How to make school work for working-class students
E-Book, Englisch, 220 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-78583-703-6
Verlag: Crown House Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Matt Bromley is an education writer and advisor with over twenty years' experience in teaching and leadership including as a secondary school headteacher, FE college vice principal, and multi-academy trust director. Matt is a journalist, public speaker, ITT lecturer, and school improvement advisor. He also remains a practising teacher, working in secondary, FE and HE settings. Matt writes for various magazines, is the author of numerous best-selling books on education, and co-hosts the award-winning SecEd podcast.
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Weitere Infos & Material
Introduction
Why should you read this book?
To answer this question, let’s pose another: why do you work in education? And don’t say it is for the money. Sure, we all need to earn a crust to cover the mortgage and feed the children, but let’s be honest: there are easier ways of paying the bills than working in a school. So, why don’t you do one of those easier things? Why did you decide to go into teaching? What is your purpose? Your raison d’être? If, like us, you decided to enter the teaching profession – or work in another role in the education sector – to ‘make a difference’, then what difference did you hope to make, and why was that important to you? More pointedly, perhaps, do you feel you have made a difference? We will share our personal stories with you shortly and explain our raisons d’être, but, for now, let’s assume that all of us went into teaching to help change lives. For some, that might have been by equipping students with a love of your subject as well as good qualification outcomes. For others, it might have been to help the least fortunate in society – the most disadvantaged and vulnerable – to have a fair chance and to ensure that a child’s birth doesn’t become their destiny. In whatever way you intended to change lives, has it worked? Do you feel a sense of achievement? There can be no greater feeling, professionally speaking, than knowing you have helped a young person to fulfil their potential and leave school more able to compete and succeed in life than when they started school. We have experienced this feeling several times in our careers, and it is what continues to drive us now. We both come from working-class backgrounds and were economically disadvantaged as children. That is why our purpose in writing this book has a very personal resonance. It is also why, predominantly, we support schools in deprived areas and help disadvantaged students. But we also feel certain that we could have done more to help working-class students like us to succeed in school and then in life. Furthermore, we feel that more action is needed now than was the case when we were at school because disadvantage and the causes of disadvantage have got much worse since ‘our day’. Far from ‘levelling up’, successive UK governments since 2010 have made the gaps between rich and poor, privileged and disadvantaged, wider and therefore social mobility more difficult. Our intention, then, is to help you make more of a difference more of the time. To achieve this, we will draw on the research evidence, although we don’t want the text to be a heavy read. Rather, we want it to be practical and easy to dip into when help and advice are needed most. We will also draw on our own experiences of working in and supporting schools in challenging circumstances, including working directly with working-class students and their parents. Our main argument is this: working-class students are disadvantaged by the education system, not by accident but by design. As such, those of us who work in the education sector must do something – and urgently – to address the situation. We simply cannot stand by and let the class and wealth divide continue to grow. We cannot continue to live in a society and work in schools where wealth and social status, rather than ability and effort, dictate educational attainment and success in later life. It is immoral and indefensible. It angers us and inspires us to do more. We need to be deliberate in how we design our core curriculum, how we plan and target curriculum interventions, how we design curriculum enhancements, and how we train staff and interact with parents and other stakeholders. We also argue that, while classism exists in society at large, not just in schools, the UK education system is rigged to fail a third of students. We don’t think our society can afford for this to continue; it is a waste of resources, and it perpetuates poverty and social exclusion. While all of this is somewhat depressing, we firmly believe that education can be a powerful tool for change and that schools can help to create a more equitable society. We can and must do something. The Working Classroom explores some practical ways that schools can mitigate some of the effects of classism and help working-class students to get a better start in life, so that ability and effort, not where you are born and how much money you inherit, dictate success in school and in later life. Why have we written this book?
We both have very personal reasons for wanting to write this book. Our stories are what drive us, and our histories are what brought us together with a common purpose, not just to say something but to do something. We would like to start by sharing those stories with you, not as some self-indulgent act of naval gazing, but as a way to explain why the subject matters so much to us, and as a means of exploring some of the issues we intend to address. We discuss the power of story in Lesson 3, so it seems apt to start by telling our own. Matt’s story
I was born and brought up in a depressed northern town in the shadow of dark satanic mills and disappointment. My family and I lived in a terraced house in a row which stuck out from the valley side like needles on a hedgehog’s back. And life was just as spiky. My childhood, although happy, was one of hand-me-downs and making do. And my primary school – in the days before ‘serious weaknesses’ and ‘special measures’ had become the de facto vocabulary of educational failure – was what we used to call ‘shit’. When I wasn’t pretending to paint while surreptitiously sneaking a peak at the page 3 model on the newsprint laid out to protect the tables, I sat cross-legged on a threadbare carpet while the teacher strummed his guitar and sang 1960s songs. (And yes, dear reader, he closed his eyes when he hit the chorus.) As a result, when I transferred schools aged 9, I was unable to construct a sentence. It was only thanks to a determined and dedicated Year 5 teacher who inspired a love of reading that I caught up with my peers. This story, like all good stories, I suppose, was repeated years later when my Year 9 teacher – an inspirational writer and poet who had lived in Peru and taught me how to bet on horses – recognised and nurtured my talent for writing. This tale was told once more when my A level English literature teacher – a fierce and frightening man, hump-backed like Richard III, but one of extraordinary talent who ignited my love of Shakespeare – set me on a path to university. You know how the story goes: I was the first in my family to get to university and lucky enough to be awarded a full grant at a time when the state recognised its duty to educate all, not just those born to privilege. But my grant didn’t go far, barely covering course fees and accommodation, so I worked round the clock – stuffing envelopes for a bank and being sworn at on a complaints line – to pay for books and stationery and food and drink. Mainly drink. On the last day of my first year, I was badly injured playing football and had my right foot set in plaster. I was instructed by A&E to keep my leg elevated and rest for three weeks. Had I followed these instructions, I would be able to walk without pain today, nearly thirty years later. But I had no option: I simply had to work if I was going to afford to return to my studies. Consequently, I walked on crutches to and from the bus stop every day that summer. I took as much overtime as I could get, working seven days a week. And I have lived with the consequences every day since; my foot never healed and it causes constant pain, which is slowly getting worse as arthritis sets in. POVERTY REMOVES AGENCY
You see, poverty forces people to make tough choices. Actually, that isn’t true: poverty removes choice; it denies people agency and opportunity. Writing in The Guardian in June 2022, the food writer and poverty campaigner, Jack Monroe, powerfully describes the consequences of poverty: Poverty is exhausting. It requires time, effort, energy, organisation, impetus, an internal calculator, and steely mental fortitude. And should it not kill you, in the end, from starvation or cold or mental ill health, should you scrabble somehow to the sunlit uplands of ‘just about managing’, I’m sorry to tell you that although your bank balance may be in the black one day, so too will your head.1 Monroe goes on to explain how ‘years of therapy has alleviated some of [the worst effects of living in poverty, such as panic attacks], some of the time, but [their] physical and mental health will probably never make a full recovery’. Monroe now suffers from ‘complex post-traumatic stress disorder, arthritis exacerbated by living in cold homes, respiratory difficulties from the damp, complex trauma, an array of mental health issues, a hoarding problem, and a slow burning addiction brought to an almost fatal head last...
