Here are a few thoughts on the knowledge debates on X this week, sparked by Heather Fearn’s comments that ten years ago ‘knowledge was an unacceptable word’ and accusing people questioning this assertion of having ‘short memories’.
In what I say here, I talk from the perspective of having been involved in thinking about secondary English teaching for many years, including over the period she talks about. These are my personal views.
1. In some quarters in 2000s there was undoubtedly a shift towards skills. Some interpreted it as no knowledge required and there were clearly some school leaders, as well as education influencers, who looked for evidence of skill development without a real interest in the knowledge that lay behind that. That was always foolish and faddish. Some teachers no doubt did experience pressure to focus on skills only and found that oppressive and ill-judged (rightly).
2. However, many teachers and schools were not influenced by this at all. They saw it as the fad it was. Many continued as they had always done, to see knowledge v skills as a false divide. They were vociferous in challenging this dichotomy. They rejected the constant references to Blooms’ Taxonomy, and use of it almost as a mantra or guarantee of learning. (I was one of those).
3. Meanwhile, in the National Curriculum and in GCSE subjects, knowledge clearly never disappeared. It was always at the heart of subject learning. To teach English GCSE without a focus on texts would be unthinkable. To teach set texts at all, at KS3 or GCSE or A Level without teaching knowledge would be impossible.
4. Some (I’d say many) of those who had never been influenced by the skills agenda, or skills v knowledge arguments, continued to offer knowledge in their subjects as they always had, in the long traditions of the subject disciplines. The English and Media Centre (EMC) over its 50-year history has always provided resources and CPD with knowledge at their heart. You can look at every single publication over the whole period for proof of this. Our publications sold very well indeed among English departments, including during the 2000s, 2010s and beyond. They won numerous awards (ERA, BETT etc). Our publication, Literary Shorts, published in 2014, (the time referenced by Fearn) won the ERA Award that year. It was crammed with knowledge for KS3. (Look at the accompanying resource which has a great big first section on all aspects of narrative, plus work on each of the stories to see this – far more knowledge than in some current ‘knowledge’ curricula https://www.englishandmedia.co.uk/publications-magazines/19921/emc-free-ks3-literary-shorts-medium-term-planning-download/). The same is true of all the other publications in that period. Literary Shorts, at that time, was one of our best-selling publications ever. English teachers up and down the country were using it to develop students’ deep knowledge of narrative texts and how they work.
5. A point came when those concerned that skills had taken over, perhaps with good intentions and from their genuine bad experiences in schools, decided that the balance had shifted too much towards skills. Among these were some significant teacher-influencers, often coming into teaching via Teach First, who perhaps only saw the practices in particular kinds of schools, not necessarily across the broad spectrum. Daisy Christodoulou was certainly a major influence in this respect, introducing the ARK English Mastery Curriculum. I first caught sight of this in 2014, and coming from a perspective of being very passionate about knowledge in English, felt horrified by what this new ‘knowledge curriculum’ looked like. It seemed knowledge-poor to me, rather than knowledge-rich. It seemed to focus on all the wrong things – facts about writers, quizzing on historical context, little ‘items’ of information that didn’t fit with the kind of knowledge that formed the bedrock of the subject. There was little actual reading of the texts under discussion – just short extracts – and a lot of factual material to be taught and then tested for recall.
In 2014 I wrote my first ‘knowledge’ blog about this issue and received lots and lots of positive responses from English teachers for whom it struck a chord. https://www.englishandmedia.co.uk/blog/knowledge-about-literature-at-ks3-what-s-significant-knowledge/
The blog became the basis for CPD, presentations and discussion around what knowledge in English is like – including trying to make the case that knowledge differs in different subjects. (This was not commonly said at the time, because the knowledge agenda went along with a new enthusiasm for generic cross-curricular cog sci initiatives. The lack of distinction between subjects has, of course, caused major problems that only now people are beginning to fully acknowledge and try to rectify.)
My blogs and presentations included a strong critique of the idea of ‘powerful knowledge’ as it was being presented at the time, along with the ubiquitous notion of ‘cultural capital’. Michael Young’s work seemed to use a paradigm of knowledge in science that did not fit English as a discipline and many of us had grave concerns that it was distorting the nature of the subject. Professor Robert Eaglestone has written, argued and presented on this very persuasively, including writing an excellent pamphlet for Impact called ‘Powerful Knowledge, Cultural Literacy and the Study of Literature in Schools’.
6. In the mid 2010s, as part of Michael Gove’s wish to influence the substance of what happened in the curriculum and pedagogy, Ofsted began to take a more interventionist approach to the detail of subject learning. It appointed new people in charge of a curriculum team, including in 2017 Heather Fearn to lead the team. Up till that point, I’d seen the work of the Ofsted English HMI as being highly expert, well-informed and rooted in the long-standing traditions of the discipline and its pedagogies. Phil Jarrett (HMI) wrote two important and very useful reports on English ‘Moving Forwards’ and ‘At the Crossroads’. But in 2017, the then HMI and the head of the Curriculum Team seemed to have a very different agenda. Ofsted created an English expert group that selected mostly people with a similar set of educational beliefs to their own. The composition of the group was opaque, even secret up to a certain point but when details emerged, the inclusion of members seemed to be based largely on ideology. Effectively it looked, to those outside the tight inner circle, like a power grab. (Bear in mind that this was during and shortly after the period when people like me were being labelled as ‘the blob’, following Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings’ war on progressive thinking and expressed intention of blowing up the foundations, replacing them with their own new ideas of what education should look like.)
In the wake of a critical blog written by EMC’s Andrew McCallum about the training Ofsted was offering linked to the Education Inspection Framework (EIF), we were invited to go to Ofsted to meet the HMI and head of the Curriculum Team. Our concerns and views did not seem welcome. Ofsted did not seem to us to be in listening mode.
The expert group set up by Ofsted went on to advise (and perhaps themselves write) two very contentious and highly criticised documents on English curriculum and pedagogy. One of the few members of the group who had actually conducted extensive classroom research themselves resigned from the group just prior to publication of the so-called ‘Research Review’. Several academics and researchers quoted in the published review put in complaints about the way their research was either misquoted, misused or misunderstood, including the member of the Expert Group who resigned. We never found out who wrote the review but assume it was a member of the Expert Group, or the HMI. In any event, the version of knowledge and associated pedagogy that it contained felt damagingly inadequate and ill-judged.
7. My objections to much of what I’ve seen emerging, including from Ofsted, over the past decade, have had absolutely nothing to do with a distaste or disregard for knowledge, as I’ve tried to show. My blogs from 2014 are evidence of this. In fact, so worried have some of us been about the perversion and distortion of knowledge `- the fact that knowledge has been damaged, to the detriment of children’s education `- that we have spent many hours arguing about what knowledge in English really is and how important it is that valid knowledge in the subject shouldn’t be lost.
8. To sum up, I'd like to refute the claim that ten years ago knowledge was ‘an unacceptable word’ and that anyone disputing that has a ‘short memory’. Some of us, (including many currently practising teachers) have quite long memories, and of the times before the 2010s or 2000s too. We draw on those memories now, as we did in the 2000s and 2010s, not in order to paint a rosy-tinted picture of what came before but to remind ourselves that there is a tradition of knowing in our subject discipline that has been seriously jeopardised – not just by the skills agenda, but by what came in the period after that as well. The period of skills being perceived as more important than knowledge may have had some worrying effects in some quarters, but what came as a response to that has caused significant system-wide damage of a different kind, at least in subject English, if not elsewhere - damage that I think could have easily been avoided through more open dialogue and constructive educational policy-making, with a close focus on subject disciplines and their long traditions of knowing, thinking and doing.
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