Jim contemplates financial savings from abolishing the DfES

 

I’m in the middle of assignment-writing for a management and leadership PgDip programme at the moment and, just as I advise my own students to do, I’m taking plenty of ‘reward’ breaks as I work. One of them became more of a ‘Busgirl’s teabreak’ as I switched on the telly and found an episode of ‘Yes, Prime Minister’ playing – the one about education in which Jim Hacker shocks Sir Humphrey by proposing to abolish the Department of Education and Science, giving control of the education budget directly to schools. “What does it actually do?” he asked of the hapless civil servant… and yes, of course, it got me thinking (and totally sidetracked, by the way) about our situation here in Scotland. What do we actually need Fiona Hyslop and her vast crew of advisers and mandarins for and how much better could the cost of this be spent ? Hacker’s solution was to hand over statutory functions and frameworks to the Environment department and local government and let schools handle the rest. And I think there may be something in this. Money follows the pupils so would this give school managers greater autonomy on budgets, expansion plans, pupil numbers, curriculum issues and availability ? After all, it works for the private school sector…

Seriously though, do we actually need these behemoth organisations and departments? Whilst the SQA and LTS do some great work, could the schools use the money spent on maintaining them in better ways to expand the services they provide to their customers – pupils and parents? And maybe local government education departments should be subjected to such an examination as well. I suppose the argument, in purely market terms is that any money spent on anything other than pupils is suspect. Ok, that supposes the philosophical stance that education is a business, but should we really be so resistant to that idea?

Take the SQA for example. Is there really a need for a national body devising, controlling, and administering a raft of qualifications or could schools actually do the job better? – as they do in Finland, for example…

I saw how it works there when visiting Helsinki earlier this year on a study visit. There, the end of compulsory education is marked by internal assessment of an individual students curriculum as well as self-assessment of the school’s performance. Students than have three options. They can move into ‘Upper secondary’ schools to study for higher education. This takes the form of non-class based study in a variety of chosen subjects. No year groups, just study modules. They can complete this in 2-4 years, gaining an upper secondary leaving certificate which entitles them to take the university matriculation exam to study their chosen subject to degree level and beyond.

If this is not for them, other students can opt for basic vocational education over three years. This is a mixture of college and work-based training offering 30 different qualifications in various areas of work. Again, in house assessment here. The students can also do a ‘dual qualification’ in conjunction with an upper secondary school. Courses are tailored to what the student actually wants rather than in other countries where you have to fit the existing model. The other option for school leavers is apprenticeship training which is mainly employer-based but includes some off the job instruction  at vocational education colleges. Over 5000 school leavers in Helsinki alone choose this route each year which leads to a trade qualification assessed by the employer, and they can even get a ‘euro pass’ which allows them to do part of their training in other countries.

So compulsory education followed by many options, to suit the learner not the system and not a national qualification’s body in sight. We are fond of ‘benchmarking’ ourselves against the Finns, and the PISA rankings speak volumes about the success of their education system, where they trust individual schools and teachers to assess and advise young people according to their individual needs. Could this be a model for us here in Scotland? Should we bite the bullet and get rid of our outdated qualifications system so fixated, as it is, towards churning out university academics rather than equipping young people with the skills they need as individuals rather than examination hall canon-fodder?  And just think how we could invest the money saved from the demise of the national examination body – in schools, expanding the curriculum to suit the demands of today’s skills-based society..

Don Ledingham has recently proposed some radical and innovative curriculum models..

http://edubuzz.org/blogs/donsblog/2008/09/05/imagining-a-secondary-school-curriculum-for-excellence-in-east-lothian/#comment-11413

 Could the Finnish model be a way of paying for his proposals? and do we have the moral conviction and responsibility to ask these questions and examine such proposals? Should we be asking more of ‘what does it actually do’  type questions ?

Time will tell…