From tinkering at the edges to an open can of worms

This was always going to happen with this current government: a new education initiative designed to solve one set of problems runs immediately – within a day, I mean – into a bunch of others.

The ITTECF (the Initial Teacher Training and Early Career Framework), published on Tuesday this week, and which I summarised yesterday, has all the inherent problems of its component parts, the ECF (Early Career Framework) and the ITT Core Content Framework.

Firstly, it is founded upon the identical weak philosophical and educational base as its two components: the ‘science of learning’ approach that ignores most educational research.

Secondly, it proposes, like it’s predecessor, a kind of teacher, and a mode of delivery-style training, that are both small subsets of real people, with real affections and honourable motivations seeking a high quality of learning within the hugely complex world of their classroom.

Clare Brooks and her colleagues at Cambridge have issued a helpful press release that underlines what I wrote yesterday: the philosophical and research basis is undermined because the new framework, like the old, contains nothing to help teaching students understand the purpose of education in a culture; there is going to be gross confusion over the separate roles of teacher educators and ECT mentors in schools (and consequent problems when inspected); and the ‘input/output’ model of teaching, based on the thin research field that barely supported the CCF, is retained.

The Cambridge press release suggests either deferring the ITTECF (this acronym has already made its way into my autofill text!) by a year, or scrapping it altogether. They also suggest a proper, broad consultation on the early career pathway for teachers. I hope they have sent this to Bridget Phillipson, as shadow education secretary, too, as it may be her that has to deal with the fallout.

There are some leaders, notably from the Sheffield Institute of Education (Sam Twiselton) and the quango Education Endowment Foundation (Becky Francis) who seem OK with it, but then they were pretty OK with the previous iteration. They function from the same research base that the DfE chooses to use, and in the EEF’s case, provide some of that research base.

This debate will run for a while, but it’s root is both philosophical (Why are we educating in our culture? What’s the purpose, the end goal, the desire for our children and young people?) and anthropological (How do we conceive of people and children? What are they for? What kind of teachers do they need? And how do we ensure that we educate teachers to enable children to engage with the complexity of knowledge and the world?). Philosophy and anthropology (like sociology) are not disciplines that the DfE regards as important in the ‘training’ of teachers: it sees a scientistic, econometric model as all that is required. Inputs and outputs.

As a result, the ITTECF does nothing at all to address this debate. It takes a technicist approach of skillset impartation through instruction, practice and worked example, as if we were plumbers. Skilled plumbers, yes, but plumbers.

We may get more teachers as a result (that’s the hope, possibly a vain one), but the quality of teachers produced will keep deteriorating unless we as teacher educators can keep subverting the foundation of the ITTECF to allow a teacher’s life to flourish. That subversion, like all subversion, needs love as its foundation: love of teachers, love of our learning and teaching, and love of children and their families.

In a different context (the role of feminism in the light of the number of women on the far right seeking to influence thinking), Mary Harrington recently wrote this:

Our best hope of moderation, then, lies in the most reactionary, and most subversive, of all forces: the messy business of trying to love one another, as embodied men, women, and children, in the world as it is.

Until embodying ways of learning to love one another and act in each other’s good lies at the heart of our efforts to educate teachers, we are educating for very little at all. To educate for one another’s good – that would indeed be a can of worms worth opening.