Education is Better

Susan Elkin outlines how education standards have greatly improved over the past decades.

There’s a lot of handwringing in education. Of course, it’s underfunded and Ofsted is arguably not fit for purpose. Moreover, most readers of Ink Pellet are probably worried about the relentless promotion of STEM subjects at the expense of the arts – among other justifiable anxieties.

My memory, however, is long and I’m struck by how many things have improved enormously in education since my arrival at the chalkface – aka an all boys’ secondary school in Deptford in 1968. Here are five of them.

First, the bar for entry into teaching has risen. When I went to Teacher Training College, all that was required was five O levels, subjects immaterial. Today it’s an all graduate profession and every teacher must have minimum level English and maths.

That has definitely improved teaching standards. I can remember working with teachers in the 1970s and 80s whose horizons were very limited. Of course, they’d mastered what they needed to teach, but going beyond it was often an issue.

Some colleagues, on the other hand, had been to university which was, in itself, deemed a teaching qualification. The PGCE wasn’t essential. And that meant a different sort of quality issue – people who knew their subject very well but had no training in pedagogy. That often didn’t make for good teaching either.

Second, the National Curriculum (introduced in the early 1990s) now guarantees every child a baseline entitlement. Before that schools, departments and individual teachers could teach exactly what they liked. It meant, for example, that the vast majority left school without having read a word of Shakespeare and there must have been equivalent gaps in other subjects which I wasn’t aware of. Yes, the National Curriculum was unwieldy at the start, but has – over 30 years – gradually settled to become workable. I think the prescriptiveness, which sometimes seems tiresome, is more than offset by the fairness of ensuring that every student gets a broad and balanced introduction to all subjects.

Third, just look at the careful, systematic support for NQTs, these days. Mentoring and a reduced timetable is standard while you’re learning the ropes at the start of your career. In 1968 I was hurled in at the deep end – a full timetable, a lot of cover for absentee teachers and almost no guidance about what to teach or how to teach it. The amazing thing is that, at the end of the year, the headteacher sat in on one of my lessons for five minutes and then wrote to tell me that I had passed my probationary year: goodness knows how in that sauve qui peut environment or what the head was looking for. The school’s severe staffing problems wouldn’t have had anything to do with it, of course…

Fourth, there’s a lot more kindness around in schools than there used to be. Yes, I know bullying is still a problem in many secondary schools, but equally, especially in primary schools, there’s a lot more emphasis on thoughtfulness and empathy. At the end of last year, I was moved to see a child, not more than 8 and unbidden, helping her friend with quite severe special needs down a flight of stairs at Nottingham Playhouse in the pantomime interval. It was evidently just the natural thing to do in their school – and a richly encouraging example of how attitudes have changed. Before the law changed in 1970 that child probably wouldn’t have been in school at all, because when I started such children could be certified “ineducable” which relieved the local authority of responsibility for them. They either stayed at home or were dumped in medical institutions.

Fifth, we now have child protection, thank goodness. In my first school there were men on the staff who you definitely wouldn’t want to be teaching your children and the awful thing was that their predilections and habits were common knowledge, yet no one took action. Today when everyone must have clearance and all teachers are acutely aware of the dangers, such people would never get into a school. And if they did, general vigilance would get them spotted and dealt with very quickly. That’s got to be a hundred times better than the PE teacher I worked alongside in the late 1960s whose greatest delight was ceremoniously whacking the bottoms of small boys with a plimsoll – and that’s just an example.

And as an adjunct to that, thank goodness we’ve got rid of corporal punishment. Even when it was administered without pleasure in the Head’s office it was an abhorrence – but standard, particularly in boys’ schools in 1968.

I rest my case. It’s not perfect but education is a great deal better than it used to be.

Susan Elkin’s book Please Miss We’re Boys (Book Guild, 2019) entertainingly details more of her early experiences in that Deptford boys’ school. Email susanelkinltd@gmail.com to buy a copy £5.00 +2.25 p&p. Also works as a KS3 class reader.