‘Britain’s brightest student’ taking aim at teaching’s sacred cows
When Daisy Christodoulou’s Seven Myths About Education came out as an ebook last year, I didn’t read it. Just another rightwing moan, I thought, saying schools should get back to the 1950s, teaching nothing but facts, grammar and multiplication tables. I’d heard it all before. Like so many other such rants, it would go big in the Telegraph and Mail, and be largely ignored elsewhere.
But the book became one of the most talked-about in education in the past 20 years, prompting praise and anger in roughly equal measures. BBC Radio 4 gave her half an hour in its series The Educators. She was praised by the then education secretary, Michael Gove. A Sunday Times book reviewer reckoned she had aimed “a heat-seeking missile” at “the heart of the educational establishment”, and tipped her for head of Ofsted in 2021. This year, Routledge, publisher of scholarly education books, put Seven Myths into print.
So what’s different about Christodoulou? First, she’s young: barely 30, with just four years in secondary school classrooms behind her. Second, she writes in lucid, vigorous, jargon-free English. Third, though she makes her case with passion, she writes forensically, relying not on anecdote and assertion, but on evidence (or at least what she claims as evidence), drawing particularly on the latest research in cognitive science, and scrupulously footnoting sources. Fourth, she focuses on classroom pedagogy, not on arguments about schools’ resources or control. “We pay too little attention to the actual content of lessons: what gets taught and how it is taught,” she writes.
Above all, she aims straight for the most sacred cows to which even Tory ministers sometimes pay obeisance. Claims that you can teach “transferable skills”, that the 21st century changes everything and that “teacher-led instruction is passive” – all these are myths, she says. She is scathing about how Ofsted highlights and praises lessons where pupils do things “spontaneously”, such as spelling French words correctly, as though it were unnecessary to instruct them on such things. She dares to criticise John Dewey, a staple of teacher training courses, for his opaque writing style and to chide Charles Dickens for creating, through Hard Times’ Thomas Gradgrind and his daughter, the myth that teaching facts turns children into emotionally stunted adults. As a West Ham supporter who played for Warwick University’s women’s football team, she even critiques how we develop young footballers, arguing that children shouldn’t play 11-a-side matches on full-sized pitches until they’ve learned ball control.
I met Christodoulou at the London headquarters of the Ark academy chain, where she is research and development manager. Intense, articulate, dressed in black, she cuts a somewhat forbidding figure as she talks at bewildering speed. She argues that understanding, creativity, powers of analysis and so on cannot be learned in a vacuum: they must always be based on sound background knowledge, committed to long-term memory. “It’s said that people can look things up to get facts. But when you look up a word in a dictionary, you need knowledge to understand the definition. I remember teaching a child who wrote ‘I am good at football’, and asking him to replace ‘good’. He came back with ‘I am congenial at football’. He’d found it in a thesaurus but his grasp of English was too weak to use it properly.”
Learning to use words is like learning to drive, she says. “When you start, you rely entirely on working memory about how to change gear and so on. But you gradually commit that knowledge to long-term memory so you don’t need to think about it. Which is just as well because you need your mind free to concentrate on where you’re going and what’s on the road. Nothing is learned properly until it’s in long-term memory.” Broadsheet newspapers, she says, assume a wide range of readers’ knowledge about history, geography, politics, literature and culture generally. If you had to look up every reference, you would never get past the first paragraph.
Christodoulou is particularly critical of Ofsted for praising history lessons where pupils design heraldic coats of arms and English lessons where they make puppets of Romeo and Juliet. “It’s a question of what they’re thinking about in these lessons. And they’re not thinking about history or literature. They’re thinking about how to draw a crest shape and how to colour between the lines or about how to make puppets. Fine, if that’s the aim of the lessons, but it isn’t.” Time spent on projects often means less time spent learning.
Discovery learning, she argues, is criminally wasteful. “It’s very difficult to learn from the real world. Apples dropped from trees for centuries, but only Newton discovered the laws of gravity. As he said, we have to stand on the shoulders of giants.”
Is she seriously suggesting that schools shouldn’t teach skills and children should spend all day learning knowledge? “I’m trying to change people’s views of the relation between knowledge and skills. We’ve created a false dichotomy. Skill is bound up with knowledge. Skills are domain specific. You can’t play chess unless you’ve learned the moves. I absolutely agree that the end of education is skilled, creative, critical individuals who can sift evidence. It’s a question of how we get there.”
It is hereabouts that Christodoulou begins to lose me. She is adamant that there was never a golden age; she doesn’t believe things were better in the 1950s. Nor does she think it’s a matter of swinging a pendulum so that we have less skills teaching and more knowledge teaching. “Cutting-edge” research in cognitive science takes us into new territory, she says. Her book states: “If pupils commit knowledge to memory and practise retrieving it from memory, that will cause skilled performance … Time that is given over to teaching skills … won’t actually improve skills … Time spent imagining how to design a role play about complex moral issues in science is time not spent actually learning about atoms, compounds, mixtures and the states of matter.”
Memory of knowledge will “cause” skilled performance? Just like that? What I think she means is that skills need to be rigorously connected to well-grounded knowledge if they are to be taught effectively. The error is to teach them in isolation, as abstract entities. She tells me that, in future editions, she will make this more explicit. Most teachers, however, would say that almost nobody tries to teach skills separately from knowledge and that the only evidence Christodoulou produces to show they do are passages from Ofsted reports, taken out of context, and a Royal Society of Arts programme adopted by a small number of schools. “The programme isn’t anti-subjects or anti-knowledge,” says Joe Hallgarten, the society’s education director. “It’s a framework through which to teach competencies in addition to knowledge.”
Christodoulou was once the star – hailed by one newspaper as “Britain’s brightest student” – in a winning University Challenge team, and I suspect her exceptional facility at retaining information makes it hard for her to understand other people’s difficulties. I point out to her that the problem for most teachers is to engage children and the real issue is not that schools don’t teach knowledge but that they often do so ineffectively, subjecting pupils to dull, unimaginative, poorly presented lessons. “I completely agree that pupils have to be engaged,” she says. “Anybody can give lots of information, anybody can entertain. The difficult thing is to provide activities that advance understanding and sustain interest. Primary teachers are very good at that. I often wish I’d trained as a primary teacher.”
She comes from London’s East End and grew up in a now-demolished council tower block. Though her father (whose own father was a Cypriot immigrant) eventually qualified as an electrician and her mother as a therapist, the family also ran a stall in London’s Petticoat Lane market where she helped out. She went to a local state primary but, under the Tories’ assisted places scheme (abolished by New Labour), won a free scholarship to the independent City of London Girls, despite her father’s fears that she would turn into “a stuck-up so-and-so”. I ask her how far her views on learning were formed by her schooling but she answers, in a manner that brooks no argument, that “we hear too much from people extrapolating from their own experiences instead of looking at the evidence”.
After a first in English at Warwick, she opted for the Teach First scheme rather than academic research – “I didn’t want to spend time in libraries” – and started at an inner-city London comprehensive, which went into special measures in her second term. Difficulties with the pupils led her to read more about educational theory and cognitive science when she left after three years to take an MA in literature. “I found a body of research that hadn’t got into teacher training at all and that views widely accepted in schools were directly opposed to what the research showed.” She went back to teaching for a year, before working at the curriculum centre at Pimlico academy – part of Lord Nash’s Future Academies chain – and then at Ark.
Though she comes from a Labour family, she’s a member of the Liberal Democrats and once stood for an unwinnable council seat. She doesn’t want to talk politics, however, but sport. As she sees me out, she says she’s a Surrey county cricket club member and author of an article on how test matches echo Greek tragedy, published recently in an upmarket cricket quarterly. When I say I prefer Lord’s, where Middlesex play, to Surrey’s Oval ground, she peers at me with alarming intensity and asks “what don’t you like about the Oval?” Perhaps she could be a writer or radio commentator on sport. But she denies journalistic, broadcasting, political or academic ambitions – and indeed ambitions at Ofsted – and insists she intends to do more school teaching. We shall see.
The seven myths, according to Daisy Christodoulou
Facts prevent understanding
Teacher-led instruction is passive
The 21st century fundamentally changes everything
You can always just look it up
We should teach transferable skills
Projects and activities are the best way to learn
Teaching knowledge is indoctrination
