Student-centred learning? Forget it. It undermines the purpose of education.

2020 will go down as the year where parents finally took more of a hand in their children’s education than ever before. But the relationships between parents, students and their teachers worked well because students weren’t the only ones we worried about.

Traditionally, schools have always put children at the centre of everything they do. Who could argue with that? Young people are the reason we all turn up at school every morning to put in a shift, doing our best to make sure they learn more today than they learned yesterday.

But this year, teachers have not been alone in teaching their children: parents have been the inevitable and essential teaching partners. And for teachers, this means that the student is not the only person at the centre of their thoughts. Creating activities that they can do alone was important, but so has been thinking how parents can help (and making sure they have the Goldilocks sweet spot of engagement in their children’s learning).

This isn’t a new thing — it’s just that we’ve had a direct unveiling of the curtain between home and schooling, and the relationship is no longer a simple one of “the child is at the centre of everything we do”. Because having the child alone at the centre of what we do doesn’t achieve what we want to for them.

On the dark side, though, every teacher has had that parent, who treats the education of their child as a product, and the relationship with the school as one of customer-provider. Where the school is a private one, the customer relationship becomes an even stronger play, for even more parents.

Why do we pay the same fees for online learning?

Why do we not have live teaching, all day, just like in school?

Why can’t we go back full time, every day, for everyone?

I pay for this, and expect a certain quality in return.

But if you’re a teacher, the relationship can’t be one of customer-provider. The students in front of you, and their parents, are not customers. Educationalist Gert Biesta this morning explained why, in his #IPDAConversations talk with ESF, which I partly paraphrase:

Teachers are professionals. Professionals don’t provide a service to people who know what they want. As a rule, the people needing their services don’t even know they need the service, and certainly don’t know the precise element of the service that they require. It’s the job of the professional to work along with the person they’re serving to define and shape the problem in hand, and make it work.

Doctors diagnose with their patients’ complicity.

Lawyers work alongside their client to define the course of action ahead.

Teachers work with students and parents to work out what needs done next.

All these professionals use their judgement, in the moment, to work out what the best course of action will be. The research, the law, the prior practice will all help to inform that, but what worked in the past may not, in the judgement of the professional, be what works today.

So in schools, education can never be a product, with a customer who gets served through a transaction. Parents and students, on the one hand, and teachers on the other, need to co-design a path together.

The next time a parent makes demands about what should happen next, the job of the teacher is to take it on board and then work with them to find the right answer to the right problem.

But what if a teacher makes demands on a parent, and a student, a demand that they feel doesn’t sit right? Should parents and students feel empowered to talk back, and ask to change the course?

If teachers had enough time, and fewer of these negotiations to work out, then yes. But with 180 students a week in secondary, and up to 34 little people in Primary, it doesn’t feel possible. Too many relationships, too many negotiations, too little time.

So instead of expecting individual teachers to find the capacity to make this co-design work, we need to nurture the kind of community culture that creates more aligned and manageable expectations on what co-design and action is required. Having more aligned expectations, and a common language on what it all means, helps reduce the number of negotiations a little.

We also need to rethink the accountability structures that prevent teachers feeling they have the scope to make fundamental changes to courses, examinations or judgements on student progression. Being co-designer and judge — as teachers in the United Kingdom became this year — is an uneasy balance to strike. But if we were to move towards a system where teachers’ judgements are trusted over examinations, their professionalism and professional judgement needs recognised by the community, and not just by their peers.

Is that professional judgement not recognised at the moment? Absolutely not. It is eroded, repeatedly, by qualifications authorities and education ministers who favour maths over professionals, even when the inevitable U-turn on such an attitude has been signalled a week before.

Professional judgement is not about individual agency — it’s about sovereignty of the profession, so that it is not pulled in jolts towards the latest fashion. While standards set the rails along which good teachers will ride, they can’t become rigid GPS signals that prevent teachers’ agility when faced with a new situation. New situations can be small, or they can be opportunities to be transformative.

We also need to drop the the managerial language we use in our system, designed to stop professionals drawing outside the lines. And the time-consuming, layered and subtle ways we create change in the teaching profession become immediately redundant when up against the challenges we face today: ecological, social, health, environmental. Changes cannot take 12 months to try; we need language that offers more agility, more conversation and dialogue about new ways to stay accountable. Such language, case studies and stories can also help chip away at the hackneyed stereotypes painted by the wider community, based on their experiences from 20, 30 or more years ago.

As a profession, teaching needs to tell a new story, so that it can seize the reins the current series of crises offers. What’s the story you’d tell?

I wrote this post ‘live’, during the seminar, to try to bring my own thoughts together. I hope they’re useful and provocative, even if they’re a little rushed.