Are Schools Actually Institutionalised Childcare?

“What has it all been for?” we found ourselves discussing last night over dinner. We realised our 18 year-old son is now on A-Level exam leave meaning his full-time state education has finished. All of it. No more lessons. No more school. Save exams, it’s all over. His little brother was most disgruntled. “What not never again?” The 18 year-old smiled and kept eating. 

We decided to conduct a skills audit. It’s something I do with the children – who are not in full-time education – I teach. I find out what they can and can’t do and help them in the things they can’t – telling the time, boiling an egg, crossing the road, that sort of thing. I find that with competence, confidence grows. We did the same with the 18 year-old: what exactly has the British state education system taught or not taught him? It was an illustrative experience and one I recommend other parents and policy makers carry out.

He began his education in a London primary with 500 pupils speaking 45 different languages, before we moved out to the countryside. Year six was spent at a tiny village school, years seven to 11 at a market town comprehensive and then A-levels at a cathedral city college. All of the schools were variously agreed by Ofsted to be good or outstanding. What, after fourteen years of (save lockdown) full-time state education, has he learned? We narrowed it down to five skills: how to read, how to write, how to do maths, having friends and passing exams.

Though getting a good grade in the GCSE, he cannot speak, write or understand Spanish. His knowledge of all the countries and flags of the world comes from Kahoot! quizzes that he and his mates use to compete against each other. The books he reads are ones we have at home. Any knowledge of history derives from a book about battles we keep in the downstairs loo.

The other skills he has (keeping goal, keeping wicket, fishing, shooting, map reading, bashing bits of wood together to make things, playing the violin, mowing the lawn, writing a book about badgers, a hopeful sense of morality and ethics) he learned outside school, either at clubs, with a private music teacher, or taught by my husband or grandparents. He has so far resisted learning from me how to: cook, clean, basic DIY, financial management – deeming none of it yet necessary.

Are five skills – how to read, how to write, how to do maths, having friends and how to pass exams, a sufficient return for 14 years of education? Could he have learned all this in perhaps two or three years? He’s not a moron, so in other circumstances, could he have learned Ancient Greek and Latin, even Spanish? Could he have learned how to cook? How to maintain a car? Basic plumbing and electrical work? How to erect a fence? Euclidian geometry? How to touch-type? How to build a wall? Household budgeting? [Will the worry of failing as a parent never end?]

Great fanfare is made about the Tories at least getting education right while messing up everything else. With an emphasis on a knowledge-based curriculum and constant testing, standards across the board were driven up in England – the PISA league tables rank us globally as 11^th in maths, up from 17^th in 2018, and 13^th in reading, up from 14^th in 2018. Yet at our son’s comprehensive, 18% of the cohort still failed to achieve a pass (grade 4) at Maths or English GCSE. If the skills that our son, who did manage a nice string of GCSEs, look meagre, what of the children who can’t even manage that? Record numbers of 16-24 year-olds (over 900,000) are Not in Education, Employment or Training (NEETS); one in five people between the ages of eight and 25 have a mental health difficulty. Similarly, the Institute of Student Employers reports a declining work readiness of school and university leavers. I’m not sure we should be so keen to trumpet this as a policy ‘success’.

Perhaps the answer then is a skills-based curriculum as pioneered by the devolved government in Wales? Alas, the skills are not those that would be useful, such as first aid or understanding debt and compound interest, but rather vague skills such as literacy, numeracy and digital competence. Wales and Scotland have both dropped down the league tables. And anyway, identifying the right skills seems fraught with difficulty – everyone was convinced a few years ago that children should be taught how to code, but now AI has that sorted. Same with touch-typing – how useful in an age of voice-recognition software? It’s somehow deemed dumbing down to teach cookery and plumbing, and elitist to teach ancient languages or to expect children to learn great poetry off by heart. Into this paralysis comes… what? Practice papers on repeat to pass exams.

“Well, if he didn’t learn much, perhaps I should stop going to school,” piped up the younger brother during the discussion. The 18 year-old stopped eating and said, “School was mostly fun… lunchtime football was brilliant… and when I won that fight… and the school plays… and the trip to Sicily where we were supposed to study volcanoes but it was too hot so we didn’t.”

And indeed he is right — school, or education more widely, is about planting seeds of friendship, curiosity, of knowing where to look if you want to learn. The joy my son experienced in school plays and on the football pitch can be taken and replicated hopefully throughout his life. Aristotle had it that the purpose of education was for the individual to develop virtue in order to live a flourishing life and contribute to a thriving society.

As the old quote says: “The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a flame to be kindled.”

Perhaps in all the opprobrium that is thrown against Bridget Phillipson, we should all be more honest about what school is about. Schools are, alas, not teaching children practical skills to get on in life, either as a flourishing individual or as one able to contribute to the body politic – otherwise there would be a curriculum whereby they would all learn how to batch-cook five nutritious meals, learn how to keep and stay fit and healthy, become fluent in a foreign language and a musical instrument, learn by heart Pericles’ funeral oration, learn the four cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance), understand how and why Britain is as it is, or learn how to stop leaks and change plugs. While I long for schools to kindle that flame of learning in all children and to teach actual skills as well as knowledge, I do have a sneaky suspicion that their real purpose is mostly to help children socialise and to keep them elsewhere so their parents can work.

Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence coach. She is looking for a publisher for: FLOURISH: How to Help the Digital Generation Leave Home and Live Happy and Prosperous Lives. Please get in touch if interested.