dizygotic twins' IQ scores were the same to three decimal places, across articles – even when Burt more than doubled his sample.

Plomin seems uncomfortable with the mechanistic application of his research to contemporary political controversies. In an illuminating BBC Radio 4 exchange with the geneticist Steve Jones he was at pains to make the point that no necessary policy implications follow from his work and  emphatically stated: “I am not advising on policy.”

By way of contrast Dominic Cummings makes larger claims for this evidence.

"Work by one of the pioneers of behavioural genetics, Robert Plomin, has shown that most of the variation in performance of children in English schools is accounted for by within school factors (not between school factors), of which the largest factor is genes. Scores in the phonics test show ~70% heritability; scores in National Curriculum reading and maths tests at 7, 9, and 12 show ~60-70% heritability; and scores in English, Maths and Science GCSEs show ~60% heritability in a just completed twin study (the GCSE data will be published later in 2013).

Cummings is keen to discount environmental factors in shaping pupil performance and emphasise the primacy of genetic factors.

“In contrast, the overall effects of shared environment (including all family and school influences shared by the twins growing up in the same family and attending the same school) accounts for only about a third of the variance of GCSE scores. Educational achievement in school is more heritable than IQ in English school children: i.e the heritability of what is directly taught is higher than what is not directly taught. Perhaps differential performance in educational achievement is heritable because it is taught: that is, roughly similar schools teaching the same material reduces a major source of environmental variation, therefore the variation that remains is even more due to genetic variation.”

And he is is equally keen to discount family wealth, social position and class as factors:

“Similarly, this paper (Science, 23/4/2010) shows how good teachers improve reading standards for all but this means that the variance that remains is more due to genetic differences. This leads to a conclusion almost completely at odds with prevailing conventional wisdom in political and academic debates over education: differences in educational achievement are not mainly because of ‘richer parents buying greater opportunity’ and the successful pursuit of educational opportunity and ‘social mobility’ will increase heritability of educational achievement.”

To collapse the entire corpus of  'progressive' educational thought into the simple concept that educational achievement arises from privileged access is a transparently rhetorical flourish that abandons any claim to rational debate.

Behind it lies a an unsavoury strain of thinking with a compelling claim to historical continuity. It was, after all, Cyril Burt, who in his 1909 study argued that:

“Wherever a process is correlated with intelligence, these children of superior parents resemble their parents in themselves being superior. Proficiency at such tests does not depend on opportunity or training, but on some innate quality. The resemblance in degree of intelligence between the boys and their parents must, therefore, be due to inheritance. We thus have an experimental demonstration that intelligence is hereditary.” 1909, p 181.

Burt's 1909 comparative measure of parental intelligence had the virtue of simplicity. He simply assumed it from their profession and social position taking intellectual and upper class parents of his sample cohort to be more intelligent than the tradesmen.

Sixty years later, when quizzed about his measure of parental intelligence he reported that: “The intelligence of the parents was assessed primarily on the basis of their actual jobs, checked by personal interviews.”

Today of course, rich parents – even those seized by the insight that the intelligence of their offspring is mostly inherited – are still inclined to trust the education of their children not to the cash strapped and highly invigilated state sector but to a more relaxed environment where generously-endowed private schools with smaller class sizes and better paid teachers enjoy more intimate and  productive relations with the most prestigious universities. Lower down the pecking order ambitious parents will move might and main (and address) in order to get their children into a school perceived to be better.

An inevitable consequence of the current fashion for behavioural genetics is the hunt for the 'intelligence gene'.  Much hope is invested in the work of a young Chinese researcher Zhao Bowe at the biotech research centre BGI Shenzen where a large array of DNA sequencing machines is available.

The research programme – which involves an international group of collaborators – is aimed at discovering the genetic code for intelligence by distilling information from the genomes of thousands of prodigies. Large claims are made for the project; that it will identify the genetic basis of IQ and allow for large scale embryo screening including interventions to raise the IQ potential of unborn children.

Sceptics naturally predict failure for this utopian project. They point to the complexity involved in the relatively simpler scheme to isolate the genetic determinants of height in which nothing much emerged until the DNA sample exceeded ten thousand. After herculean efforts scientists have now tracked down something close to a thousand genetic variations that can be connected to variations in height with some claim to universal applicability across different population groups.

Zhao's is a bold initiative and one with no easily determined time scale. If the interest in this project objective arises from a desire for scientific and rational policies which might identify and educate a larger cohort of exceptionally gifted children, perhaps one drawn from a wider social spectrum than conventional school systems and testing regimes deliver, it might have wide appeal.

If, however, it was to be deployed to exclude some children from access to the best locally available education its appeal would be greatest to those who dismiss the potential of the great majority of children to develop beyond expectations. Cummings is frank in his advocacy of special educational privileges for children who are identified as especially gifted.

From the standpoint of school improvement professionals, concerned with the education of that great majority of children who do not enjoy the class room conditions of the elite, the priority is to devise strategies that realise the educational potential of the many.

If it would be perverse to ignore science that showed a powerful role for heritability  in IQ test results it would be equally perverse to discount the significance of the uncontroversial finding that Cummings references: 'that good teachers improve reading standards for all'.

Education has a wider role than simply identifying and developing exceptionally gifted pupils. Such children have to live in a real world where the fullest development of each child's potential is the condition for the fullest development of society as a whole.

Behavioural genetics has a serious public relations problem in education circles that is not going to be easily dispelled by partisan polemics of the type deployed by Michael Gove's attack dogs.

Neither will it be rehabilitated if it is deployed to perpetuate an education system that allows privileged elites, whether those elites are selected by parental wealth or genetic endowment, to prosper while the needs of society as a whole, and of the individual child, are neglected.

A deeper understanding of the role of heritability factors in the development of the child is an undoubted common good. But a fixed gaze on the genome must not be at the expense of a 20/20 vision of education for all.

*      http://static.guim.co.uk/ni/1381763590219/-Some-thoughts-on-education.pdf

**    Hearnshaw, L.S. (1979). Cyril Burt: Psychologist. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.