No Child Held Back
A guiding mantra for education policy on the Right
In 2005, New Labour Chancellor Gordon Brown set out that “no child should be left behind.’’ It was not a new idea. The phrase, ‘no child left behind’ has been used in the ‘No Child Left Behind Act’ championed by Republican George W. Bush. Unicef claims ‘no child left behind’ as their mandate; the last Conservative Government used the phrase, as has the current Labour Government.
It is a fundamentally good principle. Deployed well, it helps to ensure that children are not written off, that those in poverty or other forms of need are given the support they require and that every effort is made to ensure that every child can achieve the levels of education they are capable of.1
We should not abandon it. But, like all good things, taken to excess it can become a pathology. If made the sole aim of policy and practice, it - like any other goal - leads to a distorted mindset that can do great harm.2
Taken too far, it is the mindset that says that the best thing to do with a child who has mastered the work being taught is - rather than stretching them further - to use them to help the children further behind. After all, what matters is no child being behind. It is the phrase often heard amongst its champions, that we do not need to worry about children who are not formally disadvantaged, or who are ahead academically. After all, they say, ‘those children will do OK anyway.’
It is the mindset that believes Shakespeare and classical music are ‘elitist’, and not for working class or black children, so they must be removed to make the curriculum more ‘inclusive’. It is the mindset that believes that no child can have something unless every child has it - and so thinks a school French trip shouldn’t be put on because only 80% of the year goes, or cancels a Latin programme for disadvantaged children mid-year, while children are already studying for their GCSEs.3 It is the mindset that criticises New Labour’s education policy for being ‘obsessed with academic achievement’ or thinks that setting children by ability is an act of ‘symbolic violence.’4 It is the mindset that, as is happening in California, destroys maths curriculums in the name of ‘equity’, de-emphasises calculus, opposes teaching algebra in middle school (i.e. before year 9) and ends advanced classes for the gifted and talented.
It is the mindset that believes the best way to get more children to pass exams is to make them easier, and so inflates grades year after year after year.5 It believes that the reason why we should worry about children failing an exam, such as GCSE English or Maths, is not that these children cannot read, write and figure well enough - but that we are ‘writing them off’.6 Rather than work out how to educate children better, it would simply remove the mirror that shows up that inadequacy. It is the mindset that all must have prizes, that none should achieve more than another, and that all achievement is suspect, and likely due to external factors7 rather than reflecting real ability.
When ‘no child left behind’ becomes a pathology, it becomes deeply suspicious of difference, because it believes that if two things are different, one of them must be worse. It throws up barriers to parents wanting to choose what is right for their children, whether reducing choice in the state school system, or making the lives of private schools and home educators more difficult. It wants to insist that every school teaches exactly the same curriculum, or that all teachers must be approved by the state.8 Differentiation and innovation in schools becomes a threat, as uniformity and mediocrity are celebrated over the pursuit of excellence.
As an aside, it is worth saying that those who lose out most in this mindset are not those in the top 5-10% of society, but the vast majority of children in the middle, who are neither rich nor formally ‘disadvantaged’. If a school stops teaching calculus or Shakespeare for being elitist, or if it leaves a bright child bored because ‘they’ll be OK anyway’, parents in the top 5-10% can readily account for this through out of school activities, or via hiring a tutor. It is those in the middle and the bottom, who depend on public services, who are most betrayed.9
The reality is that children learn at different paces, have different talents and different needs. So what is the counter-balance to ‘no child left behind’? The lens which enables the former to be kept in balance?
It is, I suggest, ‘No child held back.’
This is, of course, is not a new idea. I can find a reference to Cameron saying it in 2006 - and it was hardly original then. Many of the reforms introduced by Michael Gove and Nick Gibb, indeed, have an admirable twin-track focus on both ‘no child left behind’ and ‘no child held back’:
Progress 8 rewards improvements for every child, rather than focusing on more easily gamed metrics such as the D to C boundary.
School accountability metrics that include both the performance of children eligible for free school meals and the number of children who get into Oxbridge.
Measures that cement the basics, such as phonics and the phonics check, alongside measures that stretch the brightest, such as a knowledge-rich curriculum and higher standards at GCSE and A-Level.
But in more recent years, sometimes the Conservatives sounded like they cared more about school structures than why those structures had been put in place.10 And over the last 5 to 10 years, some of the sillier pathologies described above have come back into fashion within parts of the educational establishmen. Holding children back also now appears to be the unofficial policy of the current Labour Government, with its multi-front assault on academies, private schools, home educating and the curriculum - making a new guiding mantra for the right more important than ever.
So what would ‘No Child Held Back’ look like in practice?
It would mean the stretching of every child to fulfil their potential, with no children cast aside as ‘they’ll do OK anyway’. It would mean a knowledge-rich curriculum for all, recognising that Shakespeare and calculus are the birthright of all, rich or poor, north or south, black or white. It would mean enthusiastically supporting schools that went beyond the syllabus - whether in science, or Latin, or poetry, or maths - and recognising and rewarding this. It would mean embracing setting so that every child could be taught to full effectiveness, and straining as hard to get a child on track for a 7, an 8 or a 9, as to get one on track for a 2, a 3 or a 4.11
It would mean every child who wished to having the opportunity to learn an instrument in secondary school, with lessons and rented instruments available. It would mean embracing maths challenges, Olympiads and other such schemes that aim to stretch the best.
After school, it would invest much more on bursaries for the most highly achieving students from poor backgrounds to attend top universities - and, at the same time, support businesses to significantly increase the supply of apprenticeships for 16 - 21 year-olds.
It would be about respecting, as far as possible, parental choice to choose the school that is best for their child. Pre-school, it would mean recognising that parents know best on who they wish to look after their child, sweeping away the stifling regulation and the concept of an ‘unregistered’ childminder; at school age, it would mean ending the hostility towards and unnecessary barriers and bureaucracies being put up against home education and private schools. It would allow parental choice to let good schools expand, and bad schools wither on the vine.12
It would not insist that ‘Whitehall knows best’ and would restore school freedoms, this time not just to academies but to every school in the country. If a head thinks a teacher is brilliant, and they can demonstrate this via results, who cares if they have a piece of paper with a teaching qualification on it? Let head teachers and school leaders decide how to structure their school day, whether to follow the national curriculum and what they should teach - and then hold them strongly to account on whether they deliver, via performance tables, Ofsted and the choices of parents. Make it easier, not harder, for schools to stretch and expand the horizons of their pupils, recognising that different schools will do so in different ways - and that is fine.
Many of our best schools already apply these principles, holding both ‘no child left behind’ and ‘no child held back’ in harmony. But it will come harder for them over the next few years, as freedoms are removed, the curriculum undermined and the pressure - from Government, from academia, and from the wider periphery - builds upon one side of the equation only. Increasingly, the two will fall out of balance, and the worst distortions of the former will reemerge.
As the Right looks to rebuild,13 it should not abandon ‘no child left behind’. But as it considers its future path and policies in education, ‘no child held back’ should be its guiding mantra.
If your bottom set is routinely assigned the worst teachers, that is not a good thing.
C. S. Lewis has written extensively on how many evils come from the distortion of good things, or of taking them too far.
As the Government did earlier this year.
Both statements made by the individual chosen by the current Education Secretary to lead the current review of the curriculum.
As happened in the UK in schools throughout the ‘90s and ‘00s, and in universities throughout this century.
There is a more serious critique that what is required to pass GCSE English and Maths is not actually the English and Maths we should require as the basic standard for everyone, and that some should be allowed to take more functional literacy and numeracy papers, which I have some sympathy for.
E.g. family background.
As the current Government is doing.
For more on this, see How elite benevolence hurts the middle.
The academies and free schools programmes were fundamental to improving the school system - but when 80% of secondary schools are academies, I am less convinced it makes sense to focus on converting the remaining 20% (provided they are performing well). Much better to simply extend the academy freedoms on curriculum, staffing and so forth to all schools.
Note for old people and Americans: at GCSE (O-Levels, OWLs, etc.) nowadays you get a number from 1 to 9 for your grade; a 4 is the equivalent of a C in old money and a 7 the equivalent of an A.
As someone who spent a lot of my time in secondary school in mobile classrooms at a very good school, it is much, much, better for a child to be in temporary accommodation in a good school than in a shiny new building in a poor one.
I am writing primarily about the UK, but this could apply equally to any other children.
The expansion of apprenticeship opportunities and a de-stigmatisation of classical trades would go a long way towards improving the educational experience for all children and young people.
Many of the problems we face now are the result of well-meant changes to the education system. I passed the 11+ and went to a Grammar School; my sister went to a Comprehensive School. Eliminating the 11+ and with it Grammar Schools across most of the country was a good decision, because not everyone develops at the same rate and there is almost a year between the youngest and the oldest in the same class (which in the last year of Junior school is near enough a 10% age difference). So having a single secondary school to which all pupils in an area go is sensible, providing that there is setting and the ability to move children between sets. Sometimes judges screw up good systems; the Greenwich judgement is an example that made the life of Council Education Departments much harder.
Moving the control of schools from local councils to direct funding by Government seemed like a good idea at the time because some local education authorities were dire. The value of the LEA that was lost (and only partially recovered by multi-academy trusts) was the economy of scale that allowed them to employ music teachers across the Borough where a single school might only be able to justify a fraction of a FTE music teacher and also to fund the purchase of musical instruments that could be loaned to children. Based on a single authority covering a London Borough, it is quite practical to find enough talented children to populate a whole symphony orchestra, while a single school might struggle with much more than a string quartet. It is not just developing the skills; playing in an orchestra requires teamwork in well beyond any sport.
But the biggest failing of our education system comes after age 16. Both schools for 16-18 and universities for 18-21 teach a narrow curriculum to individual students. At university there are Sciences, Social Sciences, Arts & Humanities departments as silos with no overlap between them. In the USA, and also in France, the curriculum even at university is broader with scientists having to take an Arts and Humanities subject as part of their degree and vice versa. In the USA this is known colloquially as 'Physics for Poets'. In the UK, as far as I know Keele University with their Foundation Year is the only university that does this.