Chapter 1

The GERM: What it is and where it comes from

One of the challenges of writing about numerous changes that have beset education in the last quarter of a century has been to find a convenient term with which to summarize the situation. In this I am grateful to Finnish writer and commentator Pasi Sahlberg for bringing the term GERM into common currency (see pasisahlberg.com inter alia). The term, carefully chosen for its connotations of ill health, is an acronym for the Global Education Reform Movement, and Sahlberg identifies five separate features that contribute to it. Given that the term will be used hereafter in this publication, it is worth outlining what these are. In doing so, I clearly acknowledge that these ideas form the basis of one of Sahlberg’s principal publications – Finnish Lessons (Sahlberg, 2012). A more detailed discussion about the impact of each of these strands will inform much of what follows, so for the moment these are outlined in the broadest possible terms – but all of them will be familiar to anyone involved in education.

The first feature is standardization of education. From the late 1980s the drive towards outcomes-based education took hold in England and elsewhere; an analysis of how this happened is supplied in Chapter 2. While it would be absurd to argue that any attempt to drive up standards could be bad, the apparatus used to control and quantify this became a cart that drove a horse. High-stakes testing, the open publication of results in the form of league tables, punitive inspection regimes and a culture of target-setting gradually became the norm in English schools. As policy makers and schools looked for safe and reliable ways of meeting such targets, this culture led to a homogenization of policy and practice as all involved sought to ensure that bases were covered and targets met.

Stringent testing regimes and the need for measurable outcomes led to a strong focus on the second feature – a focus on core subjects. Primary school teachers in England, as well as many of their colleagues in secondary school, will have noted with disappointment how in the last two decades a clear hierarchy of subjects has emerged and become firmly entrenched. Along with this goes the third strand of the search for low-risk ways to reach learning goals. There is an inevitability about teachers seeking the best and quickest ways of generating the sort of results that any given testing regime requires at any given moment. This was captured perfectly in a recent conversation I had with a former teaching colleague, who bemoaned the fact that she once prided herself on being a very good English teacher but now thought of herself as a very good GCSE teacher.

Teachers in England will all recognize the fourth strand: the use of corporate management models as a means of bringing about school improvement. The borrowing – often in a clumsy and half-understood way – of the language and practices of the business world and then the shoehorning of these into the world of schools is one of the principal features of the GERM. With the increased movement toward schools becoming self-governing entities, mainly through the academies programme, the language of target-setting, performance and productivity now informs the conduct of many school leaders and their senior teams.

The final feature is the prevalence of test-based accountability policies for schools. As a lay official of the National Union of Teachers (NUT) I came across my first case of a teacher overtly cheating in a public examination in 2001. A teacher had opened a Key Stage 3 mathematics SATs paper two days early and had the children practise what was on it. At the time the case was outlandish, but as I write this, a simple internet search using teacher exam cheat uk yields results in the tens of thousands. Given the ramifications for individuals and institutions of poor results on standardized testing, such disheartening outcomes are not entirely surprising.

It is important, however, to understand that the GERM is a manifestation of wider forces. We live in times when an economic model in which neoliberalism and marketization hold sway is globally dominant. This is not an economics textbook and I am only too aware that the term ‘neoliberalism’ is bandied about in a way that seems to imply universal comprehension: conversations with students at all levels indicate that this is not the case. For convenience, I will borrow economist David Harvey’s definition of the roots of neoliberalism lying in ‘the assumption that individual freedoms are guaranteed by freedom of the market and of trade’ and that this assumption is ‘a cardinal feature of such thinking’ (Harvey, 2005: 7). The state should limit intervention in economic matters only in emergency or in matters of national security. The prevalence, or hegemony, of such thinking provides the seedbed for educational policies which, along with all social and societal arrangements, allows what was once unconscionable to become the norm. The privatization of schooling with corporations owning chains of schools as they once might have owned garages or carpet shops is now part of the educational arrangement in England. A major educational publishing company talks in the language of ‘emerging markets for faster growth, larger market opportunities and greater impact on learning outcomes’ (Pearson, 2013). When such political and economic conditions prevail, it is no surprise that the GERM can flourish.

My reasons for writing this book are – in no particular order of importance – personal, political and professional. After nearly thirty years of teaching in comprehensive schools I moved into Higher Education in 2004 to become a teacher educator. I still stubbornly use this term instead of ‘trainer’. After such a lengthy period of teaching adolescents in all their good, bad and ugliness it was a pleasant change to work with students who, unlike their unpredictable teenage counterparts, were reliably cheerful, optimistic, energetic and driven by a sense of purpose. Increasingly, however, I became uncomfortable about what happened to them once they went out on school placements. Inevitably, some of the shiny enthusiasm wore off as they became tired and the realities of school life struck home. It was not this that concerned me: such a reaction was to be expected. The cause of my anxiety is captured in the following story.

I find myself sitting in the back of a classroom in a comprehensive school in a leafy suburb. It is a warm and pleasant afternoon and the children in a Year 10 set seem amiable and well disposed. I know my trainee (for that is what I must call her) to be competent, well organized and thorough in everything she does. I hope I have done everything possible to put her at her ease in what I know to be a demanding situation for her. She tells me she is going to introduce the class to J.B. Priestley’s play An Inspector Calls. I am looking forward to it.

It is worth having a word about this particular text. As a teacher it has been a perennial favourite of my own, not least because of the predictability of its impact on young people. The play ingeniously and intriguingly exposes the callous cruelty of a smug, self-satisfied and prosperous family towards a young factory worker (even as I explain this here, I am reluctant to spoil the plot for any reader who does not know the play). It is a compelling metaphor for mankind’s enduring selfishness and stupidity. Having taught it over the years, I began to pride myself in measuring out just how much could be covered in individual lessons in order to finish at a suspenseful moment, leaving room for speculation about how the plot would develop. As more technology became available to me in the classroom, I was able to take advantage of a number of excellent TV and film adaptations.

The lesson begins. We are told we are studying a play. Inevitably, a murmur goes round the room expressing a desire to take a part or not – along with the inevitable enquiry as to whether we ‘will be watching a video, Miss?’ But wait. Before we begin the play we are ... going to look at some historical context? No. Acquire some biographical detail about Priestley, perhaps? Not this time. Point out that there is currently a new production in the West End where audiences are still riveted by this brilliantly constructed dramatic artifice – further proof of the durability of this 50-year-old piece of work? Not on this occasion.

What we are going to do is to remind ourselves of the assessment criteria for the assignment we will have to complete at the end of this series of lessons. And then we are given that assignment, which my experienced eye immediately recognizes has a title that, in itself, gives away a major part of the plot. The class is then asked whether or not that title gives them some indication as to what the play may be about. I slump – although I hope not visibly. I am bound to ask myself why, after some thirty minutes of the lesson, we haven’t resorted to the apparently outdated measure of reading the text or watching a film clip to find out.

The trainee performs competently. She has a pleasant but firm manner, is well prepared and her copious paperwork is in impeccable order. By way of a footnote, I am pleased to report that she is currently building a successful teaching career for herself. At the end of the lesson, when I am to feed back to her, she is accompanied by the teacher in the school assigned to be her mentor. Although my trainee has demonstrated undoubted competence, I do wish to make the point that I feel that she has not done justice to the wonderful material that Priestley has provided her. I clumsily attempt to make light of this by saying that in the unlikely event of her ever asking me to the theatre for the evening I would be forced to decline on the grounds that she’d give away the ending before we go in. The two young women look bemused. When, in more serious vein I try to point out that she should try to capture the attention and imagination of children – most of whom will be far less amenable than this likeable group – before dampening everything by talking of assessment, her mentor visibly bridles at these remarks from some daft old relic who has been let out for the afternoon from his ivory tower. The scheme of work for this play, she tells me with some spirit, has yielded very good examination grades. I hesitate over whether I should comment on such a justification, but settle for the path of least resistance and acknowledge that this is, indeed, an important consideration. I forbear to mention my strong suspicion that these children would get good grades anyway and could possibly have a good deal more fun on the way to doing so.

This is not an isolated episode. I could choose from a raft of examples. As a tutor and an experienced teacher I had attempted to encourage innovation – even daring – in my approach to my trainees and how they developed as teachers. Many were intellectually sharp, practically all were thoughtful, some were hugely funny and inventive and almost all brought a sense of deep-seated commitment to their work, along with a love of their subject. Gradually, however, as they spent more time in schools, they appeared to slip into a dull conformity and, above all, an acceptance of the need to comply with schemes and approaches that were deemed ‘effective’.

My concern prompted me into a doctoral study looking at teachers’ professional autonomy and their own view of this autonomy. Over some three years I interviewed teachers, gathered written testimony from them and, on many occasions, received unsolicited commentaries – often in the form of email rants – as new thoughts and ideas occurred to them or as a new government initiative was announced on the six o’clock news. The final study produced a number of findings, but the most compelling was this: for all that they felt beleaguered by the need to produce results, perform well in observations and produce reams of largely meaningless data, what Ball (2003) calls the ‘soul the teacher’ had not been entirely captured. The vast majority of respondents expressed clearly that they could give much more and could do so in a much more creative and interesting way – if only they were given the time, space and, as they saw it, the trust to do so.

This book draws on the testimony of those teachers. It is also based on the contributions gathered from other teachers in the twelve months up to publication. It is instructive to mention something of the way in which both sets of evidence have been collected. The most noticeable – and most gratifying – aspect of this has been the willingness with which teachers have given time and energy to their responses. Some of this could be attributed to personal loyalty: some, but by no means all, respondents were friends, former colleagues and students past and present. This alone, however, does not account for the enthusiasm with which written and spoken testimony was given, often in great volume and, to reiterate the point, often unprompted. The teachers’ views about their own professional autonomy is of central concern to them and they vehemently wanted their voices heard. I am grateful to them and I hope that readers of this book will find their own thoughts and ideas resonating here as well.

I begin by providing some historical and theoretical background to the situation in which England’s teachers find themselves. I hope this will be useful and interesting, especially for beginning teachers who often find themselves on courses and training programmes from which this sort of perspective has long since been removed. There follows a rather gloomy, but important, section that reveals how the GERM manifests itself in the way schools are run: if we are to resist it, we need to understand the damage it does. From there we concentrate on the energy, knowledge and determination of teachers. We hear the voices of those resolutely holding on to a better version of teaching than that which might be foisted upon them. Finally, and crucially, I consider how teachers, their representative organizations and wider coalitions can challenge current hegemony and work towards a vision of education that improves the thin and meagre provision offered by the GERM.