One of the successes of the revolution that overtook the subject of English in schools in England from about 1988-2012, was its skill in wiping the slate clean of what had gone on previously. As an experiment, try a mind-game: what kind of research and what kind of publications (on the matter of the teaching of English) between, say, 1970 and 1980 were being produced? What kinds of discussions were going on between experienced teachers, teacher trainers and education researchers? What kind of reports were they producing? How were these reports being disseminated?
So that people reading this, will know where I fit into this, let me say I first began working in schools in 1974 either as a peripatetic writer-performer or as a writer-in-residence. Technically, I had a teaching certificate because my degree in English was awarded just before the time that there was a government requirement for anyone teaching to have either done a teaching degree or to have postgraduate certificate in education. Prior to that point, you could teach in schools if you had a degree and without a teaching qualification. However, I was only rarely asked to exercise that right, as I always worked under the supervision of trained teachers.
In that period, I was aware, largely through my parents Harold and Connie Rosen of the work of the London and National Associations for the Teaching of English and I had an awareness of a constellation of institutions and organisations such as the London and Birmingham Institutes of Education, Bretton Hall College, the English Centre (as was), the Centre for Language (as was) in Primary Education and that there were bodies such as the Schools Council which were government funded research bodies, established by the government in order to develop English teaching. As I understood it at the time (and still do) this was a way in which interested and experienced professionals shared and disseminated expertise through papers, books, articles, conferences and lectures. Cascading (!) from this were Inspectors (HMI) and local authority directors and officers who had a lot of power to set up local conferences, develop their own structures (eg the ILEA advisory teachers' scheme), and hold competitions or local events to celebrate the work of schools and students. I found myself being part of some of these initiatives as local English advisers or inspectors ran writers like me into schools to encourage and develop writing. Since then, I've seen this as analogous to the way music education depends in part on peripatetic music teachers who are often professional musicians.
But let's go back to my question about what documents produced by this informal constellation can you remember? My parents were responsible for producing one of them, 'The Language of Primary Schoolchildren' (1974). And just to be clear, this wasn't simply a matter of Harold and Connie Rosen coming up with ideas out of the tops of their heads. My mother, Connie, was commissioned by the Schools Council to visit scores of schools in England, Wales and Northern Ireland and distill what she thought was 'best practice'.
As I mentioned in a previous blog, another report was produced by Bernard Newsome and Margaret Mallett. It came out in 1977, and like my parents' book, the research was funded by the Schools Council and involved in their case research in 40 schools. Between the time of parents' work and the Newsome-Mallett work the Schools Council was disbanded. In the history of how it came to be that a small ministerial clique came to run the teaching of English, the disbanding of the Schools Council was one important step.
But there's another: it's the shelving of the reports. My parents' report had a reasonable 'half-life' in that it was published by a commercial publishers, Penguin Education. However, the Newsome-Mallett report appeared in a dull edition, with an institutional yellow and black cover, with the words 'School Council Working Paper 59, Talking, writing and learning 8-13, Evans/Methuen Educational'. It's about as dull a cover as could possibly have been created. It appeared in 1977.
I have just picked up a copy on eBay. The content is quite extraordinary. It is packed full of eg transcripts of school students' talk and writing, covering various genres of writing - accounts, stories, poetry, with detailed accounts of how teachers moved from initiating topics through visits, research, examination of texts through to outcomes in writing. There is plenty of learned commentary citing theory from a mix of linguists, philosophers, psychologists and educationists.
In another time and in another place, it would be a seminal document, showcasing wonderful work by teachers and students from all over England, Wales and Northern Ireland. It would be something to be celebrated which in turn would have enabled it to have been widely disseminated so that local authorities and teachers could have modelled their practice on any or many of the examples given in the book.
I put it alongside a book called 'Language in Use' by Peter Doughty, John Pearce and Geoffrey Thornton (1971) which also came out of a Schools Council project and was based on the linguistics of M.A.K.Halliday. It stands in opposition and contrast to the idiocies of the SPaG/GPS test and syllabus imposed on primary schools in England for the sole purpose of testing whether teachers can teach what is a very imperfect notion of 'grammar'.
Since the production of these three books (reports) - 1971, 1974 and 1977 - English teaching research had one late blooming with the Language in the National Curriculum Project (LINC) - and then came a set of top-down diktats from government.
My point in talking about these three books is that when I and others have criticised what has been imposed since 1988, we've been asked, 'What do you propose?' as if we come from a tradition that is devoid of research, theory and examples. Perhaps our side of the argument has not been very good at thrusting these three books (and there are many others eg the series that came from the Open University) in front of people and said, 'These!'
But then we come up against the question of power. I've often thought the phrase 'language is power' faulty in a variety of ways. One of the ways my reservations are exemplified is by looking at what took place in this matter of English teaching. These three books are stuffed full of language. Perhaps even, we might say that there's too much, as the seven authors did their best to explain and over-explain what their research, theory and practice were all about. Even so, all it took was for the ideological certainties of a series of education ministers - ie the ones with political power - to wipe this body of work from the slate. It was overlooked, dismissed, ignored, wiped away. In their place came, for example, the absurd documents of the National Literacy Strategy - obsessive, anonymous, rigid courses in how to de-professionalise and demotivate teachers, tying them down to minute by minute curricula. And then we had (of course) the test-crazy Gove regime with its spurious claims about 'knowledge' mixed with nationalism as the ideological bedrock for what's been imposed on teachers and students.
I fondly imagine that at some point in the future, educational archaeologists will discover these three books, and pull them off a shelf and be amazed that such seemingly advanced thinking could possibly have existed. Perhaps what will happen is that the way education is run in this country will change, and the country will wonder how it is in a democracy, an education system can be run so undemocratically, and people will thrash around wondering if there are institutions that could be run which rise out of the collective wisdom of experienced professionals working alongside linguists, philosophers, psychologists and researchers. Perhaps someone will 'discover' the Schools Council, the LINC project and wonder why they don't have something like these in their lifetime.
