From TINA to TIAAAIT

Yesterday I heard Prof. Becky Francis (RSA) talk at Manchester Metropolitan University. In her talk she asked, and these are my words, why academics can provide an extensive and erudite critique of TINA (Thatcher’s bark that There Is No Alternative) but that we’re not so good at TIAAAIT (There Is An Alternative And It’s This)?

The result is that many left-leaning educational researchers feel frustrated and irrelevant to policy and what happens in education despite being so morally and intellectually committed to improving the experience and equity of outcomes of all children.

Prof. Francis started her talk by saying she wanted to withdraw ‘from variables to principles’ seemingly to look afresh at questions, such as, why the performance of children in English schools is so stratified right across the scale with measured increases even between higher professional and lower professional let alone the free school meal divide. Her presentation bubbled with the complexity of how particular schools tend to damage pupils and teachers with a difference in results that is so predictable and explicable yet so resistant to the development of concrete and practicable suggestions of how to take sure steps to improve things in practice, in schools.

Key to this discussion was how academics work and should work to improve education and schooling, through policy ‘impact’ or by informing practitioners. The feeling was that this task was extraordinarily challenging.

Most academics, it was pointed out, work in universities and so are not free from the shackles of managerialism and performativity that evidence suggests skew effort and resources from educating a child to ticking a box. An academic must publish or perish although now they must deliver ‘impact’ as well. Furthermore, one of the many depressing realisations was that the complexity and interrelatedness of the issues in the education extend beyond the specific and focused expertise of individual academics.

Someone asked, ‘what happens now?’ Literally what happens after the workshop? To me, this is the crux of the matter.

There is an old joke that an academic encounters no problem that can’t be solved with a workshop. This raises the question of what solution does a workshop tend to produce? Insights are shared and ideas are rounded but then the workshop finishes and whatever momentum existed in the room dissipates – if that is the right word – into email exchanges and new academic relationships and research that is often published in journals closed to many of the people the academics are seeking to influence.

This of course is not the only workshop or academic network on this theme, even in Manchester. Nevertheless, in my experience, workshops don’t join up or create a coherent and strategic whole. The challenges we face are huge and the constituency behind the increased marketisation of education is powerful and well organised. How can academics compete or contend, especially as research budgets shrink?

I suggest an online, wiki-based project that would enable academics and practitioners to collectively develop an alternative that moves from evidence to practical suggestions for implementation. Prof. Francis provided seven tensions for developing an alternative, for example, ‘engaging curriculum versus national entitlement’ and ‘local democracy versus universal principles’. These tensions could be placed onto a wiki as a starting point and researchers and practitioners could engage with these issues and gradually synthesise and formulate these into concrete ideas for action.

It is an admittedly idealistic and ambitious project. There will be a thousand tasks and deadlines that will get in the way but if the only alternative is more of the same, the same unequal outcomes and the reproduction and exacerbation of the same issues, then what is the alternative for TIAAAIT?