Stubborn adversaries will let children down

As we work to make and implement policy, together, for children, it’s vital we talk and listen to each other and work together, rather than shout at the sky.

I was in the audience for Education Secretary Michael Gove’s discussion with the National Association of Head Teachers at their annual conference. It was run rather like a chat show with a guest addressing questions the heads had raised beforehand, to which the Secretary of State responded using the flesh and bones of the policies he is driving through to inform his answers. On the morning before he arrived, the delegates had passed a vote of no confidence in those policies.

When it went to questions from the floor, the dialogue shifted from “professional, if agreeing to differ,” to outright adversarial. The temperature rose so that the heat generated on both sides of the argument was more prominent than the light shed on vital matters of policy and practice. 

Neither the passionate professional leaders of so many schools, nor the convinced policymaker, budged an inch. Things were said that might have been said differently in a different room or after a minute’s quiet reflection on the tone. In the conference hall, the body language and swell of raised voices became confrontational. Both sides of the debate made crucial points. 

What they were arguing about was the life chances, rights and entitlements of those who cannot argue for themselves: our children. The panel session I was part of later on explored what the system actually needs in these changing times: real and steadfast collaboration between schools and others. Diversification presents an opportunity for the teaching profession to lead the change, as well as many challenges to its unity. As the president reminded the conference, the leadership imperative was and is theirs, given politicians come and go, but schooling and children’s needs remain.

Engaging with others’ opinions
Sometimes, after due investigation, my office says what copious evidence tells us must be said on difficult issues for all of us in the system. We are still met at times by personal attacks rather than professional engagement. Our recent report on illegal school exclusions saw blogs suggest that children illegally excluded from school deserve all they get – one assumes including deserving that some schools break the law – and that it would do them no harm to be sentenced to hard labour via the courts. How we make the leap from school exclusion to a prison sentence for what a child has done wrong in school, I leave you to contemplate.

More recently, our work on the exposure of child sexual exploitation by adults in gangs and groups has been met by personal attacks on our prominent spokespeople. Apparently, we do not accept what “everybody knows”, which supposedly is that “Asian” males are almost always the exploiters and white girls the victims. What we really said was that this was just one pattern of abuse and the majority of perpetrators about whom there is evidence are white males, although the ethnicity of perpetrators is not often recorded. We also said that focusing solely on white victims meant abused children of other ethnicities fall through the net.

Holding a view passionately sometimes drives us, being human, to think those who disagree are, simply, wrong. But while passion can explain, it does not excuse refusing to listen to or engage with others’ points of view. At our peril, as adults, we will portray to children the notion that confrontation is the way to get what we consider we, and therefore everybody else, should want. They copy what we do. We should remember that.