Creative Schools review – we need to call time on exam-factory education

^‘Our school systems are now a matrix of organisational rituals and intellectual habits that do not adequately reflect the great variety of talents of the students who attend them. Because they conflict with these systems, too many students think that they are the problem; that they are not intelligent, or must have difficulties in learning.”

Ken Robinson’s thesis is compelling: we are currently operating a Fordist model of mass education that is failing to prepare young people for the dramatic socioeconomic demands of the digital age. What is more worrying is that politicians, rather than supporting a schools system with the flexibility and innovation obviously needed, have fallen for a theology of standardised testing and assessment that is exacerbating the crisis.

Robinson wants a revolution in education, “based on different principles from those of the standards movement”. And he wants us – you – to be the change. “The best place to start thinking about how to change education is exactly where you are in it. If you change the experiences of education for those you work with, you become part of a wider, more complex process of change in education as whole.”

Robinson is, of course, a change-maker himself. He might have achieved international acclaim for his 2006 TED talk, “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” (now viewed by an estimated 300 million people worldwide), but for more than 40 years he has persuasively made the case for more creativity in teaching and the curriculum, as a teacher, government adviser, examiner and academic. Creative Schools brings together this classroom experience and policy ardour in an elegant, powerfully written manifesto for change. And if the book occasionally suffers from an overdose of education conference keynote-ese – the need for “curiosity, criticism, communication, collaboration”; the importance of “diversity, depth, dynamism” – its informed, avuncular style and unexpected accounts of inspiring teachers more than make up for it.

The book is part of a growing public discourse on education policy aimed at a data-and-ideas-hungry readership of helicopter parents, engaged practitioners and school innovators. There are Doug Lemov and Pasi Sahlberg on teaching, Paul Tough on character, Andrew Adonis on school reform, Anastasia de Waal on selection, Paul Marshall on closing the attainment gap. Then there are the blogs, Twitter feeds, Teach-Meets and EdTech geeks. Add to that the controversies around international comparisons: Swedish free schools versus Finnish teaching; New Orleans charter schools versus Singapore curriculum reforms.

And it is all to be welcomed. The more we discuss education, the better. Not least because such conversations help to highlight the tricky 40-year gap between where policymakers think schooling should be heading (preparing for society 20 years hence) and what the majority of the public thinks schools should be doing (their own halcyon days 20 years past). The role of politicians is to seek, consensually and pragmatically, to bridge that divide.

But Robinson’s point is that politicians are doing exactly the opposite: scarred by the media reporting of the Pisa international league tables on school performance, they have retreated into a self-defeating cul-de-sac of testing and assessment. As a result, we are at risk of inculcating an industrial education system producing compliant, linear pupils. “The emphasis on testing comes at the expense of teaching children how to employ their natural creativity and entrepreneurial talents – the precise talents that might insulate them against the unpredictability of the future in all parts of the world.”

The prescription is a richer personalisation of learning – an appreciation of the diversity of intelligence; the need to adapt teaching schedules to different learning speeds; a flexibility that allows learners to pursue their interests and strengths; and a different model of assessment. And, as expected, a strong dose of arts education as an essential component of schooling. Through a catalogue of test cases – teaching Shakespeare in LA’s Koreatown; transforming schools in North Carolina under the A+ arts programme – Robinson shows how taking the arts seriously is particularly rewarding for high-poverty, inner-urban districts. Time and again, the arts engage students and raise standards.

If, occasionally, Robinson gets a bit too Californian – with his call for “organic education” and extensive flirtation with home-schooling – his driving critique of the “exam factory” model of schooling is well worth reflecting on. Because, in recent years, English schooling has had too much teaching to the test, too much focus on C/D borderline, too many early and multiple entries for examinations. Yet the uncomfortable truth is that there are also large swaths of the English education system that require more not less uniformity. If all our pupils could reach some basic minimum standards of literacy and numeracy by the time they left primary schools, our educational attainment as a nation would be markedly higher. Similarly, we need much greater consistency in the professional development and training of teachers.

As much as Robinson decries them, this is the clarifying force of comparisons such as the Pisa tables: they show how young people in Poland and Germany, let alone Shanghai and Singapore, are more advanced in many essential subjects and skills. Robinson rightly makes the case for the rigour of creative learning – “creativity in any field may involve deep factual knowledge and high levels of practical skill” – but we always need to guard against the soft bigotry of low expectations: the worrying trend of play and expression being adequate for working-class pupils, while leaving the tough stuff, the physics and history, for their better-off peers.

What I took from Robinson’s impassioned work is the never-ending need for innovation in education. Project-based learning, flipped classrooms, personalised curricula – all of this is starting to reshape education and the role of teachers. We need to embrace all the exciting, uncomfortable possibilities offered by digital technology. What’s more, no education system exceeds the strength of its teachers. Their ambition, professionalism and subject knowledge are the key variables. “It doesn’t matter how detailed the curriculum is or how expensive the tests are; the real key to transforming education is the quality of teaching.” The structure of a school is markedly less significant than an effective head teacher, a faculty which embraces change, and quality professional development.

We need to call time on the exam-factory model, ensure a broad and balanced curriculum in our schools, and focus on improving teaching rather than fruitlessly reforming school structures – not only because a childhood at school should be a rich, enjoyable and challenging time; but also because the coming economy demands exactly the kind of rigorous creativity and personal resilience that Robinson advocates.