Is the Edu Industry Fake?
This is an impassioned post from Claire Stoneman, blogger at Birmingham Teacher, head teacher at Four Dwellings Academy, a school at +0.22 in a MAT with -0.35.
She has great P8 relative to her context, loves photography and is an English teacher, a trifecta of achievements in life.
Within our edu world, there are those at the top: the edu voices have now become shiny packaged companies and aren’t in schools anymore, and so are sheltered from the consequences of what they sell and profess to believe. And the slickly marketed faux mateyness and cruel optimism of the course or package to buy into and the – sorry, but it’s just so disheartening – sheer disingenuousness of it all as schools scrape around for cash.
Those at the top have the money and, because they have the luxury of time outside the busyness of the school world, perpetuate newly crafted beliefs and ideas that hold schools in their sway. Don’t get me wrong, many of these beliefs and ideas are good, and are founded on a solid research base. Others are not.
The tragedy is that schools, whose budgets are cut to the bone, are sold to relentlessly. We see it, and yet we don’t. Because the marketing is so slick, and so relentless, and the voices so carefully crafted, and so whisperingly seductively cruelly optimistic, we give in.
These companies hold a disproportionate sway on the story we’re telling ourselves in schools, on the overblown challenges they throw in our paths, and on the silver bullet images of success they want us to see. To a degree, they have become luxury beliefs.
This feels both true and despairing.
The voices “at the top” simply have a swathe of followers, but rarely do they have a track record.
I love the accusation that they may even be insincere - spouting some dogma they believe will sell, regardless of their true belief. Her blog is impassioned and scathing.
But, I don’t share this view. The sadness, for me, is that they do believe. Everything sounds so logical, so right, and there’s research to prove it. But there isn’t impact, not in the schools they come from, or in the schools they profess to serve.
I could name names - but we don’t do that. Facts are inconvenient. We don’t publish their progress 8, we don’t look for their impact. Instead, like Claire, we might rage, but she argues that, despite our misgivings, “we give in”.
School leaders are at risk of our thinking being hijacked by the luxury beliefs of those at the top of the edu social media elite. Conformity bias can motivate us to copy whatever seems common.
Prestige bias can motivate us to copy whoever seems to be the most accomplished, even if they’re not.
But this is the other problem, the “social media elite”. Followers, voices, reposts and retweets, likes. There is a cure. Give up social media. I gave up Twitter in 2017 and it genuinely made me both happier and kinder.
There is a second cure. You don’t have to “give in”. Hire consultants and tell them you’ll pay them by results. (I’m desperate for a group of heads of English to take me up on this offer).
Leadership teams already do in a way. Their Ofsted judgements improve, and then I become a luxury which, when an Ofsted judgement is the goal, I am.
I tell all my schools - if we can’t measure my impact, get rid of me. I wish Ofsted judgements weren’t the main goal, but that’s a different world few heads can live in.
It is also how I train school improvement partners. This training is delivered by two ex head teachers of outstanding, award winning schools, lead Ofsted inspectors and current SIPs to dozens of schools.
My role in this training is to focus on what the research really means - not what the edu-world thinks it means.
It’s the only such course in the country with a quality mark. (In fact it may be the only such course in the country). If you know anyone who wants to work in school improvement and actually help schools to improve, check it out.