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    Crucible
    Crucible
    Crucible
    Ebook131 pages1 hour

    Crucible

    By John Reader

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    About this ebook

    Crucible is the Christian journal of social ethics. It is produced quarterly, pulling together some of the best practitioners, thinkers, and theologians in the field. Each issue reflects theologically on a key theme of political, social, cultural, or environmental significance.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSCM Press
    Release dateOct 2, 2014
    ISBN9780334053644
    Crucible

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      Book preview

      Crucible - John Reader

      Contents

      Editorial

      The Wider Context of Education

      John Reader

      Articles

      The First Problem is……a Perennial Issue in English Education: Have We Been Here Before

      John Caperon

      Learning for Change: An Exploration of How Existential Spiritual Education Facilitates Transformation in a Primary School

      Ruth Wills

      A for Culture of Blame: Sunday School Teachers, Youth Workers and the Decline of Young People in‘ Churches

      Naomi Stanton

      Directions in the English Education System Reconsidered

      Jeff Leonardi

      Church Schools: Distinctive and/or Inclusive

      Priscilla Chadwick

      Forum

      Towards a New Paradigm for Social Ethics: Facilitating a Movement ‘Beyond Dialogue’

      Stephen Innes

      Trojan Horse: A Conversation Still Waiting to Happen

      Richard Sudworth

      Book Reviews

      David Osborne, Jeff Leonardi, Rob Merchant, John Atherton and John Reader

      Editorial

      The Wider Context of Education

      JOHN READER

      ‘Education, education, education’, this was Tony Blair’s mantra when New Labour came into power in 1997. As I reflect on 36 years in full time parish ministry, I can say with equal conviction that education, in various guises, has occupied a considerable proportion of my time. During that period I have been involved with eight different church primary schools, some Voluntary Aided and some Voluntary Controlled. I have taken regular assemblies, served as a governor, including being chair of governors on three separate occasions, been chair of a parent teacher’s association, been a parent myself, and I am now a Board member of the multi-academy trust which has been established by my current diocese. Children’s work has also featured in other ways; running a Children’s Festival; a Sunday school; all-age worship; a mums and toddlers group; Messy Church and now Open the Book. In other words, a huge investment of time and energy as a parish priest has gone into this sphere of activity. I have no memory of this turning up anywhere in my training, nor of feeling adequately resourced by the wider Church in this aspect of my ministry over long periods of time. Hence I would argue that education and young people’s work is of major pastoral significance for many parishes, requires considerable resourcing and involves both clergy and laity in a range of different capacities.

      The issues encountered of course are not simply pastoral, as education has always been and will remain a contested area within UK politics. Perhaps no more so than now when the Coalition’s education agenda heralds the biggest changes since the 1944 Education Act, notably through its aspirations for Academies, Free Schools and the deconstruction of Local Authority control. Yet, through our church schools, the Church of England and other faith groups remain deeply embedded and implicated in contemporary structures and their shifting agendas, but with little attempt to critique and challenge what is happening. It was with this in mind that Crucible has brought together articles by a range of experts and practitioners, each of which encourages greater thought and reflection on faith-based engagement with different aspects of education. I hope that their combined contributions will enable a more thoughtful debate on not just the structures, but also the aims and objectives of church involvement in this area. It needs to be noted that as this edition was being compiled, Michael Gove was removed from the office as Minister for Education, but it is unlikely that the overall direction of education will undergo significant alteration. The articles in this edition reflect these concerns.

      John Caperon has been involved with the Bloxham Project, focused on the role of churches in education, and he offers not just an overview of the journey of this relationship, but of where we are now and the limitations and dangers of pursuing current policies. Shifting the focus slightly, Ruth Wills helps us to understand some of the creative work that is now happening in the field of children’s spirituality and gives examples of how this can be put into practice. Naomi Stanton also offers us a somewhat different perspective through her research into the development of Sunday schools and the tensions that arise between the different objectives of such work. Jeff Leonardi, like myself an experienced parish priest, who has been involved with schools work at a local level, challenges the validity of current trajectories in education and highlights how the tensions between what we might hope for in terms of personal and spiritual development for young people and what are the contemporary aims of schooling and education, create an environment in which it often feels that faith objectives are being compromised or betrayed. Priscilla Chadwick reflects on church involvement in schools from the perspective of her long commitment in this field and contribution to recent church reports on the future of education. Each contributor, in different ways, reflects the tensions, challenges and opportunities that this degree of entanglement with statutory provision offers to faith engagement.

      So, where should those of faith locate themselves in terms of current debates, and how do we engage without feeling that we are abandoning the values and aspirations that we might share for the educational process? I was faced by this question in a new way a little while ago, when my own daughter, herself a trained teacher, raised the issue of home education in response to her concerns about putting her elder child into formal education at the age of four. What is schooling all about, and in what ways does it serve the purposes of education? If we have taken the answers to such questions for granted, the articles in this edition encourage us to think again and to raise some fundamental issues. Were schools originally designed to create a compliant and disciplined workforce and to provide a facility for ‘warehousing’ children so that parents could work? Were they designed to create a more moral and well-behaved generation who would fit more neatly into capitalist structures and learn not to ‘rock the boat’? Do schools exist for the benefit of teachers rather than pupils? How do people and children in particular, learn and develop, and to what extent do current educational programmes contribute to that growth or actually inhibit it? Was the whole point of the Blair mantra to construct a workforce who could enable the UK to compete in a global market and to serve what are basically economic objectives? Why the current obsession with targets, standards, league tables, examinations, all of these being applied to children as young as four?

      My daughter and another friend, herself an early-years specialist with her own young children, wanted to talk to their local MP about such issues and did gain a hearing. They were given ‘the party line’ and came away dissatisfied so contacted a politician from the opposition. They have now received a response from Labour Shadow Education Secretary, who has pointed them in the direction of one of his recent speeches on the subject. I refer to this now as it draws out exactly the muddled thinking and conflicting ideas which characterize much of the current debate. In his speech ‘Schooling for the Future’ Tristram Hunt argues for a balance between character and creativity backed by the belief that the former is something that can actually be taught. Although the second section of this offering does indeed extol the virtues of creativity, the real giveaway comes in the earlier section where Hunt lays out what he consider to be the true objectives of education: to create ‘young people equipped with the academic and vocational skills to succeed in an ever more competitive global market place’. In other words, education has a purely instrumental role serving the needs, not of the individuals themselves, but of the UK economy. Whatever fine words and intentions are contained within such speeches, the reality is that the motivation underlying political support for schooling and further education is to generate income: beyond that there seems to be no vision of human development or appreciation of the real needs of children or communities.

      One further implication of this approach can be seen in the scenario now being played out in the realms of higher education. The University of Birmingham, for instance, is planning to embark upon an enormous capital investment programme, including £60 million on a new sports centre and Olympic size pool, plus £30 million on a new library, this is all part of a £175 million redevelopment programme over a period of five years. In fact the Russell Group of Universities has just announced an overall investment of £9 billion over the same period, raising echoes of the response to the 2012 Olympics and its supposed opportunities for commercial enterprise. At the same time many staff in these institutions are now on zero hours contracts, and redundancies are being mooted. Curiously this coincides with a long term demographic decline in eighteen-year-olds. The government has also removed funding for widening participation for students almost completely, including provisions for disabled students. Professional training, e.g. for teachers, nurses, social workers and similar workers are being moved out of the universities and located back in work places via schemes such as ‘Teach Direct’ and ‘Social Work Frontline’. This looks like ‘corporate managers’ responding to the nationwide mushrooming of business and management degree programmes and the ballooning of post-graduate ‘future leaders’ programmes. Plus, the growth in numbers of very wealthy overseas students could probably be more correctly labelled as the children of a highly mobile

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