AGM: John Illingworth's Speech

It is a great pleasure to be invited to speak at your Presidential dinner today. This is my first visit to Arundel and it is a very pleasant surprise so thank you for inviting me.

My congratulations to Angela on becoming your President and on her excellent address earlier today. I’ve visited around 60 Divisions in the last year talking about teacher mental health and to be invited to speak about something else was a rare but very welcome pleasure.

Angela initially invited me to speak about Early Years having heard me speak on the subject at Conference last Easter. This speech is partly about that but also about on the importance of play in the learning and well-being of not just young children, but all children and adults as well.

After the meal we’ve just had I wanted to give you some food for thought. I hope you will find some of what I say thought provoking or even controversial.

I started my teaching career 35 years ago as a secondary maths teacher but it wasn’t long before I realised that early learning in maths was crucial to later development. I wanted to be involved in shaping that learning and moved to a primary school in my second year of teaching. I spent the rest of my career teaching primary aged children including 24 years as a primary head.

My experience has led me to two important conclusions about learning that I think should be at the forefront of the minds of teachers. You might call these things principles or truths. As a mathematician I’ll call them axioms. You may of course disagree with them but I believe them to be self-evident.

The first axiom is that each year in life is less significant for learning than the one before. So each year we are capable of learning less than during the preceding one. The complexity of the things we learn may increase but the totality of our learning becomes less and less significant. That is not to say that learning does not continue throughout our lives. I’m certainly still learning, but by the time you reach a certain age I think we forget more than we learn. I may well have reached that point.

However, it is little short of miraculous to witness the acquisition of knowledge and skills by a child of two. By the age of 3 a child has developed a good working knowledge of their mother tongue. They have developed physical and social skills and have a well developed sense of self-determination. They can already demonstrate quite sophisticated traits such as empathy, although they wouldn’t know what it was called. They can sing, rhyme and dance. They can count, sort and organise. The downside is that by 3 the gap between the high and low achievers of the future is already developing. Why is this, and how can all this learning have taken place before a child is exposed to any formal education?

This brings me to my second axiom.

Learning often takes place without teaching and teaching does not always result in learning. Therefore, more teaching does not always lead to more learning.

This is important because increasingly those who control our education system plan on the basis that teaching will automatically lead to learning. They conversely assume that failure to learn must be because of bad teaching or not enough teaching.

Learning is almost only measured only by crude tests and the credit or blame for success or failure placed firmly at the door of teachers.

But learning is about much more than that which can be tested. Indeed, success in a test is no guarantee of long term learning. Primary teachers regularly observe that pupil’s learning is not retained from one day to the next never mind in the longer term. How we learn is crucial.

Early Years teachers know that just as much is learnt through ‘play’ as through ‘work’. Here is an example of what I mean. I used it in a speech at 2007 Conference so if you heard it there I apologise for the repetition. I understand however that some delegates went for a coffee during the Early Years debate but this time you will have to listen. Lock the doors please!

Shortly before I retired as a primary HT, I was visiting the nursery outdoor area on a warm sunny morning. the teacher had set up a range of around 20 activities for the children which included a large sandpit. Sitting near it I noticed a 3 year old girl who was playing in the sand . The sandpit was half in the sun and half in the shade and she was dragging her fingers through the sand. As she moved from shade to sun it was clear that she had discovered something and she repeated the action several times smiling to herself. She looked at me, came over to me and took my hand leading me to the sandpit. She carefully placed my palm on the sunny sand and then the shaded sand. She repeated this. Not a word had been spoken throughout this by either of us until this point. I had witnessed several things:

Her learning of a scientific concept,
Her intrinsic joy that accompanied her discovery,
Her desire to communicate her discovery and reinforce the communication,
Her effective non-verbal communication skills,
Her appropriate social interaction.

I don’t think the nursery teacher expected the heating of objects through the sun’s radiation to be a learning outcome for the morning, but nonetheless the learning took place and I contend it has a better chance of being remembered and retained than a theoretical science lesson that sets out to teach that concept. The teacher was planning in the expectation of many possible learning outcomes and was successful.


We should all accept that this kind of learning takes place all the time.
It is therefore no accident that the pre-school child who comes from a language and experience ‘rich’ home is likely to have much higher levels of informal learning than one from a poor family with a meagre experiential and language diet. I believe this factor explains the achievement gap which emerges before the age of 3. That gap continues to grow even after formal school begins because a high proportion of learning continues to take place outside the school. The school cannot fully compensate for a child’s lack of experiences and it is disingenuous to pretend it can.

Even in school, much of what a child learns emanates from the peers they learn alongside. If your peers have a wealth of talent and experience some will be passed on to you. If you attend an unpopular sink school sadly such peer learning is likely to be diminished. So, whether a school is perceived as good or bad, popular or unpopular, often becomes a self fulfilling cycle.

This philosophy of learning through play and discovery is not new. It is enshrined in the much discredited Plowden Report of the 1960s. Of course, leaving the child to learn in an ad hoc manner with no structure or formal teaching is absurd but no more absurd than to take the view that all that is worthwhile can be tested and learnt through formal teaching.

As a HT, I encouraged teachers to change their teaching age group from time to time if they wished to do so. When these changes were announced I was always amused that parents congratulated a teacher because they had been ‘promoted’ to teach a class of older children or commiserated with if they had been ‘demoted’ to teach younger ones.

The view that small children are only playing and therefore can be taught by less qualified staff is absolutely wrong but it is widespread and even some HTs have replaced teachers with TAs in Early Years classes. This demonstrates an appalling lack of understanding about how children learn.

Creating and structuring learning activities in early years needs particular skills and teachers of older children have much to learn. Young children, helped by their teachers, make choices about what they learn, when they learn, and how they learn. Activities are designed by teachers which appeal to different learning styles and preferences. Social and emotional learning is seen as just as important as early acquisition of literacy and numeracy, although other countries are more advanced in understanding that formal teaching of these subjects has no place until the age of 6 or 7. If the social, emotional and language foundations are well established through play then it is easy to build on them. However failure to lay such firm foundations will undermine a child’s education throughout their school career.

So, why do we foster such choice and independent learning amongst our very young learners, and then remove the choice from them as they get older? This removal of choice doesn’t only apply to children. Why are teachers often forced to following more and more prescriptive teaching methodologies? Does prescription for learners or teachers improve the outcome?
Not according to the report in yesterdays INDEPENDENT, published after I had written this speech. The front page headline ‘Damning official report says political interference has stopped our teachers teaching, prevented children learning and set back the quality of education for a generation” (Every other front page yesterday was about Prince Harry’s return from Afganistan!) I agree with the reports findings.

The distinction between ‘work’ and ‘play’ is also not helpful in promoting learning. If children and adults learn through play, and we know they do, if they are more highly motivated in play situations than those perceived as ‘work’ why do give play so little value?

I have recently come to the conclusion that a third ‘axiom’ is also crucial for learning.

For effective learning to take place the brain needs recreation and recovery time.

All work and no play really does make you dull. If we want sharp enthusiastic citizens the two Rs are both essential

The ‘Gradgrind’ approach to work in both schools and adult life is often promoted as one of productivity, value for money and wealth creation. Education is too often seen by politicians as the place where skills for work are obtained. Fulfilment in life is seen as secondary to the demands of the world of work.

British citizens work the longest hours in Europe, our children have the shortest school holidays, parents complain that they have little quality time to spend with their children and much of the time they do have each evening is wasted on home ‘work’ set by teachers chasing test targets. Exeter University Research shows that homework is of no value and may be counterproductive. However, time spent by children and parents engaged in joint activity (playing together perhaps!) or just in simple conversation has a huge impact on achievement at school. Even argument between parents and children has benefit in developing thinking.

Politicians and business leaders advocate the higher levels of economic growth based on our long hours culture, driving more parents back into work. with childcare at both ends of the school day adding to the demands placed on schools.

My work during the last two years on teacher mental health has demonstrated the disastrous consequences which may follow an ‘I will work harder’ approach by teachers. Insufficient play and recreation is the cause of illness amongst many teachers not to mention its impact on their children and partners. Teaching is now accepted as one of, if not the most stressful occupations and much of this is driven by excessive workload. But teachers are far from being exceptions, the workload in other occupations and the work demands we place on our children are also excessive.

There are high levels of dissatisfaction amongst many people in Britain. Mental illness is on the increase, our children, according to UNESCO, are the unhappiest in the developed world. Levels of drug addiction and the crime that feeds addiction are very high. Binge drinking and obesity is on the increase. These are indicators of a society that is not at ease with itself and all have significant financial costs. Even the ‘bottom line’ accountants should question the sense of our heavy workload culture.

I believe we need a rethink of how we approach the balance of play and work in our lives and we should all reflect on our own lifestyle. Lunch is not for wimps. Next time you are in a situation where you are tempted to work through your lunch, are invited to a working lunch or even breakfast – think first. Take a break or a walk in the park. Sit down to some slow food with your family or friends. Don’t always set homework – give the kids a break – think of their rest and recreation; and because you won’t have to mark the homework you’ll have more time to play with you own children or friends. A win win situation!

These are just a few examples but what is really required is a shift in our thinking about work and play.

We must also resuscitate Education. Education is not just what can be tested and therefore taught, not just that which is utilitarian or useful for the workplace. We need to return Education to it’s former glory.

Education is worthwhile for its own sake and can illuminate our lives. Teachers should champion true Education and not the mechanistic process the Government seeks to imposes on us.

We should stamp out the kind of teaching that is turning children off books and poetry. We should restore art, music and drama to their proper place in the curriculum.

Weekly announcements from the Department for Carpets and Soft Furnishings of initiatives like 5 hours of sport, 5 hours of culture, citizenship lessons, and so on mean nothing whilst teachers are shackled by the most harsh accountability measures and the longest working hours in the developed world.

So who should lead the Education renaissance which is long overdue? I can think of no better group of people than our EY teachers, like Angela your new President, who best understand the learning process.

We need to free teachers, free children, free our citizens from a life driven by targets, drudgery and the demands of the global economy.

More play and less work all will make us brighter, happier, more productive citizens.