Learning

In my whole life there have only been eight years during which I have not had some involvement with schools, and education generally. I first went to school age 4, and for 4 years worked as an assistant sound recordist in television. In the remaining 66 years, while I only taught in schools for six years, I have talked with hundreds of teachers and visited scores of schools. I’ve talked with education policy makers, headteachers and school advisers and inspectors. I’ve seen my own children go through school with varied success and talked to other parents of their children’ experiences. And these last few years I have talked to quite a lot of children in schools, as an ICT Mark Assessor and E-Safety Mark Assessor.

I think this gives me the credentials to write about where schools are developing in helpful ways, and where they are not.

I am sorry for all who work in education, or have children or grandchildren going through schools and universities, but my overall assessment is that certainly here in the UK, and very likely in a lot of other developed countries, the school system is broken. The arrival of the connected world and children having their own personal smartphones is shining a bright light on just how broken most schools are. Over the last seven or eight years I have had the joy of working closely with a few schools that can see how they need to change. But this has also illustrated just how trapped they are by the education system, and particularly the assessment and accountability regimes the government insists on. The majority of schools and almost all the politicians and policy makers don’t appear to realise how far astray from a sensible and useful purpose schools now are.

Now in 2020/21 the pandemic is exposing how far detached from young people need schools and the curriculum actually are.


See www.broadieassociates.co.uk for more of my thoughts about learning.