Revenge of the Blob: good teachers are under siege

Revenge of the Blob: good teachers are under siege | The Spectator

Jolyon Maugham has a point. There is a need for an inquiry in the aftermath of Jason Arday’s tragic death. But, not for the first time, the Good Law Project director has identified the wrong target.

It’s not the press that needs to be investigated and held to account. If newspapers and magazines, including this one, err or fail, libel or traduce, then the courts can sanction and readers can desert. We survive, to publish, by public demand. The real focus of inquiry – sustained and detailed – should be Cambridge University and, in particular, its Faculty of Education. They were Professor Arday’s employers. Indeed, more than that, they were his champions and cheerleaders, beckoning the limelight to vaunt his appointment.

Arday’s death is a cause of profound sadness. The reasons for it cannot yet be known. Professional physicians, and indeed the Samaritans, caution against attributing suicide to any single cause. A proper respect for his life, and indeed all those who may struggle with thoughts of self-harm, suggests that caution should be exercised before judging what led to his passing.

But the attention drawn to Cambridge’s role in this affair is more than merited. The university’s Faculty of Education, where Arday was professor of the sociology of education, is one of the most prestigious teacher-training institutions in the country, responsible for preparing thousands of graduates for classrooms in state schools across the country.

Its existence, and eminence, is underpinned by the taxpayer and guaranteed by the government. Support for tuition, and research, flows from your pockets. Those who graduate from the institution form the minds of the next generation. We all have an interest in how its funds are spent and how it shapes our children’s learning.

I first raised concerns about what education faculties at our universities were doing more than a decade ago. I specifically questioned the priorities and ideological orientation of those in charge of teacher training in higher-education institutions such as Cambridge. I feared that, despite the noble idealism and genuine commitment of the overwhelming number of teachers in our classrooms, the academics preparing them for their vocation were letting them, and us, down. There was, I suggested, perhaps incautiously, a ‘blob’ of university professionals whose values, and approach, was inimical to educational excellence.

I was derided for daring to question their credentials and authority. One of those most vehement in their criticism was Hilary Cremin, the head of the Education Faculty. Professor Cremin was the individual who praised Arday on his appointment as ‘the best in the world in terms of the research that you do’. Whatever her motivation for that encomium, a single sentence should not define a career. But Professor Cremin, helpfully for us all, has written at length recently on her own educational philosophy and world outlook. So we can judge her by her own, considered, thoughts.

The range of her thinking is laid out in her book, Rewilding Education. Charles Moore touched on its flaws in these pages last week. It would require more space than either Charles or I are allowed, and more tolerance on the part of our readers than we have a right to expect, to go through its idiocies.

The work actively rejects not just the need for discipline, knowledge and testing in schools but the very idea of our schools themselves. They are damned as embodiments of a failed neo-liberal notion of modernity built on the flawed principles of the Enlightenment. Michel Foucault is cited promiscuously and approvingly. Foucault was, to be fair, a stern and consistent critic of the Enlightenment. So consistent, he welcomed the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution and the theocratic bloodshed which followed. So there is that.

And indeed Cremin is nothing if not thorough in her disdain for Enlightenment principles – as we can see in her approach to questions of evidence, proof and logic. She is specifically sceptical of ‘empirical truth’, which she sees as ‘favouring a modern, urban, liberal, Western view of the World’. Instead of this ‘epistemology of the North’, Cremin argues that we might want to achieve ‘cognitive justice’ by ‘foregrounding the epistemology of the South which challenges the dominance of the Eurocentric thought of the global North’.

The book exhibits all the weaknesses of modern academia: solipsistic personal reminiscence is treated as ‘fieldwork’, spurious authority is sought by citing other works, themselves written in impenetrable jargon, statistics are deployed in an effort to prove a point but without any recognition that correlation does not equal causation.

Cremin cites some of her own work as ‘evidence’ for her assertions. Specifically, 11 of her own ‘poems’. These include stanzas such as this from a poem called ‘Postscript’:

Meet my eyes

Know my voice

I am

Researcher

Sharing songs

Walking with

Dancing through.

Should we not be persuaded by Professor Cremin’s own verse as proof of her wisdom, we are also treated to a passage where she advertises the virtue of ‘rebellious research’ – specifically an ‘expressive dance’ with an MPhil student in a workshop. The rebellious researchers ‘danced our academic trajectories’ in ‘a form of embodied conversation…circling around each other, moving in and away, connecting and disconnecting… [as we] expressed our hopes and fears for the future of academia’.

Reading this dreck, I certainly found my body reacting in its own distinctive way, reflecting my own hopes and fears for the future of academia.

Professor Cremin is not a junior research fellow feeling her way to an understanding of her discipline; nor is she Titania McGrath’s woker sister. She is the woman responsible for what those who are supposed to be our best teachers are themselves taught. And yet in her major published work she doesn’t just display ignorance, she flaunts and celebrates it. By dancing on the grave of learning.

Professor Cremin is not an isolated example. Certainly not in Cambridge, anyway. As Andrew Gilligan has reported for The Spectator’s website, one of the other Education Faculty academics, Farah Ahmed, has denounced ‘western education’ as a ‘threat’ to Muslims but has encouraged her co-religionists to make an exception for engineering ‘to produce advanced weaponry for Jihad’.

The screaming tragedy of this affair is that while Cambridge – and other university education faculties – are peddling this toxic nonsense, there are examples of how genuinely to transform the opportunities of working–class and ethnic minority children across the country which Cambridge and much of the rest of the educational establishment deride or ignore.

This month we have been able to compare the performance of schools across England, at A-level and GCSE. We can discern which schools are doing well. Those you might think it would be wise for institutions like Cambridge to celebrate and learn from.

There is a rich diet of data from which to draw. But perhaps the best single reference point is a measure known as Progress 8. It is the brainchild of the wonderful Lib Dem former schools minister David Laws and it analyses how much the educational performance of children has improved while in school – in crude terms, the value added. It looks at the level children have reached on entry to secondary school – their scores in tests at the end of primary school – and then records the progress of that cohort at age 16, after GCSEs have been taken.

It is fairer than looking just at A–level performance because many secondary schools have no sixth forms. And it is fairer than looking at GCSE results on their own, because it takes full account of the prior attainment of students. So schools with less well-educated or disadvantaged intakes have that challenge factored into the overall judgment.

It’s worth noting that we have this measure, and thus the ability to identify the best state schools in the country, only because we have Sats at the end of primary school and GCSE exams at age 16, both interventions which Professor Cremin and her allies in the teaching unions hate.

The school in England which performs best in Progress 8 measures is a state comprehensive in Wembley: the Michaela Community School. It is followed closely by Mercia School, another comprehensive in a working-class area of Sheffield, modelled directly on Michaela. Also in the top ten are sister comprehensives in Hackney: Mossbourne Victoria Park Academy and Mossbourne Community Academy. All serve poorer, multi-ethnic communities. All are non-selective in who they admit. All transform lives with performance at GCSE which transcends what many fee-paying independent schools are capable of.

One might hope that these schools and their leaders would be celebrated by professional associations, lauded by a left-wing government for the opportunities they are extending to working-class children and held up by the university education departments which train our teachers as the models to emulate.

But instead they are stigmatised, shamed and shunned. The teaching unions and school leader bodies which are supposed to fight for better educational outcomes are either scornful or embarrassed by these schools. Labour ministers mock or belittle. Those in higher education sneer and denounce. The achievements of Michaela’s headteacher, the inspirational Katharine Birbalsingh, are derided and attributed either to selection (which the school does not and cannot practise) or statistical legerdemain. Mossbourne Victoria Park has been targeted by teaching unions and left-wing activists precisely because it is successful, with anger directed in particular at its strict behaviour policy.

A calm and purposeful environment in which teachers can teach and pupils learn might seem a curious educational feature to find objectionable in a school. But that would be to misunderstand what drives the ideologues within our university education departments and their union allies. What unites so many of the schools which do best in the Progress 8 measurement is their belief in formal uniform, high standards of behaviour, academic rigour, regular testing, direct instruction with a didactic approach from teachers and an avoidance of the ‘group-based’ or ‘child-centred’ learning which the university teacher trainers believe in.

The success of these schools is a ringing, powerful, empirically sound and uncontestable refutation of all the theory and ideology to which Professor Cremin and her allies have devoted their careers. They hate these schools as the Magisterium hated Galileo – all their pretended authority is undone by the hard truth of proven evidence.

What makes this lesson urgent is that the cause which Professor Cremin and her allies affect to believe in – the liberation of the poorest and the marginalised – is advanced by the schools whose methods they abjure and whose leaders they scorn.

There is nothing base or ignoble, indeed there is an idealism and compassion, in wishing to give young people from communities scarred by prejudice additional help to succeed. There is everything to be said for asking how we might better help children living with autism or other disabilities get the best opportunities to flourish. It is both economically enlightened and ethically admirable to want to give students from our poorest backgrounds the best possible educational experience. That is what Katharine Birbalsingh does at Michaela, what happens at Mercia School and what they ensure occurs at both Mossbourne Academies. It is what the free schools, academies and other comprehensives do when they embrace traditional teaching methods, rigour in the curriculum and regular testing.

If we want to ensure that more young people from ethnic minorities, poor backgrounds or living with disabilities succeed then we need more schools like these. And if the government wants to know where to find the money, then I have a suggestion. Perhaps, when any future inquiry inevitablyconcludes that the Cambridge Education Faculty should be closed down, the funds liberated thereby could help?

Related:

Neil O'Brien on X - "It's not just "garbage" - bits of our universities have flipped from promoting knowledge and high standards to actively trying to destroy them. Via @michaelgove"

Marcus Walker on X - "The reputation of Britain’s universities will continue to collapse until this entire framework of thinking is driven out of them."

John Duffield on X - "Jason Arday's boss at Cambridge. No one as been held to account for the scandal & corruption of Arday's appointment. Until they are this story will not go away. Why the story ran & ran. It was not motivated out of personal spite towards Arday."

Eric Nelson on X - "My son was going to college to be a special ed teacher. A professor said it was colonialist to expect a journal article to contain empirical evidence. His classmates all agreed. He changed majors."