- Image via Wikipedia
Been thinking more today about my earlier piece on post Primary school selection here.
Leaving the rights and wrongs of selection itself as a policy aside, I am more and more convinced that the real priority for the NI Government on education should be focused on improving the standards of primary education across the board but perhaps most importantly: improving the relationship between schooling and the local community (including parents). Particularly so in areas of social deprivation which (no surprise) are showing sustained and worrying levels of systemic educational failure.
A thought occurred to me on a bus the other day as a horde (I don’t use that word lightly) of school children rolled on in the mid afternoon.
A rough calculation suggested to me that as a percentage of total waking hours, students will spend 20% – 25%(approximately) of that time in a school environment. Yet we know from social psychologists that the ability/motivation/emotional propensity to achieve while in school is largely determined by the environment (physical, social and emotional) in which those students spend the other 80% of their time.
Selection or not, many of those students who the Government believe will benefit from the abolition of the 11+ selection process will experience nothing of the sort simply because they come from environments where there is not a culture of learning or “concerted cultivation”. Not even the greatest of schools or the best of teachers can ‘undo’ or ‘compete against’ what is learned/conditioned/encouraged by society in the majority of their time – which is spent outside the classroom.
Again – I recognise this idea of learning being as much social as institutional is a much more significant and complex approach to addressing the issues in our educational system – certainly it will win fewer headlines (and possibly votes) than the abolition of the 11+ selection tests. It will necessarily have to recognise and address real issues of social and economic disadvantage but it is, I am convinced, at the very core of what needs to be done for the longer term. Otherwise the scenes of youth violence in Belfast City Centre last week will become more and more commonplace and the dire statistics that show more and more of our young people from deprived NI communities leaving school with no qualifications will grow year on year.
This debate must be about more than just narrow issues of ‘selection’ and ‘schooling’. This is about wider education and personal development of our young people. Schools have an important role to play but more often than not I feel they simply reflect the prevailing local culture of/attitude to learning/development rather than shape it – and given the 80/20 split pointed out above that seems only fair and to be expected.
But in partnership with community groups, parents and local/central government they can become the hubs of personal development that our small island economy/society will so desperately need if we are to prevail as a modern, inclusive and prosperous democracy in the end.
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