London Schools and The London Riots – Too Much Nanny State? – Katharine Birbalsingh

In 2011, The Sydney Institute instituted the Occasional Jim and Janette Bain Lecture to honour the contribution made by Jim and Janette Bain to the establishment of The Sydney Institute. In 1989, the Bains’ substantial donation to the Institute made possible important seed money that set The Sydney Institute on its successful path. Jim and Janette Bain have been important supporters of the Institute since that time. Jim Bain is the Institute’s Founding Patron. Executive Director of The Sydney Institute Gerard Henderson introduced the inaugural Bain lecture and thanked Jim and Janette Bain, which can be view here.To give the inaugural Jim and Janette Bain Occasional Lecture, The Sydney Institute invited UK educationist and author Katharine Birbalsingh to Australia. Katharine Birbalsingh is the author of To Miss With Love, a best selling novel that reveals many problems in the UK public school system. Ms Birbalsingh is also about to set up her own “Free School” in London. Katharine Birbalsingh addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 20 September 2011.

THE INAUGURAL JIM AND JANETTE BAIN LECTURE: “TO MISS WITH LOVE”

KATHARINE BIRBALSINGH

When I became a teacher, some twelve years ago in London, I genuinely believed that the only way one could make a difference to the underprivileged was to work for the state. I believed that state education stimulated social mobility.

But my time teaching in some of London’s inner-city schools has taught me much. I have seen things you would never believe. As every year ticked by, I became more and more frustrated with the lies we teachers were having to tell the public. We had to pretend that our schools were better than they were in order to trick parents into sending us their children. Ninety-three per cent of our children in Britain are educated in the state sector and there is a great divide between the private and state sectors.

The state sector is always trying to prove that they are just as good as the private sector, if not better. Because everyone knows deep down that this simply isn’t true. Let’s face it, British children are now rated 16th in the world for science, 25th for reading and 28th for maths, (all below Australia by the way) according to the 2009 PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) report. Yet, the 2000 PISA report ranked British children as 4th for science, 7th for reading and 8th for maths. We now spend over £80 billion a year (double what we spent in the 1990s) on education and yet British schoolchildren have plummeted in the international league tables.

So I wrote a book, To Miss with Love, with the intention of it being published anonymously because I knew just how dangerous it was to speak the truth. But then, before publication, I spoke at the Conservative Party conference in October 2010 about our broken education system, revealing some of my thoughts on what I believe needs fixing. As a British teacher recently told me, there was nothing I said in the speech that teachers don’t say everyday in staffrooms across the country. We simply aren’t allowed to say it out loud. The state school system literally prevents its teachers from speaking their minds.

The riots in London did not come as a surprise to British teachers. We have not only been predicting that kind of general chaos for years, but we experience it on a daily basis in our schools. We have many Australian travelling teachers who enter our school system as supply teachers. Generally, they are shocked by what they see and experience in our classrooms. It is the same for German, French or Spanish teachers. The only visiting teachers who are used to our behaviour problems and low standards are those who come from the American inner cities. And riots, of course, are not unfamiliar to them. The difference between the American and British school systems is that the international community knows just how bad American schooling can be. But Britain still lives off its old reputation as the mother country, leading the commonwealth and its empire in all that is true and good.

But the real truth is that not only does the state in Britain tie teachers’ hands, but it does the same to parents, resulting in a breakdown of authority both in our schools and in our homes.  Some parents try desperately to bring their children up properly and struggle. I have spent my career meeting parents who are brought to tears because of their unruly teenagers. Some say that they cannot discipline their children because their children threaten to call the police and cry abuse. Every time their child misbehaves, rather than being able to discipline them appropriately, they remember their neighbour or their friend or their cousin who was handcuffed in their own house and hauled away by the police, their children put into social care for a night all because of some made-up story.

I remember one Jamaican woman pleading with me in school, desperately wanting to discipline her daughter but the parenting classes she was attending at the local council suggested she use more praise. She said to me, “But how can I always be praising her when she gets so much wrong?” The “prizes for all culture” doesn’t just exist in our schools. It is endemic in our society to a point where not only do we not question it, but those who have old-school values are forced to conform to the “gold stars for everyone” mantra dictated by the state.

The same thing happens at school. The bad children are constantly receiving prizes simply for remaining quiet or for turning up on time. The teachers, in order to win round the bad children, are taught by their line managers and teacher training institutions that praise is what is needed to motivate children. So we all use it to saturation point, devaluing the worth of the gold star. Meanwhile, the good children, who are left in the dark because no one notices become bad in an effort to gain some attention.

The cool gangster lifestyle that these children have pumped into their minds 6 to 7 hours per day from MTV takes over. Their understanding of “success” is not marriage, a job and a couple of kids. It is cars, women and bling. Our bookshops were not looted, and if you didn’t have a sports or mobile phone shop on your High Street, you knew your community was probably safe. Who allows our children to watch so much MTV? The very parents who are exhausted because their children are spiralling out of control and yet are told by the local council they should use more praise, or the single parents, encouraged to stay single by the state with promises of free flats and welfare cheques.

The schools struggle to keep order, partly because of the low standards of the education system but also because teachers are encouraged to constantly do group work and entertain the children. Children must never be bored, and if they are, or if they disrupt, it is the teacher’s fault. Children are never held to account for what they do. Is it any wonder that some of them decided to show the police that they were in charge and went out looting?

State schools ought to promote social mobility. They should not simply perpetuate the class system and ensure that those who go to private schools are taught well, and only those taught in leafy suburb middle-class state schools stand a chance of a half-decent education. Unfortunately a number of people with power believe that the way to improve education for our children is to ban tradition from our classrooms – stop being so fuddy duddy and appeal to children by making things more “fun”.

We believe it is unfashionable to have desks in rows and so some schools actually ban traditional rows in favour of always having desks in groups. Some schools abandon the more traditional academic subjects altogether and do not teach them at all. In an effort to raise their standing in the league tables, schools will have children take Drama, PE, or Media Studies, abandoning History, Physics or French to do so, and our so-called progressive thinkers rejoice saying that these subjects are more suited to certain children. It is funny how the children these subjects suit are never their own.

The tradition of competition which we celebrate in the world of sport has become unfashionable in the academic classroom and innovation requires that children never be given grades and are never allowed to know where they stand in comparison to their peers. Tradition in education has become a dirty word and is reserved for the elite while innovation is what is given to the poor.

The irony is that the rejection of all that is traditional comes from people who were themselves beneficiaries of a very traditional education but remembering some of their classes at school as being boring, are now trying to reform the education system for these kids to make it more interesting. So they can be very well meaning people. Richard Branson who famously dropped out of school at 15, thinks schools overeducate children, and stunt the early sparks of entrepreneurship. But what Branson forgets is that he had the most traditional of educations – having been educated at one of Britain’s top private schools and yet he is the most extraordinary entrepreneur. Branson underestimates just how much his education has contributed to his success. What Branson was able to take away at age 15 from school, far outstrips the standard of education that some of our youngsters are currently accessing even at university level. Some of our university degrees are the equivalent in standard to what children used to do at age 15 in school in the 1970s. Branson would probably find these degrees ludicrously easy.

General thinking around school being boring makes it possible for us to have reached a stage where teachers are no longer expected to teach and instead they must be “facilitators of learning” with constant group work going on, where the teacher is rarely standing in front of the class, but instead moves amongst the children who are all busy doing something. The idea here is that “doing” is more interesting than “listening”. And that might very well be true. But the problem comes when we think that ‘doing’ needs to happen most of the time. This means that the teacher, a great source of knowledge, almost becomes redundant as a fountain of knowledge and instead, becomes a bit of a referee. We don’t value the importance of teaching knowledge for the children to then do something with. Innovation is considered to be only “doing” – a complete rejection of all that is traditional.

The problem is that we all underestimate the knowledge that we have and use everyday. Try to read any article in the newspaper and you’ll find that there is an assumption of background knowledge. Recently, I read an article about Carla Bruni. To understand just the title and subtitle, one would have to know who she was, that she is married to Nicholas Sarkozy and you’d have to know that he was the president of France, what being a president means, and indeed you would have to know what France is – is it a city? Is it a country? Is it in Europe? You may laugh, but I have, as a teacher had conversations with 14 year olds where they simply don’t understand the difference between France and Paris. For them, it is all the same! I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had conversations with kids about Winston Churchill where they think he’s ‘that dog’ off the insurance advert from TV.

Ordinary people don’t realise just how little some of our kids know. What we also forget is that the very thing that got us to where we are now, was the kind of education that we had – our teachers actually teaching us knowledge, so that we know the difference between Paris and France, us sometimes being bored in lessons and learning the discipline to struggle through – how many people in business clinch a deal because they know the soft skills of being polite, know how to sit through a boring lecture, and are able to concentrate enough to still pick up what is necessary to impress the client? It is through the study of tough rigorous academic subjects that soft skills are often acquired.

Traditional educations are not bad. And most of the progressives encouraging this nonsense in our schools have benefited from one themselves. In other words they climb the ladder to the top and then unwittingly pull the ladder up from under them.

So in the last 30 years, the concept of teaching knowledge in our classrooms has nearly disappeared altogether. Teaching historical facts or lists of vocabulary which rely on memory skills is considered old-fashioned. Instead, we think it better to inspire children to be creative through group discussion and project work. But background knowledge is absolutely essential to enable children to capture new ideas. For instance, when cars were first invented, they were called horseless carriages. So to understand the new concept of a car, one had to have knowledge of horses and carriages, and the idea of something being “less” something else. In fact, modern neuroscience has shown that in order to grasp new concepts, pupils require a great deal of background knowledge.

As background knowledge is provided unequally in different homes, it is our duty in schools to level out the playing field. In some homes, children are lucky enough to have tutors employed, conversations over dinner about the day’s news events, and as such, they can pick up facts about history, geography as they go. But instead of ensuring that ALL of our children should have access to that knowledge in school, we turn away from knowledge acquisition which is considered boring and teach skills like being empathetic or forming a point of view through what is a very seductive and seemingly better way of teaching. It seems more “fun” and the progressives like the idea of finally breaking free from the restriction of their own educational backgrounds.

So putting desks in rows in considered archaic, rote-learning is abandoned completely, even the idea of classrooms having walls is rejected – encouraging chaos all around – and our children quite literally are leaving school without basic knowledge in subjects like English, Maths, and History. A recent study from the university of Sheffield showed that 17 per cent of the children leaving school in Britain are functionally illiterate. Schools, quite simply, need classrooms. And classrooms, in turn, require walls. When I first told my father that we were spending billions of pounds on schools building walless classrooms, he was baffled. You see, he grew up in poverty-stricken Guyana where he went to a school that had no walls because they couldn’t afford them! So for us to now spend billions recreating what the developing world is trying to move away from, seems like lunacy. But that’s exactly what we’re doing!

If we want to equip our children with the power to change the world, they must first have knowledge of it and understand it. Unfortunately the “progressives” think that somehow knowledge is right wing and boring. But this is simply not true. What makes Tony Benn, the well known British socialist who has campaigned against injustice all over the world, such a great speaker, or what gave Ian Flemming such a creative mind that he should create James Bond? What ensured that Winston Churchill would be an inspirational leader, moving back and forth between the Liberal and Conservative parties? What ensured that Obama would be the first black American president? Their very traditional educations! Thomas Jefferson had a classical education but was so forward thinking that he signed the declaration of independence and Mark Zuckerberg is obsessed with Classics but is the founder of the transformational and innovative Facebook! What made these people into successes was the traditional educations that they had, the inspirational teachers who taught them, the love of learning that they picked up with their walled classrooms, desks in rows, with the teacher teaching at the front.

Traditional education in Britain these days is reserved only for the rich. Yet, tradition is what has given us our most explosive revolutionaries. Stokely Carmichael who led the Black Panthers and was a major player in the Civil Rights movement in America dropped gang life, so inspired was he at his Science specialist school and so busy was he reading Darwin and Marx. Mandela went to an elite Methodist mission school. Revolutions are created with traditional thinking. That doesn’t mean you can’t ever do any type of group work, or can’t ever go onto a computer. But it should not be a fight to have a school system where our poorest children should have access to an education that includes knowledge-acquisition, competition, a non-prizes for all culture, high standards of behaviour, in an environment where everyone reaches for the very best.

This is where I believe there could be a real role for free schools in our inner cities in Britain. Our Conservative government has brought out these new proposals, copying the free school movement in Sweden and the Charter school movement in America. This month, our first batch of free schools opened – there were 24 of them. As free schools are free to do what is best for their children and do not have their hands tied behind their backs by the state, they are able to reject the cultural pressure that is felt in some of our ordinary state schools, and do something different. They are free to provide children with the tradition that is found in our better private schools. They can offer an extended day, lessons that are about knowledge acquisition, and competition to drive up standards. They can provide classrooms with desks in rows and they can offer the more traditional subjects – and by this I don’t mean Latin necessarily – I simply mean the opportunity to do Spanish, or History or the chance to study Biology, Chemistry and Physics as separate subjects. The tradition of benchmarking children can be upheld, standing at assembly and holding high standards for uniform and behaviour can simply become part of the norm. In fact, bringing traditional thinking of this kind is to trailbraize and indeed be innovative. How wonderful it is that the free school movement should allow individuals in any community, to take responsibility, to know what issues face their particular community and to have the freedom to set up a school that can do something positive and new.

So I am trying to set up a free school in the depths of south London to do exactly what I say is needed, and educate these children in such a way so that riots like the ones we witnessed last month will not happen again. The ordinary people of south London – the poor, the single-parent families – are desperate for another choice of school in the area, because there aren’t enough school places and they know how generally awful the schools are. Yet there are those from the National Union of Teachers and the Socialist Workers Party who oppose us. There are those – and it has to be said, they are the middle classes – people who can afford to make up for their state school’s issues by employing tutors at home –  who want to stop free schools from opening because they hate the idea of individuals taking away responsibilities and power from the state.

The only way our poorest children can succeed is for them to receive the same quality of education as our richest. They need the privilege of a traditional education – the type of education that most of us, it not all of us in this room have been lucky enough to have had. There is a quote that I love which sums up what I am saying: The education that is best for the best is the education that is best for all. Why did the riots happen? Because 17 per cent of our young people are functionally illiterate and do not know the difference between right and wrong. Because the education that is best for the best is kept only for the very few.

I only wish that these problems were confined to Britain. But I believe that in the West, these trends are to be found everywhere, and no doubt in Australia too. I was on Lateline last night and several Australian teachers wrote to me afterwards via my website to tell me that they see the same trends here. Of course, some countries, like the UK, are simply more advanced in their decline. My advice to all of you is to learn from our mistakes in Britain. Do not go down the trendy and very tempting route of believing that all that glistens is gold. I believe in conservative values precisely because they conserve what is traditional. If Australia learns from the hideous mistakes that Britain has made, I am certain that the old-school values that we have lost in Britain will ensure your country’s future success.

*****

OPENING REMARKS BY GERARD HENDERSON

In late 1986 I was working as chief-of-staff for John Howard, the then leader of the Opposition.  A personal letter arrived from Jim Bain, whom I knew as the managing partner of Bain & Co and whom I had occasion to meet in John Howard’s office.

Jim’s message was straightforward and short – a feature of his written and spoken communications.  He had taken over as chairman of an old public policy institute which was in its death throes – and he was looking for someone who could be executive director with a view to reviving the organisation.  I agreed to meet Jim for lunch – at what is now the Sofitel Wentworth Hotel. To cut a long story short, I said I would be willing to take the job myself.

There was only one understanding.  I would work hard.  And Jim and Janette Bain would make a substantial personal financial contribution for three years – 1987, 1988 and 1989.  Then the situation would be re-assessed.

When I commenced as the institute’s head in January 1987 in Young Street, on the site of what is now Governor Phillip Tower, we did not have money to survive the first year.  But, within months, support – both financial and in terms of membership – increased.  In January 1987, Les Hollings asked me to write a weekly column for The Australian – he was the paper’s editor-in-chief. I moved to the Sydney Morning Herald three years later.  Les Hollings became deputy chairman to Jim at the old institute.  Les was emphatic that the institute should not interfere in any way with the content of my column – it never did and it never has.

In 1987 and 1988 the institute did relatively well.  So much so that our board decided that we should go our own way – with a new name to reflect our new standing as a policy forum devoted to debate and discussion, where a plurality of views would be heard and subsequently published.

Jim Bain, Jim Creer, Noel Foley, Les Hollings and Phil Scanlan – among others – were involved in closing down the old institute and opening up The Sydney Institute.  Jim did not continue as chairman of the new institute but remained as a strong supporter – he even rented rooms in our office for some years.  The Sydney Institute was born on 31 March 1989 and we moved into our current office at 41 Phillip Street on 1 July 1989.  Anne Henderson commenced on that date – and the frenetic activity that has come to be associated with The Sydney Institute commenced around this time.  Jim and Janette Bain have attended every one of our annual dinners over the years.

Over two decades have passed since then and The Sydney Institute has achieved quite extraordinary name recognition for what is, in reality, a small organisation.  We could not have survived all these years without our corporate supporters, associate members and the one thousand or more speakers who have addressed our public forums – from prime ministers to a young female university student who spoke about her book on anorexia.

But, above all, we could not have made it without the initial support, encouragement and generosity of Jim and Janette Bain.  At a recent Annual Dinner/Lecture, our chairman Nick Johnson announced that we would be establishing a Jim and Janette Bain Occasional Lecture – for which we would invite someone from overseas to talk about a matter of public importance.

The team at The Sydney Institute is most grateful that Katharine Birbalsingh accepted the invitation to deliver the Inaugural Jim and Janette Bain Lecture on the topic “London Education and the London Riots”.  Many thanks to Qantas for flying Ms Birbalsingh to Australia.  Thanks also to the Four Seasons Hotel. And special thanks again to Jim and Janette Bain on this special occasion.