Table Of Contentthe best years of their
lives?
pupils’ experiences of school
Cedric Cullingford
For Mary Morrison
First published in 2002
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
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© Cedric Cullingford, 2002
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 0-203-41697-X Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-44326-8 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0 7494 3795 2 (Print Edition)
Contents
Preface viii
Introduction 1
1. Research methods: hearing what pupils say 14
The sample and method 14
Ethical issues with pupils 16
Informed consent? 17
Listening to children 19
Institutionalizing ethics 20
Prescriptive versus descriptive approaches 21
Real consent 23
The role of the researcher 24
The boundaries of confidentiality 25
Responsibility, accountability and democratic control 26
Conclusions 28
2. Submission? Pupils’ attitudes to school 36
Formative stages? 36
Finding the positives 37
Rites of passage of a kind 38
The demands of school 39
Control and disorder 42
The routine of school 44
3. Pupils’ perceptions of the purpose of school 48
What purpose? 48
v
The social context 50
Outcomes or judgements? 52
Reasons for being in school? 54
From work in school to paid work 58
4. Nostalgia or regret? The summary experience 62
The past is another country? 62
Looking back on experiences 64
Regrets, personal; and institutional 69
The central part of life 72
Happier days? 74
5. The subject of the curriculum 77
The National Curriculum as a necessity 77
The given core 79
Subjects and knowledge 82
Usefulness and utility 84
6. Skills learnt in school: for use or survival? 86
The monument of knowledge 86
What should be learnt? 88
Formal and personal skills 90
What are ‘key’ skills? 92
Skills of schools and skills of living 94
The most essential skill 97
7. Experiencing school: learning about 101
relationships
The essential learning 101
The anti-social undercurrents of schools 103
The social atmosphere of learning 105
Waiting for something to happen 107
All that remains unnoticed 109
The seeking of challenges 111
vi
The half-hidden malaise of school 113
Culpable witness 115
8. Pupils’ relationship with teachers 119
The role of teachers 119
The dominance of being taught 123
The psychological absence of teachers 125
Fairness and unfairness 127
The inner curriculum of teaching 130
Teacher dependency 133
Teachers as roles, teachers as people 135
9. The learning styles of pupils 138
Teaching styles and learning styles 138
Groups, gangs and tribes 141
Learning to survive 143
Working together or in competition 145
The temptations of groups 148
Avoiding routines 149
The pleasures of collaboration 151
Conclusions 155
10. School and life beyond 157
Rites of passage 157
Do schools connect? 161
School as employment 163
The ambivalent security of school 165
The exposure to the job market 167
Conclusions 171
11. The social context of school 172
Conclusions 192
vii
References 207
Index 214
Preface
The origins of this research lie in a project designed to explore all
the most positive links between the experience of schools and
young people’s subsequent careers in employment, whether they
go straight to work or gain more qualifications through university.
The approach taken with the many interviews with pupils in Years
10 and 11 was to find out what they had learnt in school and
what had been most helpful to them in their subsequent careers.
It was also to discover their attitudes towards different
possibilities of future careers. The positive approach taken here
deserves emphasizing as it highlights the contrasts between the
tone of the interviews and the subsequent findings. What this
research reveals might not be a surprise to many, and will
probably stir up corroborative evidence in those who reflect upon
it, but nevertheless the results are, as in the best empirical
research, unexpected as well as consistent.
The analysis of the data has taken a considerable amount of
time, during which the experience of conducting other research
and writing other books has naturally had an influence. The time
taken on analysing the transcripts is due to trying to make certain
that what was emerging was valid and reliable. The unexpected
nature of the consistencies comes through a process of constant
interrogation of the evidence. This scrutiny arose out of
questioning the possibilities of either a tendency to deny what the
interviewees revealed, or a temptation to seek for corroborative
evidence for a personal bias. Every care was taken to make sure
that, despite all the individual differences and many small
idiosyncrasies, the results are a true statement of a deep-seated
problem. One of the ironic difficulties of the analysis is the
splendid resilience of the pupils—putting up with what is
happening to them and trying hard not to complain.
In the analysis of the manuscript there was not so much a
tension between the surface answers and the underlying
revelations as a slow realization of the implications of what the
ix
pupils were saying. Their revelations might be unexpected but
they are not shocking or meant to shock. What is surprising is the
consistencies of young people’s experiences and the challenges
they present.
The sample comes from a wide spectrum of socio-economic
backgrounds, from schools different from each other in many
ways. Whilst the interviews are with pupils from Years 10 and 11,
as well as with some school leavers as yet jobless, the experiences
they present are a reflection on the whole of their experience of
school. This is the chance for them, in the context of their leaving
or going on to the next stage, to analyse the overall meaning of
school.
The pupils are summarizing the accumulation of years of
schooling, or many thousands of hours—Rutter et al (1979)
reminds us it is 15,000 hours in secondary schools—a large
amount in this context of their lives as a whole, with other
influences, other learning experiences, and relationships with a
wide range of people, some intense and many ephemeral. These
reflections are not just about their immediate circumstances but
are the outcome of years of observation.
People are rarely asked to express their thoughts on their
experience. What they say might be not only surprising but
challenging. There will be some people who find the truth too
shocking or undermining. One reason that young people are not
heard, or if they find their voice are not listened to, is because
people are somewhat afraid of what they say (Pugh, 1997). They
challenge the unexamined assumptions of the educational
system, a system to which many people are directing their
careers. It can feel undermining to have the routine bases of
action challenged.
The problem is that there seem to be almost separate worlds of
schooling or, at least, the perceptions of schooling. We know the
rhetoric of school effectiveness, league tables, standards and
accountability constantly employed by all of those involved in
politics whether supported by a political party or a newspaper.
This language, with its acronyms and terminology and underlying
assumptions, is understood by pupils, but is almost completely
alien to their experience (Jeffrey, 2001). Pupils are aware of what
is going on but their own world is quite different, quite separate.
One of the most telling challenges in understanding what the
interviewed pupils were saying was to distinguish between
different uses of similar terms, to deconstruct some of the
seemingly familiar rhetoric into quite distinct meanings.
Pupils hear the rhetoric of effectiveness and targets every day.
