Infrastructure for knowledge

(c) Avolore

The academic year is underway once more and the Labour party have been quick to sing their own praises with regard to the UK’s education system. Four hundred new and refurbished schools have opened their doors this year (one even had the honour of the PM himself snipping the tape), which takes the running total to nearly 4,000 since Labour came to power in 1997.

According to Ed Balls, Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families: “Schools in England have had the biggest sustained investment in facilities for decades – with an eightfold real terms rise between 1997 and 2011 alone. Around 4,000 schools and tens of thousands of classrooms have been newly built, rebuilt or largely refurbished thanks to our £53 billion of capital investment over the last 12 years.”

There have certainly been large investments in education but the extent to which this automatically produces good academic standards remains to be seen. Whilst there’s been the usual seasonal increase in examination results, there is still much disquiet about how these results are achieved, with teachers, parents and other political parties accusing Labour’s education system of being dumbed-down in order to produce politically motivated statistics.

This criticism seems to fly by unnoticed by Ed Balls, however, who says: “A world-class education system needs world-class facilities – that’s exactly what we are delivering. This is the largest sustained capital investment in schools for decades – giving parents, teachers and pupils outstanding classroom, music and sports facilities; transforming their aspirations and driving up standards.”

It is surprising to note though that with so much controversy over the quality of examinations that the main political thrust of the major parties is on infrastructure and the ability of teachers. The curriculum itself, which constitutes the very facts of education, is woefully forgotten in the current fad of expenditure and cut-back debates.

The Conservative position seems to vary little from their opposite numbers across the Commons. They wish to build new schools, improve discipline and “ensure more teaching by ability” (what this actually means remains to be seen). Although they also wish to shift the balance of power away from the government and into the hands of parents and “reform the testing regime”, there is very little substance in their policy in regard to the very stuff that is being taught.

Whilst anyone would be hard pushed to deny that the UK’s children are over-tested and consequentially educated in test passing, not conceptual knowledge, these are surely the results of a long-term political slide. A school may have the finest facilities in the world, the most enlightened teachers and the best behaved children but this is no guarantee of a “world-class education system”.

Constantly tinkering and changing infrastructure disrupts the very process of learning. This country’s ability to deliver education to the vast majority of children has been largely successful over the years, yet this is the area deemed by major politics to be at the root of the system’s problems. The minority of children who slip through the system are used as the standard for this change and the majority, who attend regularly, are forgotten. The real issue at hand for education, that of quality of knowledge and information, appears totally forgotten.