Richard Pring

Education for all : The future of education and training for 14-19 year olds

1. Introduction: Why a Review? 2. Aims and Values 3. Context 4. Measuring System Performance 5. Learning 6. Teaching 7. Curriculum Framework for the 21st Century 8. From Qualification Reform to a Framework for Learning 9. Employers and the Labour Market 10. Progression to Higher Education 11. Insitutional Arrangements and the Wider Governance Landscape 12. Policy and Policy Making in 14-19 Education and Training 13. Conclusions and Recommendations

The ‘False Dualism’ of Educational Research

Educational research is being subject to damaging criticism from both outside and within the research community. The external critics are impatient of research which does not give evidence-based answers to the questions they ask. The internal critics condemn the very research which seeks to provide those answers. These differences are reflected in the rigid distinction between quantitative and qualitative research. This paper questions the philosophical positions on which such a distinction relies.

The Virtues and Vices of an Educational Researcher

This essay explores the contentious relationship between codes of ethics in research and the range of virtues that characterise ethical researchers in the face of the temptations that they face. I argue that the politics of research transforms our ethical appraisals of character and context. Researchers’ duties towards research sponsors, the research team, and university or school, all ought to be brought to bear in particular judgements of ethically sensitive issues where there is no single or undisputed currency. This re-appraisal foregrounds the need seriously to consider the question of the virtues of the educational researcher.

The Skills Revolution.

The government, through several White and Green Papers, has promoted the ‘Skills Revolution’. This requires central direction and coordination of a wide range of policies, practices and partnerships. But there are several difficulties: the impossibility of micromanaging the complex social and economic system; the dominance of the rather limited notion of skill; and the unexamined distinction between the academic and the vocational. Strong on training; weak on education.The government, through several White and Green Papers, has promoted the ‘Skills Revolution’. This requires central direction and coordination of a wide range of policies, practices and partnerships. But there are several difficulties: the impossibility of micromanaging the complex social and economic system; the dominance of the rather limited notion of skill; and the unexamined distinction between the academic and the vocational. Strong on training; weak on education.

Putting persons back into education

Both the language of performance management and the target-setting culture of our schools lead to a ‘depersonalisation’ of education—a failure to respect young learners as persons. They become a ‘means’ to some further non-educational ‘end’. John Macmurray challenged this depersonalisation in terms not only of its impoverished educational consequences but also of a fundamental philosophical error in giving primacy to persons as ‘thinkers’ rather than to them as ‘doers’. Not ‘I think, therefore I am’, but ‘I do, therefore I am’.

Labour Government Policy 14-19.

The paper, first, outlines the official policy regarding education and training 14–19, second, picks out five areas within which that policy might be assessed, and, finally, raises questions about the educational thinking which underlies the policy.The paper, first, outlines the official policy regarding education and training 14–19, second, picks out five areas within which that policy might be assessed, and, finally, raises questions about the educational thinking which underlies the policy.

Reclaiming philosophy for educational research1

The paper notes the decline in philosophy of education in educational studies from its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s. The explanation is manifold, but includes the more utilitarian and managerial concerns which find less room for the questioning of assumptions distinctive of philosophical enquiry. The paper then uses the Nuffield Review of 14–19 Education and Training to demonstrate the central importance of philosophical thinking if one is to pass from the ‘disguised nonsense’ to the ‘patent nonsense’ in much educational research, policy and practice.

THE COMMUNITY OF EDUCATED PEOPLE

Abstract: The article draws upon the work of two people, Lawrence Stenhouse and Derek Morrell, who in the 1960s offered a vision of education based upon, first, the moral conviction that a liberal and humane education was essential for all and for society, second, the belief in a curriculum agenda in which such moral conviction might be reconciled with moral uncertainty, and, third, the recognition of the indispensability of a democratic approach to making that reconciliation possible. The article shows how that vision has been dimmed by a prevailing social philosophy and political practice, sadly abetted by some in universities who should know better.

Editorial: Educational Research

The Department for Education and Employment has recently prepared a ‘research prospectus’. Its aim is to improve ‘it’s knowledge base in order to develop good policy’ and, for this purpose, is doubling its research budget and moving to a four-year research plan to be developed in collaboration with the research community. However, this must be seen against the background of an unprecedented attack upon that research community. The basis of this attack would seem to be the Hillage and the Tooley Reports, together with the Hargreaves criticism in his 1996 Teacher Training Agency (TTA) annual lecture – although a favourable climate for such criticism had been created under the previous government, as is reflected in Lord Skidelsky’s statement in the House of Lords concerning the proposal to transfer responsibility from the Higher Education Funding Council for England to the TTA for the funding of educational research.

Universities and Teacher Education

There have been momentous changes in the organisation and funding of initial teacher training which threaten the traditional role of universities. However, the critics of these changes fail to see that the changes reflect radical developments in higher education more generally as a result of widening participation, greater accountability and more diverse missions. This makes it necessary for each higher education institution to ask what its distinctive contribution could be to the various partnerships – in the case of educational studies, to the partnership with schools.