From the armed forces to teaching – a panacea or a nostrum?
John Freeman
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
I was fascinated by the Panorama on the employment of ex-services personnel in schools. Clearly it works – or, rather, the examples shown, from Birmingham to Plymouth News, seemed to work very well. (Though in the Birmingham case, one ex-forces teacher had ‘left after one day’ and one of the ‘teachers’ was wearing a Young Apprentice sweatshirt. And any attempt at importing education policy unthinkingly is a risky undertaking, as education ministers have found out over very many years.) I have absolutely no problem with ex-services personnel being encouraged to take degrees and go into teaching. That seems to me very positive for them.
But in the same way that some graduates with first class degrees, even doctorates, prove to be ineffective teachers, so will some ex-NCOs and even ex-officers. As with all occupations, some will be brilliant, others less so. Selection and training is, as always, vitally important. Even what we saw raised some interesting questions. One of the ex-forces people is now a headteacher. He has renamed all his ‘coordinators’ as ‘leaders’. I have much sympathy with this as I have always believed that an activity is much more likely to succeed when there is unequivocal accountability. But it struck me that ’coordination’ is needed in every aspect of the armed forces and education; even in the army people are given responsibility for their own actions. The other focus of the programme was Combined Cadet Forces, clearly something that ex-forces personnel will be able to help with. Here we saw all sorts of activity from firing air guns to team building to parade-ground bashing. As with all such motivational activity, for some young people it will work, for others it won’t; youth workers know that a variety of provision is important. But the deepest impression that I was left with was a profound commitment by the Secretary of State to the use of ex-forces personnel, and the development of CCFs.
And that led me to recall that the Guardian reported last week that the Coalition Government has cut £8.9 million from academic evaluation budgets. This includes, for example, £400,000 from a project to evaluate the success of academies. I fear that we have moved from ‘evidence-based policy’ to ‘policy by assertion’ – ‘It will work because I say it will’ – not a secure base from which to make long-term commitments of public funding.
