In Defence of a Rose in the No Longer Secret Garden

nick cowen, 9 December 2008

It is not often, in fact I cannot think of any previous occasion, when I have found myself agreeing more with the opinions of David Aaronovitch than those of Michael Gove and Melanie Phillips. However, in relation to the merits of the Rose report on primary schooling, published yesterday, I find much to my surprise that I do.

On the Daily Telegraph website, beneath a headline that somewhat misleadingly runs ‘History and geography lessons in primary schools should be scrapped’, there is a brief video clip of the Shadow Secretary of State for Education in which he lays into the Rose report.
Gove is seen claiming that, if its recommendations were adopted, by the time children finished their primary schooling they would have ended up learning less, not more, science, history and mathematics than they currently do. Rightly, he wants them to have learned more about these subjects by that stage of their education.
Melanie Phillips is even more hostile to the recommendations of the Rose report. After mentioning a denial by Rose that his report was seeking to get rid of subjects like history and geography but only to ‘give primary schools flexibility to do less, but to do it better’, Phillips writes:
‘This is crazy… because Sir Jim Rose was one of the people who … in a seminal report published in 1992… tore into the madness of the progressive “Plowden” approach, then the orthodoxy in primary school teaching but which was destroying children’s education…’
Melanie Phillips claims that, in proposing that the primary school curriculum should be organised around six learning areas, the Rose Report threatens to undo all the hard-won benefits obtained by the 1988 Education Reform Act. Instead, she argues, it would take us back to the pre-1988 Plowden’ era when its writ was allowed to run riot (!) in the country’s primary schools, inflicting great educational damage on their pupils in the process.
By contrast, in his column in today’s Times , David Aaronovitch adopts a more relaxed and sanguine attitude towards the proposals made by Rose. He sees in them only the sensible recognition of the need for information technology to become better integrated into the learning activities of schoolchildren.
Likewise, he claims, again rightly in my opinion, that good primary schools, even now, are likely to be meeting current national curriculum requirements for subjects like history and geography through project work, rather than entirely through separately time-tabled discrete classes in these subjects.
As I said, I find myself more in agreement with Aaronovitch than Gove and Phillips over Rose. Given how severely constrained Rose was by the parameters of the terms of reference that the DCSF imposed on him, within those constraints what he has proposed seems pretty unexceptionable, if not downright sensible.
As well as preventing Rose from considering assessment, which probably in its present form does more harm to primary school education than anything else, he was also required to incorporate into his proposals the teaching of at least one foreign language and the ‘personal development’ of ‘the whole child’, something that demands that time be given over to ‘understanding physical health and well-being’.
Rose could have refused the brief. But given the terms of reference by which he was constrained, and having accepted them, he does not appear to have made a bad job of things.
As Aaronvitch rightly points out, the merits of incorporating project-based multi-disciplinary forms of pedagogy alongside the straightforward teaching of subjects were recognised and extolled in the Hadow report published over thirty years before Plowden.
Moreover, all that Rose did was argue that use of ICT by pupils should be incorporated into their learning of traditional subjects. He did not argue that its teaching displace such subjects.
That ICT can be so incorporated to great beneficial educational effect seems born out by claims made by a primary school in Devon that has already gone a long way to doing so. Although you might argue that its being posted on the Microsoft Schools website casts doubt on the impartiality of the report, if you see on the website what the school’s headmaster, teachers, parent-governors and parents of pupils say about its heavily ICT integrated form of pedagogy, and also about its very impressive SATs results, then the dismissive reaction to Rose of Michael Gove and Melanie Phillips seems a trifle hasty and ill-judged.
As I say, it is rare that I find myself agreeing with Aaronovitch against this latter pair of commentators and opinion-formers, but on this occasion, I do. If I should not have done so, I would appreciate (politely expressed!) correction from readers.