Reframing the culture of policy-making
I think it’s clear that policy by announcement and imposition has run its course. It may improve test scores in the short term, but it turns out that a hierarchical power structure where ‘we say, you do’ makes school less appealing both to pupils and teachers.
We need a new way to make policy.
We’re not the only people to suggest that education policies should be developed collaboratively and iteratively, and that they should focus on the long term. Our book outlines a number of projects and processes that bring people together to think about education policy, that use design processes and systems thinking, learning from the past and looking to the future. But we believe that we also need to reframe the culture of policy-making.
We need a culture with a focus on learning and building relationships, and which puts children and young people at the heart.
The importance of learning
We’ve come a long way in building policies on evidence and evaluating ‘what works’ - and that’s important. A focus on learning means building systems where that knowledge is stored, shared and kept up-to-date. Where it’s used to challenge thinking, not to prop up the status quo. But it’s also about bringing people together to learn from each other. Expecting people to properly articulate their arguments and the evidence that underpins them. Really engaging with the arguments of others - yes, even those you think are wrong - not so you can demolish them, but to understand them. It means bringing together people who see the world differently, whose values and life experiences are different, and incorporating those perspectives into a bigger picture.
It’s important because it encourages respect. Those who have done the work so that they can articulate another’s argument build trust. And it encourages innovation. We won’t solve the problems of education by doing more of what we’ve done in the past. Listening to different points of view with an openness to learning from them isn’t about compromise, or building bland policy that offends no-one. Decisions still need to be made. But those decisions will be built on a greater understanding and a more comprehensive evidence-base. And all who are involved will have grown in their own understanding - surely an important aim for education.
Making relationships central
Involving a diverse range of people in policy-making, and learning from them, is important if policies are to be made and implemented successfully. But key to culture change is having a process that aims to enhance relationships between the people involved. This is about bringing different groups of people together - parents and teachers, employers and school leaders, community leaders and academics, young people and politicians, and many different combinations of all of them - to build policy together. It means helping people to understand how policies are made and implemented, giving people time to listen and understand the arguments, facilitating conversations between people - supporting those who’ve never been involved before, and helping everyone to explain their thinking.
It’s important because it gives people more ownership of what happens in education, and more responsibility for its success. It helps people to feel that they belong, both within the education system and within the processes that make policy. It builds policy that starts from where people are, not where we think they should be. And that builds an education system where people are included, and know they are important.
Putting children and young people at the heart
Although education policy-making does, quite obviously, focus on children and young people, it’s often about what they need for the future, the knowledge that adults believe they need, the books they should read and the ways they should behave. All of these things are important - and contestable - and they should be continually debated and refined. But policy-making usually happens in places where children aren’t present, and it’s easy to forget what five-year olds are like when you’re sitting in the DfE. We need to build policy that reflects what it’s like to be three - or thirteen; to focus on what children need now as well as in the future; to develop policies that work for children with different needs and life experiences.
But it doesn’t just mean making sure that policy-makers think about children and young people. It also means involving them. Building structures and systems that make it possible for them to engage - at whatever age - in talking about the things they need, the things they enjoy, the things they want to do, and that they find difficult. Systems that enable them to be part of developing policies that will affect them - locally and nationally.
Of course policy-makers and politicians will still have to make decisions. We operate within political and financial constraints, there are global and local challenges to be faced, we need to meet the needs of the economy, the environment. But by building systems for policy-making that focus on learning, on relationships and on children and young people we create opportunities for dialogue, for ownership, responsibility and belonging. We create systems of trust and respect, where people are more likely to collaborate; we include people with experience of the many systems that impact on education; we empower people to engage with different arguments, different perspectives. We make education, and society, better.
