There’s a scene I still enjoy teaching, every time I get the chance: Macbeth, told he’s safe until Birnam Wood marches against him, treats the prophecy as a kind of cosmic permission slip — an impossibility dressed up as a guarantee. Forests don’t walk. And then, of course, they do; not by magic, but because an army cuts down branches and carries them, and what looked fixed and immovable turns out to have been waiting for someone to actually move it.
I’m not going to pretend a change of Prime Minister is Birnam Wood arriving at Dunsinane, and I’d be a fool to promise the children in today’s attainment report that the cavalry is coming. Governments have promised “national renewal” before, and the trees stayed exactly where they were. But there’s something in that scene worth holding onto: the wood only moves because somebody decides it can, and starts cutting branches. Stories do that — they let us rehearse the moment before we have to live it. Which is, as it happens, more or less the entire argument of Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s tenure as Children’s Laureate: that a child who has been read to, who has been allowed to sit inside someone else’s impossible forest for a while, comes out better equipped for whatever their own turns out to be.
Today’s report on white working-class attainment landed with the depressing inevitability of a wet Monday in February. Another year, another set of figures confirming that a sizeable chunk of our children are leaving school having been measured constantly and served rarely. I read it over breakfast and thought: we’ve been here before, and we’ll be here again, and somewhere in between those two visits the actual children involved will have grown up and left school anyway, none the wiser as to why nobody fixed it in time for them.
I want to tell you about a hundred headteachers in a hotel conference room, because it’s relevant, and because I’ve been waiting years for an excuse to tell this story again.
It must have been around 2003 or 2004 — a couple of years before his death — when Ted Wragg addressed the Independent Schools Association conference. A hundred of us, heads of school, notebooks out, doing the thing headteachers do at conferences, which is nod sagely while mentally drafting the email we’ll send when we get back to the office. Wragg told us about some research he’d been involved with into Singapore’s accountancy students. Apparently they were astonishing in their first set of professional exams — flawless on the calculations, faultless on the spreadsheets — and then fell apart spectacularly in the second set, which asked them to sit across a table from an actual client and tell them, in plain language, what to do with their money.
Wragg’s diagnosis, as I remember it, was that these students were brilliant at what they’d been trained to be good at, and had no idea what any of it was good for. A roomful of headteachers laughed nervously, because every one of us recognised the shape of the problem. We just didn’t know yet that twenty years later we’d still be writing the same speech.
That distinction — good at, versus good for — has lodged in me ever since, the way only the really useful ideas do. It’s not an argument against rigour. Spreadsheets matter. Exams matter. I am not about to stand here, fifty years into this career, and tell you that getting the basics right is somehow beneath us — that ship sailed long ago and good riddance to it. But a child who is magnificent at the test and has no idea what the test was for is a child we have half-finished. We’ve built the engine and forgotten to ask where it’s supposed to go.
Cottrell-Boyce’s Reading Rights campaign makes the same case from a different angle. The children most likely to be let down by the system — the same children in today’s report, more often than the headlines admit — are also the ones least likely to have had the “invisible privilege,” as he calls it, of being read to. He isn’t asking for another testing regime. He’s asking for time, attention, and the rather unfashionable belief that a child who has been read to is better equipped for absolutely everything else, including the spreadsheets.
I don’t think today’s report and Cottrell-Boyce’s campaign are two separate stories. I think they’re the same story told twice. We have built a system that is very good at measuring what a child is good at, and almost entirely silent on what a child might be good for. The white working-class boys — and it is mostly boys — at the centre of today’s report are not short of testing. They are short of someone making the case, convincingly and early enough to matter, that any of it adds up to something they’d want.
I don’t have a tidy three-point plan to fix this, and I’d be suspicious of anyone who claims they do, especially by lunchtime on the day a report drops. But I keep coming back to that hotel conference room, and a hundred heads laughing nervously at a story about Singapore, all of us recognising the problem and precisely none of us having solved it since. If a new government — and it increasingly looks like Andy Burnham’s government, with Ed Miliband installed at the Treasury — wants to be more than a prophecy nobody believed, that’s where I’d start looking for the army. Though I suppose the real question is whether the Chancellor permits the cutting down of any trees at all, or simply asks the Office for Budget Responsibility to confirm the forest was always going to march on schedule. Wragg would, I suspect, find it darkly funny that we’re still here. He’d also, I suspect, tell us to get on with it.
A Principled view 