The Socially Sustainable Education Systems project is about turning the current education system on its head.
The Socially Sustainable Education Systems project has been rattling around in my head for a number of years, almost decades. When I began teaching in 1988, I was fresh out of teacher training college and armed with 4 years of developing my knowledge and understanding of how children grow - emotionally, socially and psychologically - as young humans and the importance of nurturing this growth to facilitate their learning of the world around them and beyond.
However, I graduated at the same time as the then Thatcher government initiated their political education agenda, through the Education Reform Act of 1988. Education did need some reforming, but the core reforms were not designed to benefit children and young people because they generated a shift away from the welfare, nurturing and development of the learner to the managerialism and competition between schools.
Since then, education policy from all successive UK governments have continued to prioritise the marketisation of schools over the welfare of the learner and this has had detrimental effects on the teaching profession, the relationship between teachers and their pupils and the relationship between pupils themselves. The political agenda has never demonstrated understanding of child or adolescent development and as a result, we now have at least one generation of children and young people who have grown up being failed by the existing education system and this has left them with a variety of lifelong problems.
From my research, the daily experience of teachers is to put pressure on their students ‘to get them high targets and grades’. In order to do this, the regime is to test-assess-test-asses-test-asses. Imagine the boredom, the stress, the constant pressure. I think as adults, many of us would go mad if this was our daily life. No wonder some young people struggle to regulate their emotions when, in a school context, they do not feel cared, they do not feel respected and are continually put under pressure to perform instead of nurtured in a way that helps them to thrive.
The Socially Sustainable Education Systems project therefore, is about turning the current education system on its head. Who would believe we are in 2025 where the way we ‘do’ education in England is concerned? We have returned to the Dark Ages with regard to the barbaric way schools have developed behavioural policies and strategies to force our young people to comply with an adult perception of education. The Socially Sustainable Education Systems project presents opportunities to challenge such approaches and questions if such strategies are needed, then we must be doing something wrong and more concerningly, something that goes against the natural development and curiosity that children and young people have about the world we live in.