Why Acknowledging Readiness is so Important in Education

‘He possesses, neither by experience nor talent, any managerial ability at all’

-       A Glasgow Industrial Tribunal’s ruling on St Mirren’s sacking of Alex Fergusson

This week, the guest on Desert Island Discs was the Secretary General of  NATO and former Prime Minister of Norway, Jens Stoltenberg. During the course of the programme the listeners were told that he didn’t learn to read until he was ten years old. The Secretary General explained:

“I struggled a lot. I was not able to read, I was not able to write. I had trouble with speaking. I stuttered  . . . nothing indicated that he could become party leader, Prime Minister and Secretary General of NATO.” 

At ten, his parents moved him to a School that accepted that he was,       “ . . . a little bit different. And suddenly I started to learn.  The first book I read was ‘The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad.’

This story is not that unusual. After all, we all have different stages of readiness and, given time, will find our own place in the world. So before lauding Stoltenberg’s story as one against the odds, (and he was fortunate his parents worked to find the right school for him), we might consider whether that same story could happen here? Or whether by the age of ten, the die would be cast, the child already defined by data with expectations to match, held back by entrance exams, an unfortunate casualty of streaming and selection in a system that favours the early developer. It is shameful to label and segregate children on perceived or learnt ability at a young age whilst ignoring the most basic premise of human development, that it happens at different times for different children. It is a system that relies on the physical, intellectual, emotional and social maturity of children reflecting their chronological age and as such, will always fail many of them.

Our relentless drive to ensure that children begin their formal education younger and younger in order to meet some spurious targets is hugely damaging for a hidden number of children. And it's so unnecessary. We don’t have to look far for other education systems, where children start school as old as seven and yet, by age sixteen, have literacy and numeracy standards that comfortably exceed ours. Nor does it take a lot of imagination to see that the same children, rather than being held back, are better adjusted, having had several years of growing up in the bosom of their families or experiencing a holistic education somewhere from where target setters are banished. These children are more likely to develop self-confidence, co-ordination and even a sense of intellectual curiosity and hunger before starting formal education.   

So when do children reach their academic maturity?  Some time ago, I attended a conference in which one of the speakers, a very successful army doctor spoke about his rather ordinary school career at a grammar school in Norfolk. When he was in his final year of school, several of his teachers complimented him that at last he was starting to work. His reply was telling: ‘No’, he said, ‘I’ve always worked this hard. The difference is I’ve only just got it.’ The lesson is we all ‘get it’ at different ages. 

The examples are plentiful and two that stand out are those Amanda Foreman, who won the Whitbread Prize for her biography 'Georgina: Duchess of Devonshire", based on her doctorate thesis from Oxford. At A levels she got two Cs and, disastrously, an E in English. She re-took her English at a crammer - and still got an E. Although she applied twice, not one British University made her an offer. Such is the way we measure our children. Thankfully, by going to the United States and beginning her tertiary education there, all came right, but how many others have been similarly lost to a patently flawed system? The second from a different field of endeavour is that of David Hemery who was born in Gloucestershire, but educated in the United States. As a youth, he was dyslexic and unable to read until the age of ten, and at 14 years weighed six stone and was only five feet and three inches high. Not the resume one would expect from someone who went on to win a gold medal in the 400 metres hurdles and who since has written four books and accumulated four degrees from Boston, Oxford and Harvard - and who didn't specialise in a single sport until he was twenty. How far would he have got in the rigorously selective environment of his homeland? What chance would he have had? 

For some children, whose school careers are like shooting stars, they can be ablaze at twelve, but burnt out by twenty. Others have a longer fuse and their trajectory is enduring, so long as they haven’t been placed away in a box of duds somewhere for failing to ignite when required. We need to be patient; we need to keep doors open; and we need to re- assess the criteria we use to determine potential and place more stead on such attributes as attitude, curiosity and a decent work ethic; and finally, we need to take on board our social responsibilities in extending children beyond academic criteria and to ensure the business plan of schools does not contradict the ethics and purpose of education. To do all of these things, we need to place readiness at the heart of our admissions policies and make our schools truly inclusive, for failing to do so is both wasteful and wrong. 

N.B. Incidentally, Alex Fergusson won the 27 trophies in the ensuing 30 years after his appearance at the tribunal in Scotland. He just wasn't ready at St Mirren's.