Politicians will often look to overseas when trying to effect change in our own education system. Favoured countries range from Singapore to Finland and Canada to China when they try to make a point about how British youngsters need to compete with their global peers on skills from mental arithmetic to teambuilding and creative thinking.
There is no doubt that there is much we can learn from our neighbours in aspects of educational practice; no doubt also that global measures put the UK firmly mid-table in outcomes in Maths and Science. However, it isn’t as easy as it sounds to transplant what goes on in schools all round the world into the UK environment.
Recently I have visited schools in China and Dubai. In both cases, the schools I visited were huge by British standards: over 4000 pupils in each occupying huge campuses. However, the two experiences couldn’t have been more different. China relies very much on explicit instruction: the teacher explains how to solve a problem in, say, quadratic equations and the class will then attempt an example. The teacher will support and explain and, in the Shanghai “Maths Mastery” approach, won’t move on until every pupil in the class is able to solve the equation.
In Dubai, in the school I saw at least, the approach was very different. Every child has a laptop and all the resources were available electronically. Tasks set are often quite open-ended; group work is common and pupils work together collaboratively. The teacher acts as a learning facilitator, steering pupils through the activity and helping them on an individual basis as the lesson progresses. The focus was very much on self-assessment, with pupils identifying their own strengths and weaknesses and developing strategies to address them.
Both education systems are very successful. Chinese children leave school with a significantly higher level of numerical and computational skills than their counterparts in the UK. Dubai children are sophisticated, well-informed mature young men and women who have the qualities needed to succeed in a global, cosmopolitan world.
So, which education system should we in the UK try to emulate? Should we, as traditionalists would argue, stick to tried and tested teaching methods: teacher-led instruction, classes sat in rows, frequent testing along the way? Or, as the more progressive wing in education would prefer, should we allow pupils to learn in a personalised way, using the latest developments in technology to explore ideas at their own pace and then work with others to synthesise the information in a project-based task?
As ever, the question is a little more complicated than that. The two educational systems are so different because the societies in which they have grown up are different. Chinese children, and indeed their parents, are hugely invested in education; youngsters in China will regularly attend extra lessons in the evening and at weekends to improve their test scores in the famous Gaokao exam. Dubai parents are equally ambitious but their children live in a sophisticated, materialistic society where formal qualifications are only part of what it needs to succeed. Each educational system is a mirror of the society it inhabits.
In the UK, we sit uncomfortably between the manufacturing industry, which needs to be reinvigorated if our economy is to prosper, and the service/gig economy which reflects changing lives in the 21st century. We have the unenviable task of serving both of those masters when preparing pupils for adult life. So the next time a politician pontificates on PISA scores, or the next big thing in education, look at the bigger picture and ask yourself what kind of society you want. That will tell you the kind of education you want for your children.