On Monday 17 March 2008 The College of Teachers held its Spring Awards Ceremony at the Institute of Education, University of London. The College’s President, Professor Geoff Whitty, who is also Director of the Institute of Education, conferred the College’s Honorary Fellowship upon Baroness Morris of Yardley, Estelle Morris, who had received the award in absentia in 2006. Lady Morris then presented her lecture ‘Teachers in charge of change’.

Since I’ve got the chance, I would like to thank everybody for the privilege of the Fellowship this afternoon. It’s been a wonderful occasion so far.

What I’ve decided to talk about today is how the rest of the world is catching up with The College of Teachers. Because I think when you hear of the focus on teaching and learning and the skills of teachers, and when you realise that the predecessors of this organisation focussed their thoughts there all those decades ago, it is quite extraordinary. It is quite latterly that the whole panoply of government and the education system has chosen as its focus to concentrate on pedagogy and teaching and learning in the classroom so I hope that the comments I have to make are fitting, given the history of the organisation.

People don’t ask you these questions when you’re a minister, they ask you questions when you stop being a minister and when I stopped being a minister, – they would often ask how politicians used evidence to inform their decision-making. In fact they used to more often put it ‘why don’t politicians use evidence to inform their decision-making?’. I could do a whole speech just on the answer to that question, because of course they use evidence but they use other things as well. The whole business of how we decide to change education, and who drives change, and where the leaders for change are, is incredibly complicated. I think it’s more complicated in teaching and in education than it is in many other professions.

I want to talk about what the rhythms of change have been and what has driven change in the decades that have passed, where we might be now and what I think might drive change in the decades and the years to come. And I used to say, probably up until quite recently, I think it’s still in part true, that education has been incredibly slow to change. If you look at something like medicine or technology or agriculture, and if you were to chart its changes over the last 50 to 80 years, I think you’d conclude that education has been very slow to change. An example I always used to give is that up till about the last twenty years ago, if you’d got a teacher who taught in the 1920s and was magicked back to earth, they probably would survive the trauma of going into a classroom. There would be things that would be vaguely the same – a few more children but still often sat in rows. The classroom, and even the content of the curriculum would be fairly similar but called different things. We’d of course call cooking ‘cooking’, they wouldn’t have known we’d gone through ‘home economics’, ‘design technology’ and back to ‘cooking’ again. They would find that very familiar but there would be lots of familiar things. If you’d been a doctor or a surgeon that operated in the 1920s and came back in the 1980s I think you’d find yourself frightened to even move a foot once you’d got into the ward or once you’d got into the operating theatre. I used to think that that was a fault of teachers, that that was the fault of education, that it had been slow to change. I’ve given a bit of thought to this and I think that in part that is the case, but I think it’s in part what the rest of society has wanted of education. And whereas medicine and agriculture and technology have been driven forward by science and invention and discovery, education hasn’t been driven to change by those things. If you read the history of education up to, say, the end of the Second World War, there were moral imperatives for change. The reason to change, to educate more children, was because it was morally right to do so. I’ll read a quote to you ;  the person you’d obviously go to if you were looking for somebody who drove forward the moral purpose of change, Robert Owen, back in 1841, said

”Is it not the interest of the human race, that everyone should be so taught and placed that he would find his highest enjoyment to arise from the continued practice of doing all in his power to promote the wellbeing and happiness of every man, woman and child, without regard to their class, sect, party, country or colour. It is therefore”, he concludes, "the interest of all that everyone from birth should be well educated, physically and mentally, that society may be improved in its character’. And those arguing against him at the time and a few decades earlier, a person in parliament saying ‘for however specious in theory the project might be, of giving education to the labouring classes of the poor, it would in effect be prejudicial to their morals and happiness”. So it was a debate, whether we changed education and how we changed it was about a moral purpose in education.

If you then fast forward to the end of the Second World War and Butler and the 1944 Education Act, we began to know that we needed more skilled people. We needed apprentices; we needed that group who under the tripartite system were heading for technical school. So really what happened in the 40s and the 50s was that the moral imperative for changed was joined by the economic imperative for change. But if you look through the politics of that time, there was not a unanimity about educating everybody -about educating the poor the same as we did the rich, by educating girls the same as we educated boys - that wasn’t there. What I think happened in the 80s and the 90s was that people looked round and they saw that those youngsters in prisons were those who couldn’t read and write. They saw that the adults in prisons were the people that had been failed in school and they looked at the beginnings of breakdown and family, and breakdown in communities and fragmentation of communities. Where that was happening was among those families and those people who had not benefited from education so far. And I think at that point the social imperatives for change joined the moral and the economic imperatives for change. So only in autumn last year one of the two political leaders of different political parties said:

“... and the countries that I believe will succeed in the future are those that will do more than just unlock some of the talents of some of their young people; the countries that will succeed will be those that strive to unlock all the talents of all of their people”.

And the leader of the other major party said:

“It's a simple fact of life that school really matters. …. That's why we must not tolerate a situation where good education is unevenly spread. …. That's a tragedy for our country and we have a moral imperative to turn things round”.

The first was Gordon Brown and the second was David Cameron, but I think each would have been happy to use each other’s words. And what we’ve had in the last ten years -it’s as recent as that - is that bringing together of three important drivers for change in education: the moral one that’s been around since the beginning of time; the economic one that began when we re-built this country after the Second World War – and the social ones that brought all the Right and the Left politically together when we saw the consequences in an advanced industrial nation of people not getting a decent education whilst they were at school. So I’ve modified my thoughts a little bit and thought why it is that teachers have been slow to change. But it has also been that the rest of the world, the rest of our country, hasn’t wanted them to change in the way that they’ve wanted medicine to change and technology to change. Sometimes I think we have this silly argument about trying to compare whether schools are better now than they were in the past. The truth is the schools of olden years were very very good at doing what was asked of them. What’s asked of schools now is different and therefore we can’t compare the two. We need now to be as good at delivering a quality of education against the criteria of what we’re being asked to do, which was quoted by both Cameron and Brown, as the old schools were in delivering what they were asked to do, which was 20% with high skills, 80% prepared to do semi-skilled and unskilled jobs, and most people knowing their station in life. And that’s the enormity of the change that’s happened over the last 50 years.

It’s been interesting that, talking so far about change and what has driven change, it has all been about politicians, what they have said or what society has said through them, that they wanted of the education system. And I’ve looked back to the end of the Second World War, to look at the levers of change. People are saying it is true that politicians have been the ones that have driven change. What I’ve heard more and more in the last 10 to 15 years that really one of the problems we’ve had with the education system so far is that education and politics have been too close together. That if we could take politics out of education, rather than education out of politics, we would be a stronger education system that could make the changes it wanted. Now, I don’t agree with that, I don’t think that would be a particularly good idea. I think that education is about values, it is about the transmission of knowledge from one generation to another; but it’s also about the type of society we want to see. If you look at one or two examples of big changes that we’ve had in the last half century, they have been about the sort of society we want to be. So if you look at girls’ education - and what’s been achieved and how well girls are doing in education is really something to celebrate,- it was the suffragettes wanting political independence; it was women wanting to be able to vote; women fighting for their role in politics that was almost a sign about the society we wanted to be. When you have a society that says we want to be the sort of society where women vote, women stand for parliament, we have women prime ministers, it follows that therefore we educate women as well. If you want to educate people from different socio-economic backgrounds or different races and religions to the same level as middle class white people, that’s been driven in some ways by political ideology, you can actually say, ‘no, we want to live in a society where people from all backgrounds can rise from the lowest places of birth to the highest achievements’. So whether you like it or not, I think we’re stuck, in my view rightly so, with politics and education being so intertwined because education is the delivery agent for what politicians want to do. All their speeches, all their targets, all their aspirations, all their promises to the electorate count for nothing unless there’s an education system that can educate the country, that can enable citizens to actually make that change. So I don’t believe that you can take politics out of education, but what I do want to argue is that we’re now at a point when the relationship between politics and education is changing and we ought to sit up and take note about it and see if we need to do anything to make it work as effectively as we can.

I think what happened in the post-war years was structural change, led by politicians: the fight for comprehensive education that came from the political Left, the raising of the school leaving age from 14 to 15 at that time, (15 to 16 although it was in the ’44 Education Act didn’t come until much later, in my very first year of teaching which was 1974). There was the debate about charitable status for public schools, the expansion of higher education, teachers’ pay and working conditions – if you look back through the manifestos of the political parties at the time, that’s what they were talking about.

The politicians at the time talked about how to have a better education system; but then levers for improvement were structural levers; they were things that stopped at the school gate. There is a rough understood rule that politicians could pass laws, politicians could make speeches about education but what happened beyond the gate was the domain of the professions. Politicians didn’t make speeches about what happened beyond the school gate. And then in the 80s we got the second wave of reform, the national curriculum, testing, inspections, all those things now which we would call ‘the infrastructure’. And I think they brought about considerable improvements. What was really interesting about that was it was politicians leading it - Ken Baker and the Education Reform Act 1988. It was politicians actually saying “We’re no longer prepared just to talk about the structures, the name of the school, about admissions arrangements’, which is essentially what comprehensive education was about. “We now want a national debate about what we teach and we want to know what our children learn. We want to be able to say that if they’re aged 5 they learn this, if they’re aged 7 they learn that. We think we’ve got the entitlement as leaders of the nation, and we want to be more interested in the quality of teaching because they deliver”.

The importance of the Education Reform Act and everything that came in its wake in the 1980s was that it was the lever for change crossing the front door, going into the school. I think they made considerable progress. Mainly led from the Institute of Education, what we got through the 90s -one of the things that certainly influenced the Labour government when it was preparing for power in 1997 - was the school improvement movement, the notion of what made a good school. We can reel them off now, they’re embedded in our psyche – and that’s where this idea of good leadership, of good heads, of “you can’t have a good school without a good head” came from. That’s what all the work that Peter Mortimer and Geoff Whitty and their colleagues here at the Institute actually led. That’s why we spent so much time on the National College for School Leadership; that’s why, at the sign of a failing school, you go in there and look at the head and try and either support the head or change the head. So that was driven politically and it was moving closer into the school. It wasn’t only a matter of "well, we’ll tell you what to teach and we’ll measure whether you teach it and we’ll monitor the quality of heads but then we’ll stand back …“   Then in 1997, there was the biggest change of all, because the Labour government came in with a literacy strategy and a numeracy strategy and that was about how you teach, about how teachers teach, about pedagogy – it was government catching up with the College of Teachers. And I think we didn’t realise the enormity of that change as a lever for driving through improvement.

In 50 years of politicians driving change forward, I’m not saying it was them that achieved it, but they were nationally seen to be the ones that drove it forward. We’ve gone from politicians where there was a rule that they didn’t say anything about what happened beyond the school gate, to politicians actually putting in their manifesto – ”children shall be taught through phonics”, “children shall be taught in a three-part lesson” or whatever the literacy and the numeracy strategies should be. So that was a huge move. What we’ve had since then really is a decade, with perhaps a couple of years missing in the middle, of politicians using pedagogy as a lever for change. There’s almost a law on how you group your children, because mixed ability is very not favoured at the moment, parties are having a bit of a battle at the moment as to who can be firmest on setting and whether one’s going for setting or banding or streaming. There is a real live political debate there, about how teachers on a daily basis should group the 28 or 30 kids that they’ve got sitting in front of them.

So we’ve had a decade of pedagogical change actually leading education. Now the reason I think that’s right is because I’ve always held the belief that if we want the education system to which we aspire for all our children, that holy grail of being able to deliver for every child, no matter what their background, to solve the problems with children from less affluent backgrounds … I wouldn’t use the term ‘being failed by the education system’ because I think without the school system they could end up with an ever worse lot in life, but not having benefited in the way that perhaps many of our children would. I’ve always believed that there’s no quick fix; there’s no magic structure or type of school that can deliver that. It’s what happens in the classroom; it’s the daily teaching and learning; it’s the development of pedagogy; it’s how we organise the shape of the school day, the shape of the school week, the shape of the school term. It’s how we bring together the teaching of skills and the learning of knowledge or how we link with the home that will drive improvement in education. Not sexy, not a quick fix, not a brilliant political speech, it’s solid good stuff, the best of what we know about teaching and learning. And so where we’ve landed really is what we now know will improve teaching but we’ve still got the politicians thinking they’re driving it forward. And so the first conclusion I’ve come to, that if that’s true, that if from now on it’s going to be pedagogy that leads teaching and learning, it’s got to be evidence-based and not ideologically based. Now, politicians are entitled to make decisions based on ideology; selection and non-selection is based on ideology; educating girls and boys is based on ideology; inclusion, non-inclusion is based on ideology. I’d be very very happy to defend that; if you elect me to parliament, you know what you’re getting. But things that are based on teaching and learning, what happens in the classroom, must be based on research evidence. They must be based on what works in the classroom and there isn’t a left or right ownership of good pedagogy. Some of the things that work in the classroom don’t naturally belong to the political left, or the political right, and if politicians are going to go into pedagogy, they have to learn to behave in a different way as far as pedagogy is concerned.

One of the most bizarre things we’ve got at the moment is an argument between the Tories, who want synthetic phonics, and the Labour government who is happy with the phonics as outlined in the literacy strategy. I’ve read the debates between the two and I would bet a month’s salary that I won’t find many ministers who actually know the difference between synthetic phonics and phonics in the literacy strategy. But synthetic phonics sounds tough; it sounds as though you’re driving through what instinctively parents know is right. Literacy strategy has plateaued, so perhaps there’s a feeling that we might not be getting all that we might have got from it. What has happened is not a battle based on the evidence of which phonics is right, because both are perfectly good, it’s actually a battle of language and perception about what parents and the electorate will think about politicians who either want synthetic phonics or the other thing. Now we really can’t have that. What we need is politicians to join together, to say “On the basis of evidence, we now know phonics is best, isn’t that great?’  It’s our responsibility to train the teachers, to fund it, to make sure that parents do whatever they need to do, to make sure new teachers are trained, make sure we fund schools of education to carry on researching so that we can get the next stage of phonics, but not have this barmy argument about whether Tory phonics is better than Labour phonics.

But the only reason I sort of talk about that, is to show the problem we have. We have not yet made that jump from politicians used to driving change based on ideology, to having realised that it’s about teaching and learning, and not having redefined their relationship with teachers. Now, it’s not a political culture that makes that easy. If you base things on evidence, it means sometimes that it doesn’t work, and that you evaluate what hasn’t worked and learn it for next practice. It’s not easy for politicians to launch something and then go back and say “well, it didn’t work but we’ve got it right for next time round”. You can write the story, you can see the way it happens. Sometimes evidence is counter-intuitive. Mixed ability teaching has got a lot of evidence to say that it’s better than either setting or streaming. Inclusion has got a lot of evidence for special needs kids to say that that’s quite good for some special needs children, but common sense instinctively; you think that setting is better, you think that special schools are better for special needs children. And sometimes politicians have this battle between what the evidence tells them and what their political instincts tell them and on most occasions they’ll back their political instincts more than they will the evidence; that’s the nature of being a politician.

But it doesn’t happen in other areas. Look at health; we don’t get politicians taking the blame if a drug doesn’t work. Look at the debate we’ve had on GM foods, look at the debate we’ve had on the triple vaccine. Look at the debate we had before we absolutely rolled out the flu vaccinations. They’ve been the highest order of debates. Men and women with no science background have struggled to understand GM foods and whether they want to buy it in the shop. People with children with no scientific background have looked at the evidence and have struggled to understand whether they should let their child have the triple vaccine or pay to have the separate vaccines. And there have been programmes on the radio, from the Today programme to special programmes that have helped us to do that. It’s been our country at its best, it’s been the scientists providing the evidence, it’s been the media and the broadcasters presenting it in a way that we can understand, and it’s been us as citizens trying to make the right decision. And when as a nation on the evidence we’ve made the right decision, the politicians have come in behind it and funded it and helped the roll-out. Why isn’t it like that in education? Why haven’t we in education got that same relationship between evidence and policy-making and evidence and practice? And I think the reason why is that we’ve always known that science drives change in health, in agriculture and technology. Imagine where we’d be if a politician decided to ignore evidence and run the department for technology. So we’ve been brought up, we’ve already got the culture, where we know what the politicians do in health - make sure there are enough doctors, they make sure the hospitals are good, they make sure if there’s a good idea that it’s available to everyone; they get the blame if there’s a drug that’s got an evidence base that’s not available to everybody with regards to where they live. We’re pretty certain, aren’t we, as citizens, as voters, of what the relationship is, but we are more muddled in education because politicians are muddled. And I would say that, if evidence is going to be the way we drive forward change in education, we need a new relationship between politicians and teachers. Not one that actually removes politicians from the game, but re-draws the line because the levers to promote change have changed. But it won’t, if we use evidence, just be politicians that need to change. If we’re going to use pedagogy, teaching and learning as the thing to improve standards, then we’re going to expect even more of teachers. The decisions that they make day in and day out in teaching and learning will be key to whether we achieve the sort of education system we want. Because what it means, if politicians actually say, "well, we now understand, it’s about what happens with the teachers”, it actually means "it is what happens in the classroom” that’s got to be better than it ever has done. I think Ted Wragg did research that concluded that the average teacher in the average lesson makes 300 decisions, and if it’s a good teacher and a good lesson, they make between 500 and 600 decisions. In every one-hour lesson. And it’s the nature of the decisions they make and how they implement them that will actually determine whether they teach effectively or not. That’s why in some very good schools, good school improvement things there, you get a child who doesn’t pass maths where he’s passed everything else, you get poor French results whereas the school’s got brilliant everything else results. It’s what happens in the classroom. We’ve had a brilliant model which has served us well of what makes a good school, and a school improvement model. I think what we’re looking for now is what makes a good lesson and a lesson improvement model. And if we’re going to get that lesson improvement model, I think what we’re looking for is a different relationship between researchers and teachers. When I taught for 18 years, I can’t remember looking at any evidence about research at all. I can’t remember a researcher ever coming into my school to talk to me, I can’t remember – and I taught in a good school – people really saying "I’ve come to see you teach, Estelle, and I think I could help you to evaluate what you did, and we could put this against some theoretical background, and you could reflect and do a bit of reading, then you could go in and you could get better results”. And we’re in a good position to change this. We’ve got over 100 university schools of education, £70m spent on research each year. What we need, as well as a different relationship between politicians and teachers, is a different relationship between researchers and teachers and researchers and government. And if that’s to happen, first of all, teachers need to know what evidence is available, what is good evidence, what is bad evidence, where they can find it and how they should use it. Secondly, teachers need to be able to update their subject knowledge far more frequently than they’re able to do, and to reflect on their pedagogical practice. Thirdly, teachers need to think of themselves as researchers. They need to be taught and they need to be well versed in evaluating their own practice and programme. All academic researchers should have a very close contact, a very very close relationship, not only with their local schools but with other schools as well. Teachers and schools should be able to commission research; they should have a research budget so that they can commission the research that would be helpful for them. And what’s lovely about this is The College of Teachers has been pushing away at this for over a century. What’s sad is I do believe that it’s taken the rest of society a long time to catch up. When I left the Department, one of the things that was being worked on then which has really brought huge benefit was teacher workforce reform, the notion that we should look at what teachers need to do, what jobs can be taken away from them, how we use their skills and their expertise to greatest effect. And what are the skills we need to draw into the classroom so that teaching skills and other skills deliver well for children. And I think we missed a trick at that point. We should have brought researchers into teacher workforce reform. As we are reforming the workforce and all those new posts as well, somehow we still have the research community running on a parallel line. It’s not that it doesn’t link with school, I know it does, it’s not that it doesn’t impact on school, I know it does, but somehow they’re still too much seen as slightly separate routes to education. And I wish, going back, that when we’d done teacher workforce reform, that we’d actually involved researchers as well. But maybe that’s something in the next stage of teacher workforce reform that we could do at the same time.

I hoped that what I’ve said was pertinent given the College’s commitment to teaching learning leading but I’m delighted really that after over a century, the rest of the country has indeed caught up with you.

 

ESTELLE MORRIS started her career as a teacher at Sidney Stringer School and Community College in Coventry in 1974. She was elected as a member of Warwick District Council in 1979 and led the Labour Group for seven years.

In 1992 she was elected as MP for Birmingham Yardley and in 1994 she was appointed as Opposition Spokesperson for Education and Employment.  After Labour’s 1997 election victory, Estelle Morris became Parliamentary Under-Secretary in the department for Education and Employment and in 1998 she became the Minister for School Standards.

In 2001 she was appointed to the post of Secretary of State for the newly created Department for Education and Skills. Ms Morris resigned from this post in 2002 but returned to the front bench eight months later as Minister in the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.

Ms Morris did not seek re-election at the general election in 2005 after thirteen years as MP for Birmingham Yardley. She was appointed to the House of Lords after the May 2005 election.

Estelle Morris became the Pro Vice-Chancellor of Sunderland University in 2005 and Chair of the Strategy Board of The Institute of Effective Education at the University of York in April 2007.  She serves on a number of charitable bodies connected to both Education and the Arts. She has been awarded honorary degrees from a number of Universities.

This lecture may also be downloaded as a PDF.