Education lives beyond the bounds of black and white

Opinion: I have a three-year-old grandson. When he asks a question, he nearly always finishes it with “Yes or no?” They’re the only two options he thinks are available for an answer. He lives in a black and white world, so I’m often flummoxed because few questions have simple answers. The world is more complex than he yet knows. I understand his need for a yes or no answer.

When the Prime Minister announced his Government’s reform of the mathematics curriculum last weekend I thought of my grandson and his world view. Christopher Luxon seems to think there are simple answers to complex questions. How I wish that were true.

“We are focused on outcomes: achievement in maths and reading and getting kids to school,” he said. “That may well mean we’re going to defer our arts and music curriculum for now.” I wanted to tell him that the answer to how we raise student success is not an either-or strategy.

The complexity of the task he’s talking about demands a nuanced response. Research demonstrates that you can have a literacy and numeracy focus and retain the vibrancy of the arts, science and social studies. International and national evidence also shows that rich broad curricula deliver the best learning results. And while the Prime Minister doesn’t appear to care much for the arts, he should be alerted to the evidence that children in arts-rich schools do better in literacy and numeracy.

He might also be interested to know that children who have rich arts experiences in life do better in all areas of schooling. The link between playing a musical instrument and success in maths is particularly strong. The positive link between engaging in drama and better inferential comprehension (being able to infer an understanding, without being explicitly told) has been repeatedly demonstrated in multiple studies. Getting kids to school might be about making it more enjoyable through engaging in and through the arts. Getting kids to school is one thing, having them want to be there is another. Rich lively classrooms where children can express their passions is certainly one way to achieve that. Multiple solutions will be needed for the outcomes the Prime Minister and all of us hope for.

Rendering black and white solutions for education reform came further into focus this week with a quite extraordinary comment from the Minister of Education when justifying the latest changes in school curriculum.

Erica Stanford said, “No more of this ‘Your kid turns up to school and decides what they want to learn’,” – as if it’s that simple. Learning is a complex process, and black and white approaches will not get the results children deserve. Schools are places where governments decide what and how children should learn, and always have been, but they should also be places where children can find out the things they want to know, to grow the skills they want to develop.

They must be places where alongside direct instruction, curiosity is rewarded, where they enquire and make sense of their own worlds. Schools need to be places where children discover lifelong passions. Having teachers feed their appetite to know is part of making children keen to learn a rich curriculum. It’s not about simple binaries, of either/or teacher-centred or student-centred classrooms, but classrooms that are learning-centred.

Children need to be in schools where they are challenged to learn from a well-designed curriculum. They also need classrooms where they are inspired to ask questions and to grow the skills to answer them for themselves. This is especially true for those questions that can’t be answered with facts alone, or a yes or no answer. They need to be where they can learn about what they want to learn alongside meeting the requirements of the curriculum. Both these requirements can work and be achieved in tandem. I would argue that allowing children to learn what they want to know, alongside learning what the Government wants them to know, is the only way we should teach if we want to children to flourish in the education system.

If we want to make genuine differences in schools, there are some complex problems that need solving. None of them can be solved in a way that can be captured in simple soundbites, although the Government might like us to believe otherwise.

Literacy and numeracy success is one of the problems our children face, but it links to everything else impacting them; inequity in outcomes is consequent and reinforced by and through social inequities. We need to understand more fully the impact Covid has had on the mental health of our children. We need to find ways to attract more people into a teaching career and keep them there, and it would help if we could find a consensus that transcends political parties so there isn’t constant churn in the sector. We need to find ways to talk about education without the inflammatory language of crisis. It is time for a grown-up conversation.