Citizenship and Democracy in Schools: Connecting Policy, Practice and ResearchAccountability, Assessment and Education for Citizenship

Moving beyond “What’s in it for me?”Developing outward facing schools where citizenship is a livedexperience.

Accountability

If we are to be held to account as school leaders, then let us be judged first andforemost on the quality of our children as citizens. Let us be held to account for theway our children view learning, for their level of interest, for their self belief, theirsense of community, their optimism that the future is theirs for the making. In Englishprimary schools the standards agenda has, without doubt, made school leadersaccountable. However, the pressure of high stakes testing has distorted theeducation that we offer. Values and principles about the core purposes of educationhave become suppressed in favour of adherence to teaching that focuses onmeasurable outcomes.The notion of accountability within English primary schools has dominated theagenda increasingly since the 1988 Education Act. As the Association of Teachersand Lecturers state in their recent policy document ‘New accountability for schools’(2010) there is no longer a debate about whether teachers

should

be accountable but‘the questions are to whom and how?’ As the headteacher of an English primaryschool I am more than aware of the constant pressure of accountability.Headteachers and senior leaders are accountable to a wide range of stakeholdersthat include children, parents, staff, governors, local authority inspectors, schoolimprovement partners, Ofsted and the DCSF. Almost on a daily basis, we arereminded of the need to prove our worth and to enact models of leadership that holdothers to account. Depressingly, this ‘top down’ model leads many teachers topressurise their class of children in the name of ‘standards’. Parents and carers seekadditional tuition outside school; all around us is the worry of test performance andranking. Even when we self evaluate school performance, too often the measuresthat we use are dominated by pupil performance within the core curriculum areas ofmaths and English. This has led to a culture of fear in many schools wheremeasurable outcomes, in terms of test results, dominate the primary curriculum.School league tables, safeguarding regulations and the constant prospect of a phonecall from Ofsted, are enough to send a shiver down the spine of the bravest schoolleader.In this paper, I shall argue that as a profession we should indeed be accountable.However, let us make sure that we are aiming for the most important outcomes.There can be no more important responsibility within our schools than fostering andbuilding generations of young people who have a real sense of agency within society.To achieve this aim, my argument is that we need to provide school communities thatprovide real life, authentic examples of what it is to exist within a democracy drivenby values and principles. Throughout this paper I shall refer to the practice that wehave developed at The Wroxham School. As a headteacher, I believe passionatelyin the importance of a principled approach to school leadership. The followingdescription of our school is intended as a basis for contextual understanding of howcitizenship education can be realised as an intrinsic part of everyday experience. It isnot something that is planned for separately but is more a way of being. This is notpresented as an unflawed model, but is intended to provide a rich description of oneschool community that will hopefully resonate with the reader in relation to her ownexperience.

A principled approach to school improvement

Citizenship and Democracy in Schools: Connecting Policy, Practice and ResearchAccountability, Assessment and Education for Citizenship

When I joined my school as headteacher in January 2003, the school was in theOfsted category of special measures. Having previously been described by aninspector as ‘unteachable’ in 2001, stringent behaviour management systems hadrendered the children almost totally passive within classrooms. No one askedquestions, no one volunteered, no one showed any interest; because to do so was torisk being labelled a ‘boff’ (boffin) by your peers. The overriding classroom culture atthat time was one of apathy, boredom and disenfranchisement. On the playground,however, all the frustrations of the day spilled out. Bullying was commonplace, fightsbroke out regularly and for many children conflict at lunchtime ruined any prospect oflearning in the afternoon. As a newly appointed headteacher my aim was to inspirethe school community to believe in the prospect of a bright positive future. For twoyears HMI had noted limited progress. What was needed was not more of the same,but a new way forward built on the notion that learning can be magical and irresistibleif we find the right opportunities. I was convinced that we needed to swim against thetide of school improvement that measures progress through setting tightly definedtargets. What was needed was hope, the art of the possible, a sense of optimism.I began by telling the children, staff and parents that we were going to becomeknown as a ‘listening school’. The message was that our learning journey as aschool community was going to be a collective endeavour. I made it clear from theearliest days that the best answers often lead to new questions and that our journeyof improvement would be exciting, shaped by dialogue between all participants. Our journey would be based on working together to create exciting learning opportunitiesthat would mean none of us would be able to wait to get to school each morning.However, the curriculum followed by the school at this time was rigidly timetabledand monitored through observations, planning scrutiny and summative analysis ofchild and adult performance. Subjects were planned using national schemes of workand there was little confidence for creativity. We set about enlivening the children’sinterest in learning by inviting a wide range of visitors into school. We worked withartists, a poet, musicians, scientists, a youth rock band – anyone who could bringlearning to life. Gradually the atmosphere around the school began to change.Children began to get excited about learning almost in spite of themselves andteachers appreciated a fresh approach to curriculum monitoring which was based oncelebration rather than criticism. Our alternative approach to school improvementbased on the principles of trust, co agency and inclusion, rapidly enabled us to betaken off special measures and within three years to be judged by Ofsted to beoutstanding (Ofsted 2006, 2009). The story of our development has been co-researched by the University of Cambridge and will be documented in a forthcomingbook entitled ‘Creating Learning without Limits’ (2010 forthcoming).

Giving adults and children a voice

Our progress had been achieved so rapidly because the aims of citizenshipeducation underpinned every decision that we took. We became inspired to learnand to challenge ourselves because everyone was given a voice; everyone’s viewswere listened to and respected. Decisions were made and evaluated collectively.When learning becomes a collaborative process, when individuals are supported andencouraged, instead of being labelled, everyone benefits.In my previous school I had participated in an ESRC funded research project intostudent voice (Fielding and Bragg 2003) and had initiated the practice of wholeschool mixed age meeting groups. This radical democratic process forms analternative to the model of a school council, enabling the whole community toparticipate in discussion, debate and decision making. When I arrived at WroxhamSchool there was no school council. Indeed no one within the school, adult or child,had a voice; decisions were taken on their behalf by local authority advisers and the

Citizenship and Democracy in Schools: Connecting Policy, Practice and ResearchAccountability, Assessment and Education for Citizenship

outcomes were inspected each term by Her Majesty’s Inspectors. On my first day ofheadship I held a circle time with each class and their teacher. This meeting was away of getting to know the children, but crucially it gave the message that we were allgoing to be involved in finding out what our school was good at, in order that wecould improve still further. At the end of my first term, staff suggested that weimplement the model of whole school mixed age circle meetings that I had described.Consequently by March 2003 we had implemented the circle meetings that still takeplace each week. Each Tuesday morning at 10.15am furniture is moved back ineach classroom to provide space for a meeting; children then leave the room to jointheir allotted group. The meetings take place in each classroom from years one to sixwith another group in the hall and another in the staffroom. The meeting lasts forfifteen minutes and is followed by playtime. Initially, each group was led by a teacherusing an outline session plan written by me with ideas for warm up and warm downgames, news of the week ahead and a focus for discussion and feedback. However,by September 2003, it was agreed that the Year Six children would be confidentenough to take the lead. The meetings continue in this format and provide a forumfor whole school participation. Issues discussed are initiated by children, staff,governors or a mixture of all three. Decisions are often quite small because thegroups meet so regularly. This form of regular dialogue ensures that communicationis effective and that decisions taken are effectively evaluated. Crucially, discussionleads to action and dialogue leads to empathy.In preparation for this seminar paper, I asked two children that I came across in thelibrary, to tell me what circle meetings were for. Alice (10) commented:‘I think we have circle meetings to discuss what goes on in school, soeveryone knows about it and it’s not secret……….We discuss things and wework as a team… the Haiti fair and discussions like that’I asked her who decides what action is taken:‘We all decide as a group and we have votes and everyone gets their share oftheir ideas’Megan (8) said the meetings were held ‘so that people know how you feel’. Shewent on to say that it was an opportunity ‘to talk about things you’re upset about’ thebenefit of mixed age groups being that ‘you might already know your class’s ideas’Without the meetings Megan pondered ‘you wouldn’t really know how other peoplefeel and the teachers wouldn’t know how to sort it out’

Whose voices are heard?

Sir Al Aynsely-Green, Children’s Commissioner for England, commented recently inthe Times Educational Supplement (2009) that ‘children only tell teachers what theythink they want to hear’. His argument was that a ‘crisis’ has been caused by the‘constant obligation’ for teachers to consult with children and to record evidence ofdoing so for Ofsted. The Children’s Commissioner was calling for an improvement incommunication between adults and children, apparently recognising that consultationis often seriously flawed. The real danger to citizenship education is that our childrensee through the adults’ agenda of consultation and instead experience a model ofparticipation that is tokenistic (Taylor & Robinson 2009). Experiences such as thisthroughout school life ultimately reinforce feelings of powerlessness within society.Accountability to the aims of citizenship education means providing a principled,living model of democracy that enables empowerment within individual schoolsettings. We cannot afford for our teaching to be undermined by day to dayexperiences that go against the values we discuss in the classroom. Small actions