FORUM: We must ensure every child matters

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Published: 16 June, 2011

IT’S time to reclaim education for our children. The charter enshrines education as a universal and inalienable human right and affirms the public provision of quality education as a fundamental entitlement of all children.  

It aims to encourage a debate about what schooling is for and how schooling provision should be made, and schools organised and funded, to ensure that every child does matter.  

It also emphasises that schooling should contribute to the rounded development of children with the confidence, self-worth, values and skills that make them fit for living in civil society and contributing to the social and economic life of the community.  

Teachers should not be expected to teach all year round only towards high level test and examination results.

In The Case for a Learner’s Charter I argue  that it is time for school students to organise themselves and, with the support of their parents and teachers, reclaim education and rescue schooling. 

The schooling debate tends to be about improvement or otherwise in school examination results on the one hand and disruptive, undisciplined and underperforming students on the other. 

It is a debate that often fails to compare like with like, dismissing considerations of class, culture, geographical environment and parents’ ability to exercise, if not buy, choice of school.  

This preoccupation with disruptive, undisciplined and underperforming students is part of a wider construction of “youth” in society, with a focus on anti-social behaviour and Asbos, under-age drinking, teenage pregnancies, youth crime, street violence, inadequate parenting and inadequate parents and government and schooling interventions that are principally about league tables and about exclusion and punishment. 

The Case for a Learner’s Charter argues that a failure to help school students develop insight and emotional intelligence, irrespective of their background, and to embrace the values that make them fit for living in civil society is costly, especially given the correlation between school exclusion, underachievement, social exclusion and youth offending.

• Professor Gus John is an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Education, University of London, and Associate Professor at the Institute’s London Centre for Leadership in Learning. In 1989, he became the UK’s first black director of education, following the abolition of the Inner London Education Authority where he was Assistant Education Officer and Head of Community Education.