Students or customers?

Students or customers?
London: Are corporate values now running education in the UK? Have schools in this country been taken over by the language of management consultancy? And does this imply an undermining of a central purpose of teaching: to encourage a sense of inquiry and morality in young people?

These are some of the questions raised - and answered in the affirmative - by a new report which is billed as the largest investigation into education and training for 14- to 19-year-olds in England and Wales for 50 years.

The Nuffield 14-19 review, based at Oxford University, has taken six years to compile. Its report, which runs to 230 pages, attacks the "relentless change" in education as often counterproductive; renews calls for a baccalaureate system for secondary schools; asks why many young people drop out of education and training in their late teens, and calls for the government to rethink plans to "coerce" them into staying on; and offers contrasts between England's approach to school reform and that which has operated in Wales since devolution.

It also finds space to praise ministers for, among other things, their commitment to raising participation rates among 16- to 18-year-olds and their investment in school buildings. But it is what it has to say on the often troubled relationship between schools and business in England that is, perhaps, most eye-catching, raising questions about the philosophy that has governed schools policy for many years.

In a section on "aims and values" of the UK education system, the report says that one set of goals - the need to improve schooling to serve the requirements of the economy - has been given prominence. It cites a speech by Tony Blair in 2005 in which he said: "The country will succeed or fail on the basis of how it changes itself and gears up to this new economy, based on knowledge. Education is now the centre of economic policymaking for the future."

The government, says the report, has therefore laid down a set of aims that are dominated by the need to develop skills for the economy. This comes across not just in the set of exam results-based performance indicators by which schools are judged, but in the language that is used to describe education policy and its implementation.

The report says that growing central control of education has helped to produce a drive to talk about schooling from a "performance management" perspective, which is borrowed from business.

It says: "The consumer or client replaces the learner. The curriculum is delivered. Aims are spelt out in terms of targets. Audits (based on performance indicators) measure success defined in terms of hitting the targets."

It adds: "As the language of performance and management has advanced, so we have proportionately lost a language of education which recognises the intrinsic value of pursuing certain sorts of question ... of seeking understanding [and] of exploring through literature and the arts what it means to be human."

The report cites the decision by ministers, when they were developing a system of performance management for teachers in the late 1990s, to bring in management consultants Hay-McBer to define what constituted good teaching. Another consultancy, McKinsey and Company, was seen as the authority on effective teaching after producing a report in 2007 looking at outstanding practice around the world.

The assumption behind much of education policy - that performance targets are set for teachers in the form of pupils' test and exam success, and the means by which they reach them are less important - is also borrowed from industry.

Last week, a speech made by a leading figure in school assessment referred frequently and uncritically to pupils being teachers' "customers". The Guardian