Mr Yamazaki: An Epilogue

Don’t be fooled, Sensei Yamazaki does not hold all the answers — and he would be the first to admit it.

Last night I wrote a fictional account of a visit to Mr Yamazaki’s controversial primary school in Truro, Cornwall (also fictional). Things are done a little differently there.

I wrote it to address what I perceive to be the biggest single problem in British primary education: overload.

There is just too much of everything for anything truly meaningful to be achieved, and too much of our children’s understanding is surface deep.

Too many learning objectives, too many assessment tools, too many meetings, too many schemes, too many consultants, too many useless INSET days, too many portfolios, too many initiatives with fancy names, too many books to mark, too many to-do lists, too many display criteria, too many clipboards, too many humourless conversations…I could literally go on for days.

I’m delighted that the ‘hitaisho’ method sparked such debate, and I love nothing more than being challenged. As my late grandfather said: “There is no tree worth its wood that can’t survive a good shaking.”

However, I urge anyone offering a critique to address the problem of overload.

If you don’t like Mr Yamazaki’s ideas, bring their flaws into the light and move the debate forward. Please don’t limit yourselves to a leaden moan! If everybody who read the blog copied it, pasted it and edited it, we would have such a treasure trove of transformational ideas. My point was that unless we strip away everything, we won’t be able to think clearly about the direction we want to go in.

Let us all be utterly relentless in our attempts to undo the overload that is eating away at our schools.

Please, pick apart every single one of Mr Yamazaki’s ideas. I wrote them in one sitting, as a thought experiment. They are about as far from perfect as it is possible to get, and it doesn’t take long to find gaping holes! All I ask is that people remain open enough to enter the spirit of the article, if not the methods.

My final plea is this: lace each criticism with a solution to overload, otherwise leave us all alone, we’re too busy.