Transplanting China into England – and what’s happening in England

Let’s ignore the fact that’s that China is now in severe recession and that the whole world economy is shuddering as a consequence. And let’s also ignore the uncomfortable fact that the Pisa comparisons involve only countries with the single exception of Shanghai. It is worth asking, though, about the aims of the wider Chinese education system. I’m not denying the challenges of an industrialising society, and I have no particular insight into a better way of doing things, but I’m strongly reminded of the aims of the 1944 Education Act – the Butler Act – which set up the tripartite system, in which 20 per cent of the population was selected at age 11 to be the future professional class, 5 per cent the future artisan and technician class, and the remaining 75 per cent the workers. And of course the future bosses were educated outside this system entirely, in the so-called public schools!

With this background it was always going to be an odd experiment, trying to transplant Chinese education methods into English schools. And, bluntly, it was never going to work, if the aim was to demonstrate that Chinese educationalists can do better than their English counterparts.

First, any short-term activity is of necessity doomed to fail. Teaching and learning work best with good relationships built over months and years. Second, any experiment with cameras in the room is skewed by the observation – the Heisenberg effect writ at a scale larger than the individual quantum. Third, the children and the teachers both bring strong social expectations to what is going on, and in both cases these expectations are just wrong. The whole thing is a gimmick – interesting but largely pointless.

I’m much more concerned about some other news, which has received contradictory coverage. 50 primary children are being excluded every day for attacks on adults – a total of 11,420 in 2013/14, and up 25 per cent on the previous year. I’m not sure how a Chinese teacher would react, but Nick Gibb, the schools minister, said that the increase reflected the “new powers for headteachers that were giving them the ‘confidence’ to exclude pupils”.

At the same time, the local authority I used to work for, Dudley, is being castigated in the local press for having almost the highest exclusion rate in England. I’m tempted to write to the Express and Star to say that schools are excluding more pupils simply because the headteachers are more confident.

The truth is that all exclusions are a failure – like prison, exclusion is a punishment rather than a rehabilitation, and the outcome, certainly for repeated exclusions, is not likely to be an improvement. At the same time, as a school governor I attend exclusion appeals and I have to say that some young people (and, I fear, their parents) seem to have little or no understanding of how to behave and how their poor behaviour impacts on others.

I’m afraid that I have no nostrums for all this, and little of interest to say, except that importing Chinese teachers (or Chinese methods) is not going to solve all our problems.

John Freeman CBE is a former director of children's services and is now a freelance consultant