THE FUTURE FOR A DIFFERENT EDUCATION

The Future for a Different Education

Today, the new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, announced that from 2028 fourteen-year-olds will be able to follow new technical education pathways in our schools, combining core academic subjects with practical skills and work experience linked to jobs in their own communities. He declared that Britain should "value the hard hat every bit as much as the graduation cap." In my opinion, after five decades of teaching, this is a welcome recognition of something we once knew, and foolishly threw away.

When I heard this announcement on breakfast television this morning, I confess I was shocked, not because the idea is new, but because it is not. It is precisely what I have been saying, writing, and sending to others for some thirty years, and it is what I have set down in my books. It is the education I received myself at Great Yarmouth Technical High School. I do not expect recognition for having argued this long before it became fashionable; those of us who did so were, for many years, simply not listened to. What matters is not who said it first, but that children will once again be taught to use their hands and to make things. That, for me, is a wonderful thing to hear.

Many parents and teachers now appear to support a stronger movement towards technical education, and in my opinion it should always have remained an important part of the school curriculum. Changes in education over recent decades have discouraged schoolchildren from taking risks in case they fall or get hurt, and this has weakened one of the most valuable parts of a child's learning.

As an education consultant, I hope that this Government will have the fairness and intelligence to recognise how much education has changed. Education should include not only academic learning, but also physical education, technical education, and practical forms of learning. Children have been discouraged from using even the simplest skills of their hands and feet for fear that they may come to harm. Parents, both at home and through their schools, should encourage children to get their hands dirty and to value a far wider range of activities than football alone. A much better education can be created by looking again at the model provided fifty years ago by the technical high schools, which offered children a curriculum of gold.

I speak from experience. I was one of a family of nine children, and we all attended excellent State schools in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, when the assessment system was known as the School Certificate and covered five subjects. In my opinion, the standard of teaching in those years was considerably higher than it is today.

Consider my brother, Professor Harold Thomas Arthur Whiting. He attended Stalham Grammar School in Norfolk before being called up to serve in the RAF, and later studied at Loughborough College of Physical Education. He built and repaired his own canoes and paddles, helped to build his own home with friends from that same school, and developed practical skills across many subjects. He went on to achieve BA, BSc, MA, MSc, and PhD degrees, became a teacher, and rose to become a senior professor at a Dutch university. That is what an education of hand, body, and mind can produce.

State education, including the technical high schools, was far stronger in those days. Teachers were genuinely pushed to the limits of their abilities, not only academically, but in the practical and physical disciplines taught at my own school, Great Yarmouth Technical High School, where equal importance was given to academic, practical, and physical education alike.

The curriculum of my school years included building, metalwork, lathing, woodwork, bricklaying, cookery, archery, athletics for all, gymnastics for all, camping, swimming, fencing, pottery, knitting, darning, washing clothes, and even the cleaning of our own classrooms and a great deal more besides. The teachers of these subjects were held in the same regard as those who taught the academic ones. They were respected because they taught children to make things, and to understand the worth of what they had made.

The press reports that school leaders have welcomed the ambition of the Prime Minister's announcement while asking for greater clarity on detail and funding, and it is right that they should. But I would say this to the Government: you do not need to invent this system. It existed. The technical high schools of my youth delivered precisely the parity between the academic and the practical that Mr Burnham now promises, and they delivered it magnificently. If this reform is to succeed, those who design it should study what those schools achieved fifty years ago and have the humility to learn from them.

Graeme E. B. Whiting — Founder of The Acorn School and three other schools; headmaster for four decades; academic tutor, consultant, and author.