Anniversary of a fluttering wing...

One of the books I read with great interest when I was a young teacher was the book published soon after the noisy conclusion to the so-called William Tyndale affair. A small group of radically-inclined teachers in the William Tyndale School in London, led by the school's headteacher, set about shaping the school to their progressive principles, and fairly quickly found themselves mired in a mess of protesting teachers and parents, tabloids on the warpath, and an education authority that had no idea how it should sort the mess out. The new regime in the school crashed and burned! Looking back now, the core of what Ellis (the headteacher) and his sidekicks were trying to do was simply not all that revolutionary - in strictly educational terms they were attempting to establish something akin to the 'integrated day' in the school. But, like too many unsophisticated radicals who allow the fire in their bellies to overwhelm any scrap of political nous any of them might be able to offer, they put their own vanity and their zeal before the need to ensure change is genuine and sustainable. At the time, I remember having a lot of sympathy for their underlying views, but none at all for the way they went about trying to implement those views. It would be a massive irony if, as Gerald Haigh so strikingly suggested in a recent TES article - Flutterings from the Tyndale Affair - the Auld Report, produced in response to the Tyndale mess, was the tiny fluttering of the wing of a single butterfly (from Edward Lorenz's Chaos Theory) that has led today to the situation in the English education system that Haigh describes as a "highly regulated regime with a national curriculum, prescribed lessons and the most comprehensively tested children in the world." Did Ellis's botched attempt at educational radicalism, "open the door to the new authoritarians," and thereby set back for a couple of generations or more, "any prospect of a truly progressive approach to teaching in our primary schools?" Scary thought for those of us seeking change today........

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© John Connell
The views expressed in this weblog are entirely my own and are not intended to reflect the views of any other individuals or organizations. All sources will be fully acknowledged.