Schools with Soul: time to give SMSC its proper place at the heart of the school improvement and transformation agenda?

Although attending to the “Social, Moral, Spiritual and Cultural” development of the pupils and students in their care has been a statutory responsibility for primary and secondary schools since 1944, what counts as ‘SMSC’ has had, as the Citizenship Education expert Ted Huddleston has noted, various iterations over the years.  At different points the initials and emphases have changed and in different periods the nuances and meanings ascribed to terms such as “social”, “moral”, “spiritual” and “cultural” have meant different things. In addition, particular themes have periodically emerged that might either be seen as a legitimate part of the wider terrain that SMSC occupies, or which have significant implications for those working on this terrain. For example, in recent years initiatives focused on Citizenship Education, Employability, Values Education, Resilience and Character Education have all come to the fore, and all have a contribution to make to the broader and evolving SMSC agenda. Whatever its precise articulation, though, SMSC has been viewed as a good thing. The challenge for policymakers, school leaders and practitioners – and all who work with them – has not been its ‘worthiness’; it has been the fact that it’s meaning has rarely been scrutinized or ‘nailed down’, either by schools or those charged with supporting or inspecting them.

This has been the concern of the authors of a new RSA report on this issue published this week, a team led by the RSA’s Director of Education Joe Hallgarten and which I have been proud to support as part of a broader advisory group, one that has included heads, middle leaders, classroom practitioners and others who have an engagement in the broader SMSC enterprise, including a range of national figures in the field.

Nobody would suggest running a school that does not attend to the social, moral, spiritual and cultural well-being of young people but giving SMSC its proper place in a culture dominated by ‘tests, targets and tables’ has proved especially difficult for school leaders and all who work with them.  Schools with Soul reminds us of the costs of failing to do so, as have the efforts of those concerned with what might be broadly termed the wider social curriculum over many years.  Schools with Soul calls into question not just the unintended consequences of the justified aspiration that every young person should achieve their full academic potential but the very way in which we organize schooling, and secondary schooling in particular.  You can read about Schools with Soul and download the full report and associated papers here: Schools with Soul

The dominance of the subject curriculum and of a very particular view of what constitutes a school ‘subject’ has continually marginalized (and sometimes ridiculed) so-called ‘newer’ subjects (think sociology, media studies, citizenship) while confining anything that cannot be packaged so neatly (think PSHE in its many iterations) to the often-lost world of cross-curricular themes or the margins of tutor time, in there with the register and the homework diaries - ‘everywhere but nowhere’ as I have been heard to claim on more than one occasion. So it has been for SMSC, and with the old hierarchy of knowledge firmly re-established in the new English Baccalaureate and a firm commitment to developing teachers’ subject knowledge (that’s certain teachers and particular subjects), the prospects might not look good for something as broad and apparently undefined as SMSC often has been.

That’s why this new report does three really important things: first, it makes us pause for thought about the purpose of education – grades are vital (I know, I went to a secondary school in the 1970s where four of us in my year group got five or more A-C grades) but so are the qualities and skills of confidence, character and resilience and dispositions that are pro-social, culturally-diverse and values-rich. Forget that and we end up with the ‘greed is good’ culture that has given us the banking crisis, the debacle of the MPs’ expenses scandal and the ‘have it all’ attitudes of celebrity culture, whatever the grades achieved by the protagonists.

Second, it proposes that we put the educational reform bandwagon on hold while we reflect on what the purpose of our educational endeavours might be. As Professor Richard Pring asked a few years ago in the report of the Nuffield Foundation’s Review of 14-19 Education, “what does it mean to be an educated 19 year old at the beginning of the 21^st century?” Seventeen years ago I published a short chapter (in a book anticipating Labour’s 1997 landslide entitled Take Care, Mr Blunkett), that reflected on James Callaghan’s Ruskin Speech and carried the heading “25 years on: the great debate that never was”. Schools with Soul makes it clear that that debate remains to be had, and that it remains as important as ever; we should take the report as our starting point.

Third, it offers strategies that teachers and school leaders might use to bring the distinctly un-soft skills at the heart of the SMSC agenda to reality in our classrooms and our school communities. Everywhere but nowhere is not good enough; thankfully, the report offers some pointers that might be of benefit not just in addressing the ‘non-subject’ components of SMSC (and, yes, the subject curriculum can play its part here) but in supporting other areas afflicted by the curse of cross-curricularity: work-related learning, students’ physical and mental health, careers education and guidance, employability and so on.

The report’s deeper message is simple though: attending to the social development and personal wellbeing of students, which is what good SMSC does, should never be an after-thought or add-on from the ‘fluffy corner’, to be dealt with when we’ve met our targets numeracy and literacy, or whatever. It must sit at the heart of school improvement and transformation strategies designed to close the cap, raise attainment and build inclusion, especially in our most-challenged schools and our most deprived communities. 

SMSC is not a distraction from the ‘standards’ agenda; it is the new standards agenda, the new standard by which we should judge the success of our educational efforts – attainment and achievement flow from inclusion and wellbeing; they do not precede it. Requires improvement is the report’s clarion call: without attending to their social, moral, spiritual and cultural development – and their physical and mental wellbeing – our attempts to ensure that all of the young people that we work with fulfill their potential are surely destined to failure.

High grades or the whole child: a false choice

The responses to both the PISA statistics and the Chief Inspector's report are depressingly familiar, with those who believe that more assessment will drive up achievement (usually on the policymaker side of the fence) cast against those (usually on the practitioner side) who claim our children are over-assessed and over-tested.

This false divide has pervaded the education debate since the 1960s.  Schooling has to be about more than just assessment and assessment has to be about more than SATs in primary schools and GCSEs in secondaries. But there is an important role for these forms of examination, partly because children and parents deserve feedback on progress, and partly because the exchequer needs to know whether substantial public investment brings a worthwhile return for children, young people, their parents and society as a whole; testing provides one means of measuring this.

We need to have the 'great debate' about the purpose of education that James Callaghan called for at Ruskin College back in 1976 and we need to decide on, as Professor Richard Pring argues, what qualities we want the educated young person, of any background or ability, to have by the close of statutory schooling.  As any successful leader in any sector will point out, we need to decide on purpose and objectives, then the means of achieving them.  In education, we endlessly tweak the means without having the courage to address the discussion about purpose and objectives.  How are we to achieve educational success without deciding first on what it looks like?

And what might it look like? That would be to pre-empt the debate, but let us decide that we can 'have our cake and eat it'.  The best schools, state and independent, primary and secondary, are not afraid of formal, traditional assessment.  They embrace it but it has no more than its proper place; they do not allow it to become 'high stakes' for the young people in their care and they align it with projects that develop the whole child and the young person as an effective citizen; they put as much focus on the development of confidence and character, on sporting achievement, on having the confidence to speak out in public in an informed way, on the opportunity to benefit from work and community experience, and, of course, on the sciences, the arts, the humanities and creativity.

Critically, they do not make false choices between endless examinations or developing the whole child, between an academic and a vocational curriculum, between maximising attainment and building inclusion.  We should be informed by their example, not by spurious comparisons with completely different societies, some of which have their own educational challenges in spite (or because?) of their PISA success.  The headlines might suggest that Sir Michael Wilshaw sits squarely on one side of these divides.  His record as a Headteacher in Hackney and Newham suggests that he struck a better balance.  That is the demand we should make of our schools today.

A summary of this post was published as a Letter in the Evening Standard on Friday 13th December 2013

Citizenship, a lost bag and an act of kindness: a good news story

It's never been the stuff of this blog to go 'personal' but I must relate this story of human kindness, honesty and optimism. Just in case you've put down the newspaper or turned away from the rolling news with its tales of dishonesty, dishonour and the rest - a world where nobody can be trusted, everybody has their snout in the trough and integrity is forever the victim of greed (be it the banker, the politician, the tax evader or the benefits cheat).

Today we got back from our holiday - a lovely week in Madeira, in which we'd experienced nothing but friendliness from everybody we met. It was a lovely journey back even if we were met by a rainy Monday afternoon - our bags came straight off the belt (always a sign that things are going well).  We grabbed them and the connecting bus to London Luton Airport's APCOA mid-term car park. We were home in an hour and all seemed well until we realised, an hour later, that our gadget bag (laptop, iPad, kindle, camera, the boys' 3DS consoles and their games - you get the picture) was missing. I never thought that I knew so many expletives or that I could utter them so quickly: £3,000 or more of kit and a whole lot more personal and professional history, up in smoke.  I'd left the bag behind - either on the connecting bus, at the bus stop or by the car.

Well, the world is not as dark as the papers and the TV tell us; somebody spotted the bag - a lovely woman, who left a message that I only picked up after I'd started heading back to the airport. She had checked the contents, realised their value and found my mobile number on a Breslin business card. She handed the bag in to the APCOA team, who also left a message, one that I only picked up when I arrived back at the airport.

People at airports are in a hurry, rushing to catch a flight or to get home - we were hurrying to get home, but also, and critically, to get into the car and out of the rain. I don't know whether she was intent on catching a flight or getting home or, like us, just out of the rain but the heroine in this story didn't rush - or at least stopped rushing - to check the contents of our bag, to find our contact details, to make the phone call and to walk the length of the car park - and airport car parks are long - to hand our bag in; an act of kindness, generosity, honesty - everything that we are told day-in and day-out has vanished from our society; it hasn't and the lovely man in the car park office told me that similar expensive kit and personal valuables are handed in every day.

Some readers of this blog will know that I spent nine years leading a wonderful charity called the Citizenship Foundation; the core belief that drove - and sill drives - that great organisation is that the prosperity of society depends not simply on GDP but on the active committed, effective engagement of individuals as citizens.  By this way of thinking, society needs people who are, to draw on the title of the Foundation's primary school programme - "go-givers" not just "go-getters".  The woman who handed in our bag is a go-giver - she may be a go-getter too and there's no harm in that but I have no way of knowing.  But I do know that she took 30 or perhaps 45 minutes out of her airport rush for somebody, a family, she didn't know.  And, she is not alone; as other forgetful users of Luton's airport car parks can gratefully testify.

Perhaps its not just about building the 'big' or 'good' society but realising, in spite of the headlines, that there is much to reaffirm about the society we already have, albeit that we can't and shouldn't duck the responsibility of working together to 'fix' the bits that are not working. I suspect far more people would have given the bag in than made off with it, as the popular narrative might have us believe.

I'm relieved that citizenship is alive and thriving, and that kindness, generosity, integrity, trust and honesty are as well;  I'm also relieved to have that laptop, my wife's i-pad and the boys' 3DS consoles. Phew, you bet I am!

Child poverty: what do young people have to say about it?

Breslin Public Policy release new paper on child poverty

We are pleased to announce the publication of our new paper, A Series of Doors: young people talking about the experience of poverty, based on work originally undertaken for the Office of the Children's Commissioner, as part of their response to the government consultation on child poverty conducted earlier this year.

We reproduce the News Release that we have just issued and commend the views of the young people to all with an interest in this area.

News release

For Immediate Release: 16 July 2013

New publication

“A Series of Doors”

Young people talking about the experience of poverty

A Breslin Public Policy paper[1] informed by work carried out for the Office of the Children’s Commissioner[2] as part of its response to a government consultation on child poverty[3]

Poverty is like a series of doors. One door is being poor, another door is being autistic, another door is being a young carer; another door is living in a bad area… The more doors there are, the more keys are needed to open them and people don’t care enough to make the effort to open them all

As this comment demonstrates, children and young people who experience poverty can be highly articulate and insightful about their lives, but their voices are too seldom heard, especially by those in power.  At the invitation of the Office of the Children’s Commissioner, we brought a group of these young people together in Westminster to help inform policy. In this paper their voices are given prominence. They reflect on the issues that matter to them: Money, Access to services, Education, Employment, Community and home life, Aspirations, Access to transport, Networks.

Dr. Maggie Atkinson, Children’s Commissioner for England, said:

Under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, every child and young person has the right to express his or her views, and to have those views heard and taken seriously. That right is hugely important for those who live in poverty and on the margins of society. This document provides a powerful example of the fundamental and essential job of amplifying their voices

Dr Tony Breslin, Director of Breslin Public Policy, said:

The voices of children and young people continue to be excluded from debate about their experience. Much of the literature on child and family poverty is pertinent and incisive, but comparatively little of it presents the voices of first hand experience

These young people were thoughtful, articulate, provocative and insightful. They contributed their views in an inspiringly positive and participative spirit, and it was a privilege to work with them. Their energy and honesty deserves close and sincere support from all who have the power to help make a difference to their lives

Kate Green, Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Poverty, said:

This paper is a wake-up call to all of us charged with the responsibility of addressing the challenges of poverty as experienced by children and young people. Too often, we conduct an adult-to-adult debate that ignores where poverty hits hardest - on children and young people

The paper, and the associated report to the Office of the Children’s Commissioner, can be accessed through the links in the Endnotes below.

Contacts

Tony Breslin, Breslin Public Policy: 07973 885 915; tony.breslin@breslinpublicpolicy.com

Kevin Harris, Breslin Public Policy: 0773 042 9993; kevin.harris@breslinpublicpolicy.com

We will be pleased to arrange access to young people who participated in the event and are prepared to speak about their experience of poverty.

---

[1] The paper, A Series of Doors, is available at:

http://www.breslinpublicpolicy.com/images//ASeriesofDoors.pdf

[2] A Series of Doors is based on an event held in February 2013 organised by Breslin Public Policy for the Office of the Children’s Commissioner. It uses direct quotations from the children and young people recorded on the day, together with some comments from supporting adults who accompanied them, and written contributions made by the participants during a specially designed workshop activity on the day.

[3] The report produced by Breslin Public Policy for the Office of the Children’s Commissioner, Young People Talking About Poverty, is available at:

http://www.breslinpublicpolicy.com/images//YoungPeopleTalkingAboutPoverty.pdf

Ed Miliband and the re-building of trust in politics

Today's speech by Ed Miliband is powerful stuff and an honest, appropriate response to Falkirk but this is not just about 'Labour and the Unions'. Below I share more of my personal experience than is usual on this 'company' blog - experience of Labour's Parliamentary selection process itself. I've framed it as an 'open letter to Ed Miliband'; in fact, it's an open letter to all in politics...

Trust in Politics and the selection of Labour Party Parliamentary Candidates

An open letter to Ed Miliband

Dear Ed

We worked together when you were Minister for the Third Sector at the Cabinet Office and I was CEO at the independent charity, the Citizenship Foundation.  I have been a member of the party since the age of 16 and have long held a commitment to the importance of political engagement in all its guises.

My own recent experience of the Labour Party's parliamentary selection process has, though, been extremely disheartening - not because of the behaviour of some trade unions (which you are right to tackle and challenge) but because of the behaviour of a local party so determined to install a favoured candidate (one named as such on the ‘inside’ from the beginning) that it failed to long list a range of talented candidates on the grounds that it had been overwhelmed with applications. It subsequently provided local members with a shortlist of two (which hardly amounts to a 'list' at all), who then selected the long-tipped individual, the one that the local party had sought to 'protect' from challenge throughout the process.  This individual may prove to be a terrific candidate but they deserve to pass the test of a fair, rigorous process and others deserve the right to enter the contest.

My request from the local party for feedback was refused (I was told that detailed notes were not taken and no scoring mechanism was used – it seemed that standard equal opportunities practice had yet to influence the process of selecting parliamentary candidates, at least in some local Labour Parties) and discussions with the regional party proved fruitless because the local party had, I was assured, 'followed the (now revised) rules'. Conveniently, this selection was held under the ‘old’ process, one that was revamped earlier this year.

My point is that the commitment to deal with those who seek to unfairly install candidates on behalf of trade unions  (while welcome) is insufficient if it is not matched with a commitment to reform local party selection itself, to tackle local (albeit declining) fiefdoms and to end that other privileged (and increasingly dominant) route into parliament - from intern to think tank to special adviser to safe seat.

Open primaries may or may not be an answer (and I think that it is right to explore their potential) but, as you argue, a better and more open, more inclusive politics certainly is.  As somebody who has worked on the ‘project’ of building trust in politics for over a decade and who now works as a public policy analyst committed to opening up access to politics, I would welcome the opportunity to discuss these issues with you and to assist the party's efforts in this regard.

I do hope that whoever is charged with sifting responses to your speech passes this one to you.  In any case, I welcome the debate that you have started.

Best wishes in all that you are seeking to do.

Yours,

Tony Breslin

Director

Breslin Public Policy Limited

0330 660 0525 / 07973 885 915

tony.breslin@breslinpublicpolicy.com

www.breslinpublicpolicy.com