In 2006 I became the headteacher of St James school in Exeter. The school was in special measures, and it served a largely working-class community in the east of the city. This was a time when the New Labour government 1997–2010 was supporting schools in difficulties. In 2008 we received a lot of extra funding to set up a trust. This wasn’t academisation; this was still in the future, to be inaugurated by the Michael Gove Department for Education’s Academies Act of 2010.
We named this trust after the great educationalist Ted Wragg, who died in 2005. Teachers of the turn of the 20th century will remember Wragg very fondly.
What did Ted Wragg stand for?
Wragg was a prominent educationalist and professor of education at Exeter University from 1978 to 2003. In 2003 he became emeritus professor of education at Exeter until his death in 2005. He had a national profile and was known for opposing political interference in education. He directed many research projects, mainly focusing on classroom practice and the craft of teaching.
Throughout his career he would always make time to teach a class of children for one or two days a week so that he would remain in touch with the profession at the chalkface. Wragg was an advocate of warmth, humour and humanity in the classroom, and he defended these ideals with a passion against a narrowly utilitarian approach to learning. After initially welcoming New Labour, he became critical of them when they took a more authoritarian line. By 2005 he was well known for his articles in the Times Educational Supplement and the Guardian.
Final interview
Wragg gave his final interview in 2005 to Anthony Wilson in a publication called Creativity in Primary Education. It’s titled ‘Going against the flow’. That an interview from nearly 20 years ago is so relevant now may be surprising to many people. He said of Ofsted:
“Teachers get apprehensive. The most common question I get when I’m talking about creative teaching to heads and teachers is: oh that sounds really interesting. I’d love to do that but what about Ofsted?”
He goes on to argue that to have a truly creative climate, schools need to be free of fear. He said: “A negative head who constantly tells staff that they’ve got to be worried about Ofsted and stepping out of line doing anything other than QCA schemes of work is actually killing creativity stone dead.”
Wragg always understood that teachers needed the space to innovate and to challenge. However, he wasn’t advocating an undisciplined free-for-all. While he saw the need for frameworks and schemes of work for schools, he also passionately argued for flexibility and professional judgement. He once used the example of a heavy snow day and wondered why many schools hadn’t got the children to write about this or to study the science of weather. Many had ignored this opportunity and ploughed on with the literacy hour, because that’s what Ofsted would expect.
It was however hard to pigeonhole Wragg, as he resisted labels:
“I reflected on a class of seven-year-olds I had been teaching. Had I been traditional or progressive, or, for that matter did anyone give a hang? I had told them things, which sounds trad enough, but we had done a fair bit of group-work, so perhaps I am progressive. On the other hand, I had told some of the groups what to do, so I must be a traditional progressive.”
His gentle mockery demonstrates just how unhelpful these labels are.
Enduring influence
There are many people who were influenced by Wragg both as an educator and through his public comments. As early as 1992 he wrote to the Guardian along with 14 other professors of education, saying that education could not prosper with a narrow centrally controlled base – and a socially divisive hierarchy of schools; that governments should treat education as a public service and not as a commodity to be traded. He emphasised that high quality education should not be reserved for some children in some schools.
These insights into education are as relevant now as they were then. However, there have recently been some rather disturbing reports on the direction of the Ted Wragg Trust schools.
A memory defiled
A mistaken belief has arisen amongst some in education that the only way working-class children in deprived communities can succeed is if they are subject to draconian, no excuses behaviour regimes. There is very little evidence that this is the case and significant evidence that such regimes do more damage to children than their advocates think.
Just like Wragg, I favour fair and consistent discipline in schools. I don’t want a free-for-all where nobody can learn. Neither do I want the sort of draconian regime that doesn’t allow children to breathe and punishes them for minor misdemeanours to a ridiculous extent, by isolation and exclusion.
Schools with such ‘zero tolerance’ regimes are by definition not inclusive, as they weed out many children, some of whom will have special needs. I was unaware that the Ted Wragg Trust was going down this road until I read an article called ‘The Rise of Authoritarian schools’. To my horror it used the school that I had been proud to work in as an example of this new authoritarianism.
Phrases like SLANT – sit up, lean forward, answer questions, nod head and track the teacher – and the aggressive collective discipline routine of ‘flattening the grass’ have become commonplace. Such authoritarianism has crept into many English schools over the past few years in the guise of high behaviour standards.
I have no evidence that the Ted Wragg schools are doing these things, but the article claims that they are putting children into ‘reset’, a euphemism for isolation for relatively minor offences. They miss education and some get to the stage where they give up. In the article, one parent documents what happened to his son, who became totally disengaged from education. This led to him leaving with no qualifications and he had a very poor experience. The argument is that such practices enable the majority to learn. But I’d ask, what are the majority actually learning? Are they learning that compliance is all important and that only adults can wield power?
In these situations, parents have little redress because academy trusts aren’t held accountable by local authorities, they are self-determining businesses, funded from the public purse. If parents aren’t supportive of these draconian measures, they are typically told to take their child elsewhere. But what are parents to do when most of the schools in the area are run by this academy trust? They become trapped in a fixed choice of driving their child many miles to an alternate school, or collaborating with other adults to impose draconian punishments that they judge to be cruel.
At what cost?
Andy West, a teacher at the Philosophy Foundation, argues that behaviour policies that rely on stigma, isolation and humiliation are taking education in England in the wrong direction. He goes on to ask the salient question: “At what cost… We are going to have another generation who are taught that this is how you communicate through power exchange. But children are so powerless that we have a duty as adults not to exploit that.”
Advocates of these sorts of approaches typically counterargue that the ends justify the means. They post evidence that such schools get better GCSE results than less-draconian schools with a similar demography. However, there is evidence that this is because, by the time children take these exams, all of those who have struggled for various reasons in the first four years of secondary school have been ‘weeded out’ of zero tolerance academies; it is not a level playing field.
My point is therefore that this is not an inclusive system. Not all of those children starting in Year 7 are finally included in the results statistics five years later; some have spent those years languishing in ‘reset rooms’ to be finally driven out of the system.
There is also the very salient question about why in England, so many head teachers and academy chief executive officers have an entrenched belief that a school can only get positive results from working-class children by oppressing them en masse from the very beginning.
Professor Diana Raey of Cambridge University asks: “is it really true that we must treat working class children like Pavlov’s dogs in order to get the best out of them?”
We are left with the question as to why the majority of the schools in the private sector, and state schools in more advantaged areas, tend not to use these approaches. Is there potentially a very sinister agenda underlying a system that only inflicts such a regime on working-class children?
What would Ted say?
I believe that Wragg would have been horrified to see schools with his name resorting to these policies. Even when imposed with optimism and good intentions, they can cause serious damage to children. Do we really want economically and socially disadvantaged children to learn the lesson that conformity and compliance are all that matters? This will not equip them with the skills to enter society with the same confidence and independence of thought as their more advantaged contemporaries, however many exams they pass.
Perhaps the new government will abandon these oppressive regimes, to focus more on social justice and equal opportunities.
I believe, having underpinned my own teaching career inspired by Wragg that what Aristotle said still holds true, “Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all”.
CLICK HERE TO DONATE TO OUR CROWDFUNDER
HELP US BECOME STRONGER SO THAT WE CAN CONTINUE TO DELIVER POWERFUL CITIZEN JOURNALISM!
