The Department for Education published the White Paper entitled The Importance of Teaching today, 30 November. This sets out radical changes for the schools system and claims to free schools from the constraints of central Government direction and place teachers at the heart of school improvement.

CSIE supports many of the plans laid out, not least the desire to radically overhaul the way in which the curriculum and inspections are run, the emphasis upon high expectations for every pupil, improvements to accountability and transparency and the efforts to make funding fairer. CSIE recognises that this will be of benefit to millions of children and young people.

However, CSIE is concerned about a number of the proposals, most notably those that concern behaviour and discipline. We feel that a chance has been missed to genuinely change the ethos of schools and urge the government to think carefully about the following points:

• We are at a loss to understand why former Armed Forces employees have been singled out for a specific teacher training initiative (over and above, say, former bankers) and are concerned that such people are being sought as a ‘solution’ to the ‘problem’ of discipline in schools. Like Children’s Rights Alliance England (CRAE) we remain worried that successive School Ministers place a heavy weighting on teacher force and disciplinary measures when research has repeatedly shown that thriving schools are those in which children and young people feel respected, stimulated, involved and engaged.

 

• The coalition Government is urging all schools to market their own school improvement plan geared around their own specific circumstances and recognises that improving teacher performance involves developing and strengthening on the job training. However, recognition that the self-evaluation framework (SEF) has become a bureaucratic nightmare for many schools, has the potential to leave an abyss if self-evaluation is not built into all processes within schools. CSIE’s popular publication The Index for Inclusion; developing learning and participation in schools, the 3rd edition of which is due to be launched in April 2011, is a helpful resource which guides schools through a self-review of their cultures, policies and practices in a way which leads to whole school improvement.

 

• We are concerned that proposals to allow teachers to use “reasonable force where necessary” in order to discipline pupils breaches Article 19 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), which the UK has ratified. Article 19 stipulates that Governments should ensure that children are properly cared for and protected from violence by anyone who looks after them. This clearly includes teachers. We would like to remind the coalition Government that the powers of restraint currently granted to schools were recently prohibited in privately-run child prisons by the Court of Appeal as an abuse of children’s rights. CSIE is deeply concerned about the lack of any duty for the central collection of data concerning such force since transparency helps to protect children from unlawful restraint. Without monitoring, there is no way to determine whether force is being used disproportionately on certain groups, such as those children said to have special educational needs or children from Black and Minority Ethnic communities.

 

• CSIE believes that if the proposals to stop, search and confiscate items laid out in the White Paper were applied to any other group within society there would be national uproar. Current plans are almost certainly a breach of children’s rights to privacy under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, as well as Article 28 of the UNCRC which states that discipline in schools should respect children’s human dignity.

 

• We agree that existing anti-bullying guidance is too long and does not serve pupils well through being spread across a variety of places. However, plans to radically reduce the information available on specific forms of bullying to a mere 20 pages, is worrying, unless good quality professional development activities are made available to all prospective and existing teachers. Where teachers are inexperienced or lacking knowledge of specific types of bullying CSIE fears that a reduction and simplification in guidance will make it far harder for teachers to support pupils fully. While the effects of bullying and the methods deployed are often largely similar the reasons behind it can vary hugely, as can a young person’s ability to inform a member of staff or other adult. Without teachers recognising where and why such differences may occur CSIE is concerned that pupils will suffer.

 

• Like the Department for Education, CSIE expects schools to take bullying, particularly that founded on prejudice, seriously. That said, we would urge the Department to help teachers identify the beliefs that are in place that enable such prejudicial views to form in the first instance. For example, we feel teachers would be better placed in helping pupils unpick social stereotypes from an early age rather than “firmly intervening to tackle disruptive behaviour”; unpicking notions of Whiteness and heterocentricism rather than responding to specific racist or homophobic incidents; and developing an understanding of the social model of disability. Failure to challenge underlying systems means that bullying will always continue to exist, irrespective of how sound a school’s anti-bullying policies may be or how concise government guidance.

 

• We are concerned over suggestions that the coalition Government will “increase the autonomy, accountability and diversity of alternative provision” for those young people that have become, or are seen to be, marginalised from mainstream educational provision. We suggest that it makes more sense – both on a financial, and on individual, personal level – to improve mainstream provision so that it becomes responsive to the full diversity of learners, irrespective of their perceived abilities or behaviour. Equally, we are concerned that the Department for Education feels it necessary to publish separate and additional guidance relating to so-called ‘special educational needs’ in a future Green Paper. It is regrettable that the radical reform of schools proposed here would not appear to stretch far enough to encompass all learners and the tacit suggestion that reforms do not apply to all children equally.

 

• The suggestion that competition will be used to open the way for “high quality new providers to enter the market” is alarming. It would appear that the Department for Education is conflating accountability (as epitomised through ‘good’ use of tax payer’s money) with competition. Pitting schools or Academies against one another encourages competition and weakens possibilities for collaboration; it also provides an inappropriate incentive for schools to focus their energies on pupils who are expected to perform well at examinations. CSIE is concerned that this promotes a very narrow view of school improvement, while it reduces children, and education, to market forces. Education is a basic human right of every child. This is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UNCRC. This difference is about more than semantics. The latter position involves treating children as human beings, worthy of respect by virtue of being human. The former sees them as little more than cogs in a machine. If the government is insistent upon using market forces as a justification for solid educational provision it may be more productive to shift the thinking slightly through acknowledging that people are more productive when they are happier and where they feel they are being treated in a respectful manner. It should also consider the impact of education on children and young-people’s well-being, instead of perpetuating a narrow focus on academic achievement.