Back in 2004, personalised learning was the hypothetical future of education. Tony Blair and David Miliband, the then-education secretary, claimed that personalised learning would "revolutionise" education. The idea behind this was to tailor teaching methods and styles to an individual’s needs and preferences, thereby replacing the outdated "one-size-fits-all" approach.
However, fast forward five years, and many parents, teachers, and pupils are still waiting for the promised significant transformation. The House of Commons Regional Education and Schools Committee reached out to Professor David Hargreaves, a prominent intellectual in New Labour’s educational ideology. Hargreaves, who helped shape the standards for education, advised Estelle Morris when she was education secretary and briefly served as the chief executive of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. The committee tried to understand what became of the promised personalised learning.
Hargreaves had spent four years working on bringing the government’s goals of personalised learning to reality and wrote various pamphlets on this subject. However, he implied that he no longer believed in the concept. His comments confused and frustrated the committee chairman, Barry Sheerman, who expressed his confusion.
Hargreaves has been involved in redesigning the educational system. He challenges the traditional method of secondary education, including the role of teachers, the authority of heads, subjects, year groups, classrooms, and tests. His vision for education includes pupils helping in designing the curriculum, deciding how to use information technology in learning and assessing their progress in collaboration with other learners.
In his vision of the future, the teacher acts as a mentor, offering guidance and commenting on student work instead of assigning grades. Subjects taught will be "essential learnings" such as communication, thinking, social responsibility, or "competencies," where students learn how to manage information and relate to people.
Hargreaves believes that personalised learning should be called "personalising" rather than personalised, describing it as a continually evolving process. He has been involved in helping teachers and heads in rethinking how to approach secondary education. Hargreaves states that the government policies contaminated the term personalised learning.
According to Hargreaves, there is no predetermined blueprint or model for the new educational system. Rather, heads, teachers, and pupils jointly discuss and create teaching and learning strategies. This new concept of education will involve a partnership between teachers and learners.
Hargreaves contends that student feedback and collaborative projects are crucial in his vision of education. He emphasizes that the projects should be constructed genuinely and developed carefully and should involve authentic issues that students can solve through teamwork.
Ultimately, Hargreaves aims to create an education system that is flexible and tailored to the individual, one that encourages critical thinking, creativity, and innovation. Innovation must come from the bottom-up and begin with educators fostering a learning environment that encourages student input and collaboration.
He has always advocated for a fairer education for non-academic children, although his own time teaching was limited to three years in a Hull grammar school. He aims to connect with regular teachers and writes in a simple and straightforward style, yet his use of terms like "four deeps" and "nine gateways" and his pamphlet titles, such as "Deep Experience" and "Deep Leadership," give off a slightly pseudo-religious vibe.
In 1967, he gained recognition with a book based on research funded by Manchester University’s Ministry of Education into behavior within a secondary modern school in Salford docks. His approach was groundbreaking as sociologists primarily tested children’s IQs and measured social disadvantages. Hargreaves approached schools as an anthropologist might, and he concluded that "the awkward squad" created a sub-culture, almost a mirror image of the school’s dominant academic culture, with its own rules, language, and badges of accomplishment. Lower streams were deprived of status in the eyes of teachers, thus, they sought status among their peers. This insight is now commonplace, but at the time, it was revolutionary.
Following 14 years in Manchester, Hargreaves moved to Oxford, where his lectures for postgraduates in teacher training earned him standing ovations. His 1982 book, "The Challenge for the Comprehensive School," was arguably read by more teachers than any other book since. In the book, he argued convincingly that "our present secondary-school system … exerts on many pupils … a destruction of their dignity which is so massive and so pervasive that few subsequently recover from it."
Hargreaves recalls his time at the Bolton school, which awarded him a scholarship in the 1950s. He excelled academically, but he was terrible at gym, games, painting, swimming, running, and especially at woodwork. The woodwork teacher would stop the class, making Hargreaves the prime example of how not to do it.
Imagining a "nightmare curriculum," Hargreaves envisaged its domination by compulsory woodwork, gym, etc., with maths, English, and history relegated to thin slices of the day, thereby disappearing when he turned 14. With persistent failure, wouldn’t he have turned to truancy, subverting the school and escaping education at the earliest possible moment?
According to Hargreaves, schools need to broaden their curriculum, allowing students to experience success in areas other than "the dominant cognitive-intellectual mode." Traditional subjects should be subsumed into an integrated core, occupying half the day, and exams at 16 should be abolished. The expressive arts should play a key role in the core curriculum because everyone can get a sense of achievement from the school’s plays.
The other half-day must concentrate on addressing skill deficiencies, particularly in literacy and numeracy, and providing specialist options of brief duration (e.g., not English per se, but "science-fiction" or "Romantic poetry") so that pupils are not permanently turned off by entire subject areas if they don’t enjoy them.
Following his time in Manchester, Hargreaves was invited by the Inner London Education Authority (Ilea) to lead an inquiry into underachievement, which entailed visiting half of the authority’s 120 secondary schools. As this was being written up to become the Hargreaves report, he was offered the role of Ilea’s chief inspector, an almost unprecedented move for an academic.
"I could have become a crusty old Oxford don, but now I was being asked to put my life where my mouth was," he says. "I assumed two things. Firstly, I would not take anything personally because academics can be hypersensitive. Secondly, I could only fail, but I had enough confidence in my academic abilities to know that I would get a job elsewhere if I had to leave."
New Labour pulled him out of inactivity and, when he was appointed as the QCA head honcho, it appeared that the fox had not just been allowed to mingle with the chickens but was authorized to entirely revamp the coop. However, it didn’t take more than a year for him to realize that the radical reforms he had in mind "were unattainable as long as the Prime Minister maintained complete control of the agenda". Consequently, he resigned, with still three years remaining on his contract.
One of his colleagues said, "Managing an institution such as the QCA isn’t exactly his forte. He’s more of a visionary and a source of inspiration." Hargreaves himself admits that he found it difficult to keep quiet about his opinions in public and had no taste for clashes or disagreements with politicians. "He’s the polar opposite of a political fighter," a former minister remarked.
So, will his contribution to the SSAT lead to the reform of secondary education? The passion of the school heads impressed him, "all our conferences were fully booked, and I’ve never met such self-assured and adventurous people before" but he doubted if the government had the mettle for it.
"They claim to back innovation, but it has to be innovation that conforms with their opinions. It’s ridiculous to have the Department for Industry dictating where business can and cannot innovate.
"Some might argue that a Conservative administration would be more supportive than a top-down Labour government, owing to their emphasis on granting local power to headteachers. However, I am not sure. Labour spoke of granting more autonomy, but their policies remained unchanged."