Education without failure

Education without failure?

Advances in technology and our understanding of how children learn should enable us to eliminate failure in education, says Professor Tim Brighouse

Since the millennium there has been much discussion on what schools need to do to meet the challenges of the 21st century. The increased pace of change in society and the economy, the global nature of many so called ‘wicked’ issues concerned with eradicating social exclusion and creating a fairer society, and the need for interdisciplinary solutions to these matters have been cited as examples of why schools need to behave differently in the future.

The recently announced RSA Charter for Education in the 21st Century epitomises this widely held belief in the need for change, especially in secondary schools, and there are already several initiatives devoted to this end – not least the government’s Building Schools for the Future programme.

Together with Mike Tomlinson, I co-chair one such partnership, the 21st Century Learning Alliance, which in June presented its first school awards at the National College of School Leadership ‘Seizing Success’ conference in Birmingham. Schools were invited to illustrate 21st-century characteristics in their use of time and space, their teaching and learning methods or their deployment of people and resources and the curriculum.

Next year we hope this award scheme will include a debate on what is arguably the most important, if elusive, issue of all: that, given the advances in the use of information and communication technologies and our improved knowledge of how the brain works and children learn, it ought to be possible to eliminate failure in education. The correlation of school failure with subsequent predisposition to crime, homelessness and ill-health mean that it is certainly a debate worth having.  

Admittedly such an approach runs the risk of being criticised as ignoring the needs of those who gain most and excel at school, those whom the government has recently identified as the ‘gifted and talented’. But it is our partnership’s contention that this very identification has ensured that their needs are in no danger of being overlooked. Indeed, we shall argue that when schools have to make hard choices – for example, about which teachers teach which children – their needs are promoted at the expense of the group we are identifying as gaining the least from school.

First, however, it is necessary to set out what we mean by failure and how it might be measured.

The moral argument for trying to minimise failure and optimise individual educational success was well expressed by William Temple whose words powerfully affected R A Butler in the production of the 1944 Education Act:

‘Are you going to treat a man as he is with many of his tastes warped, with his powers largely crushed or as he might become with his faculties fully developed? Are you going to treat a man as he is or as he might be? Morality requires that you should treat him as might be, as he has it in him to become; business on the other hand requires that you should treat him as he is. Raising what he is to what he might be is the work of education.  ‘And so you can have no justice at the basis of your social life until education has done its full work … and you cannot have political freedom any more than you can have moral freedom until people’s powers have been developed. Nor can there be individual freedom, for the simple reason that over and over again we find men with a cause which is just (who) are unable to state it in a way which might enable it to prevail … there exists a mental form of slavery quite as real as any economic form. We are pledged to destroy it … if you want human liberty you must have educated people.’

To this moral imperative for successful education – which is not emphasised as much now as it was in the optimism of the post–war period of reconstruction – can be added an economic one. Not merely does education add to the individual’s chances of financial advantage, there is a general political consensus that ever-higher standards of education and training are now necessary for countries to survive and thrive in a rapidly changing and technologically driven world.

For any individual to lead a fulfilling life as a contributing citizen it is arguable that he/she needs to be able to tighten an argument and/or to hone a skill that will bring him or her financial and other reward. Both have prospects that are economic and if you succeed at only one, then you at least need to be able to seek the help of someone who has a different skill, rather in the way that the philosopher and the plumber need to respect each other and their mutual interdependence.

Thirdly, in addition to these two moral and economic imperatives, there is a cultural one, and this is of benefit to both the individual and society collectively: we owe it to our future citizens to ensure they are initiated into the essential culture of a society and are capable of shaping its development. Lastly, society expects its schools to reinforce those values such as honesty and truth that are the bedrock of most societies’ moral norms. It is really against these three – the moral, economic and cultural – purposes that we should measure educational success or failure. It is interesting to note that the very idea and understanding of ‘failure’ varies from country to country. There are, for example, languages that have no word for failure except in relation to an absence of success: it is as though their language implies simply a postponement of success. In that sense, of course, failure is inevitable and not harmful.  

I am not talking of trying to eliminate the sort of failure that arises when an individual or group fails to understand a concept or demonstrate a skill and is then prompted to more endeavour, which leads ultimately to success. Frequently that sort of failure is a useful part of learning. It allows the learner to see exactly what he/she has to do to overcome the difficulty and embark with a clear map of the next few steps on the journey of learning. This attitude is thankfully much more pervasive in schools now than it has ever been and many are cleverly using the London Olympics of 2012 to boost its relevance to their current set of pupils. After all, every athlete who fails to reach or surpass their ‘personal best’ is spurred on by this sort of failure to make adjustments and become ever better.

But to complicate matters, the appetite for competition varies according to self-confidence and the capacity to cope with a comparative lack of success. The judgement about the extent to which the individual is exposed to this sort of competition is inevitably in the hands of teachers, parents and peer group. Get it right and the individual’s and society’s recognition of what is possible is extended; get it wrong and both are damaged.

This last point reaches the heart of the matter. Repeated failure can become so embedded that it convinces the individual or group that it is impossible ever to be successful. Researchers say that it is very apparent in young children aged seven or eight when some of them perceive they are falling behind their contemporaries in learning to read – a capability they see as clearly very highly valued by their teachers, their parents and the more successful members of their peer group. They start to see themselves as ‘failures’ in every other sphere of highly valued activity and perform accordingly. Repeated failure becoming collectively embedded can be seen every week in the performances of consistently ineffective sports teams as their ‘heads go down’ and their self-confidence becomes so low that they lack the psychological strength to break the habit of losing. Unsuccessful schools are like this. It is this sort of failure that the educational system could do without. So let us consider ways in which we could reduce, if not eliminate, this sort of ‘unnecessary failure’.

One final point needs to be underlined: we are sometimes reluctant or unknowing heirs to the expectations of our ancestors. In this respect it’s worth noting that we have been preoccupied with – and in a sense dependent on – failure for centuries. In 1803 the Bishop of London noted that some thought that ‘it was safer for the Church and State to allow the poorer classes to remain in that state of ignorance in which God had originally placed them’. Robert Lowe, the architect of the notorious Revised Code following the 1870 Education Act, said: ‘We must give the lower classes just sufficient education to give them that sense of awe for higher education which the leaders of the nation demand.’

More recently, if the 11-plus didn’t ‘fail’ you, then O-level would; and if you surmounted that hurdle and even A-level standard, you could regard yourself as a failure if you didn’t get a first from Oxford or Cambridge. Even then, there was the real test of the Ph.D ahead. Such observations may be fanciful but they convey our inherited predisposition to find failure as a means of identifying success.

The emphasis on academic attainment as the main means of establishing an individual pupil’s or school’s success is well noted and sometimes contested as being at the expense of other sorts of achievement. Certainly OFSTED inspections and the publication of exam league tables, for example, encourage schools to focus on a few key measurements such as five or more higher GCSE grades including English and Maths, with the probable result that the school gives disproportionate attention to those pupils at the borderline of this measure at the expense of others who are unlikely to achieve that level. And they, of course, are the very pupils who are already at risk of experiencing that embedded sense of failure we want to avoid.

The more narrowly and normatively pupil and school success is drawn, the more likely it is that there will be embedded failure for some. Therefore the way we decide to measure school success is important if we wish to be serious in eliminating self-fulfilling failure. Included in a more desirable and wider definition of schools’ success might be the way schools and their pupils can demonstrate improvements in:

• participation and average performance rates in various sports
• annual ‘health fitness’ measures
• participation in a wide range of arts activities (music, for example)
• participation in pupil activities and experiences (including day visits and residentials as well as extended curriculum studies)
• staff professional development activities
• staff and pupil absence rates
• defined student leadership and management opportunities
• pupil voluntary contribution to the well-being of the local community
• encouragement of opportunities for family learning

One final piece of evidence a society and school serious about reducing unnecessary failure might consider is the regular collection of the views of pupils, staff and parents through the use of attitudinal surveys.

Children are in school for only 15% of their waking time between birth and 16; the balance (85%) is spent in the home or community – and here children find themselves in very different circumstances.

Some are fortunate to be immersed in a supportive culture with clear and well-judged expectations. These children feel good about themselves; at an early age they play, hear music, are listened to encouragingly and bear witness to countless stories intended for them. Their lives and confidence are enriched by taking part in new experiences. In short, at every turn they are surrounded by a positive, aspirational role model.

Other children, however, come from homes where some or all of these things are absent. In some they face apathy or even violence from parents or carers who have lost hope and are simply not ‘good enough’, as psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim would have put it. These children are surrounded by what we might call negative, or at best neutral, aspirational role models.

Furthermore, in the teenage years and sometimes earlier, they are frequently in a culture beyond the school and home where they spend time in a community characterised by sporadic violence, crime and drugs and where it is especially difficult to grow the resilience needed to avoid becoming ensnared.

Aschool’s organisational practices – such as vertical or year-group teaching; setting or streaming; formative or normative assessment and marking; use of language; a regime of rewards and sanctions – all have a positive or negative impact on individual pupils. A school may be successful for many, some or few pupils. Existing evidence is that schools are less successful with children from apparently disadvantaged backgrounds, but that a few schools do buck that trend.

What the 21st Century Learning Alliance has done so far is to set out a series of statements for schools to consider and, in doing so, ask themselves whether a particular answer is more or less likely to cause embedded failure among those youngsters most at risk. For example, most secondary schools, in adopting a fortnightly timetable ‘to fit it all in’, admit that in establishing priority criteria they start with the sixth form, proceed to the higher-grade GCSE sets, ensure that Year 9 have good teachers and end with Year 7 ‘making do’ at the end of the process. Yet they would also subscribe to the desirability for any Year 7 pupil to encounter eight teachers at most. With the exception of schools that have adopted the RSA ‘Opening Minds’ programme, schools often have Year 7 pupils encountering 16 to 20 different teachers during their fortnightly timetable.

In the same way, schools face real choices in elevating the needs of some pupils over those of others when they decide on ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ banding. The examples are myriad and we have set out some of them on the website: www.21stcenturylearningalliance.com.

My hope is that we can broaden the debate and establish a list of, say, half a dozen essential school organisational practices and so reduce the sort of embedded failure identified in this paper. In my view, the list would definitely include:

• ‘vertical’ as well as ‘horizontal’ pupil groupings,
• more team and less individual activity, assessment and tasks
• guaranteed residential experiences

The debate about what practices harbour embedded failure is surely one worth having. As the RSA Education Charter states, all young people need the support to enjoy success, no matter where their talents lie and irrespective of their background.

This debate should also provoke a simultaneous consideration of government practices which, at a system level, have a similar potential to diminish or increase the likelihood of embedded failure, the reduction of which is surely the country’s top priority for the 21st century.  

Professor Tim Brighouse was London Schools Commissioner and he co-chairs the 21st Century Learning Alliance.

The RSA Charter for Education in the 21st CenturyThe world is changing rapidly. If we want to support young people to become the adults they will need to be to thrive in the 21st century, we need not just to adapt our education system, but to transform it.

The RSA Charter for Education sets out the principles we believe should inform future development of education for young people, in which we include learning of all kinds, whether formal or informal, and whether offered by schools, colleges, universities, training organisations or elsewhere.

In doing so, we have drawn heavily on the experience of schools using Opening Minds, and the perspective of organisations running initiatives in schools which share our values and aspirations.

We believe many people share this vision. Yet, the public conversation about schools tends to emphasise the problems, while success is often narrowly defined. In this context, the RSA will use the charter to promote a positive vision, and to highlight the exciting practice already happening in schools and communities up and down the country.

You can express your support and sign up to the charter by visiting www.thersa.org/educationcharter