This is a recording from 2018 with John Coe. He shares his educational experiences, views and involvement with the National Association for Primary Education since 1980. John sadly passed away earlier this year and I wanted to share this conversation so you can hear the essence of NAPE and their continued support for primary education.

This is my celebration and commemoration of John who has influenced me greatly.

John Coe began teaching in Essex. After primary headships, first of a small rural school and then of an urban school serving an underprivileged community; he joined the West Riding of Yorkshire authority as Inspector of Schools. His second local authority appointment extended over 16 years as Senior Adviser to Oxfordshire. In 1984 he moved into Higher Education as Course Leader of the PGCE Primary Course at the London Institute of Education. A later move to Oxford Brookes University involved him in research and both initial and in-service education. He is a Fellow of the University and a founding member of NAPE.

John Coe obituary in The Guardian

www.nape.org.uk

Hello, my name is Mark Taylor and welcome to the Education on Far podcast, The place for creative and inspiring learning from around the world.

Listen to teachers, parents and mentors share how they are supporting children to live their best, authentic life and are proving to be a guiding light to us all. Hello, welcome back to the Education on Far podcast. Today is a celebration and a commemoration of John Coe, who sadly died earlier this year here.

And I wanted to use this as an opportunity for you to hear, in his words, what he believes primary education is all about and understand maybe how that's influenced me and some of my ideas, but also a way to sort of celebrate his life and everything that he's done for primary education. Now, going forward, NAEP are going to collate some of his articles, his writings, and make this into something that you can read and be a part of.

And I will keep you aware of all of that as it develops. But today, this is my way of saying thank you to John and to Nape and everything that they stand for. And I really hope you enjoy this.

Morning.

So, let's start with a bit of professional background in terms of your experience in education and your general work life to this point now.

So, you see, I've been around a good time, a couple of headships, a very formative experience as head of a small school that really has conditioned a lot of what I think and believe about education. Primary education, then up to the West Riding as Inspector of Schools. Inspector is not really the right word.

We were more advisors, we were more supporters of schools trying to improve what was happening and certainly talent spotting to see people who were promised England could move forward. I went from there to Oxfordshire where I worked for 16 years as the senior source of advice in the county.

Then about to retire, I set up as a writer at home, but soon got attracted to London and to the Institute of Education where I led the primary PGC for a number of years.

Decided then again to retire, but came back to Chargrove only to be recruited by the Polytechnic, now the University Brookes University Oxford Brookes, to work on their pgce. So there we are I've been through the mill on every side and still.

Going strong, like I said, really gives you not just an insightful idea of education, but actually a sort of a global feel of what it's like in each area.

Yes. Both inside the classroom. Well, in fact, my work has always led me inside classrooms, even if it wasn't my own room.

I was in a position of helping within another person's room and also outside internationally. I've done a lot of work across the world when I was younger, but I've moved on since then.

Yes.

It was founded on the knowledge that primary education was neglected in the national scheme of things, both in resource terms, but more important even than that, neglected in terms of respect and acknowledgement of the vital part that the education of young children at their pre, primary and primary stages of life that that colors everything they do in education. And this wasn't recognized at the time and it's still not properly recognized today.

And I think one of the.

One of the things that really strikes me, having been involved now for sort of three years or so within naep, is that the whole sense of children living their life at the appropriate time and the sense that you are only, as NAEP does, say between 0 and 13 each year, each year that goes by, they actually should be living their life at that appropriate age rather than just actually setting them up for whatever the future happens to hold. And that's really a key essence to what the association's about, if I'm right.

Yes, you're absolutely correct.

The view of education as a whole, which NAEP continually campaigns against, is that the primary stage is merely a preparation for the proper education which occurs at the secondary stage. Have you.

Is that it's experience that enables children to learn and to grow, and the richness of that experience at that stage of life that's very important in shaping them as men and women.

And how many people were involved when it first started out? Who was that initial group of people?

Well, the initial group was about 10 or 12 people, really. There were criticisms from the unions who worried we were setting up as a teacher union, which of course we've never been right from the first.

And I'm proud to have been the person who initiated this at the Inaugural meeting.

I insisted, and this was immediately agreed, that membership of NAEP should be open not only to teachers, but and their assistants, professionals, if you like, but also to parents and families. That's a vital part of NAEP's existence. And it began then at the inaugural meeting.

And it is that sense of. I don't know if community is the right word, but I guess it must be.

I mean, extended family, really, like you say, whether it's parents and grandparents and the children, but also as that expands into their school life with their teachers and like, say, assistants and everything. It's.

I think when you feel like everybody's working together to support children, Children and to give them that environment to grow and to learn, I guess, in that sort of holistic family environment, I guess that really just sets the. Sets the scene for something which is very expansive and. And, I don't know, fruitful, I think might even be.

Be a good word in terms of being able to just sort of live your life on your terms as you start to progress through and.

And as the knowledge and experiences that you have during school, they just give you a sense of, I guess, finding out who you are and what you want to do and what you like to do as you go through, especially through those early primary stages.

Yes, you and I are teachers, Mark, and of course we believe in our work, and it is important.

But on the other hand, what men and women are like, not only the skills that they have, but more than the skills, their attitude to their personal skills, their expectations of themselves and others, their philosophy. Although most people would not claim to have a philosophy, they have got it.

It is the framework that shapes, that colors their actions, that comes through the home initially through mother and father, brothers and sisters, carers. And soon as the children reach into adolescence, it comes from the peer group, from the other children with whom they are friends and acquaintances.

So teaching is important. Of course it is. But equally important is the upbringing that every family gives to its children.

And in terms of NAEP working together across all of these.

All of these people, whether it's parents, grandparents and teachers and people within the profession, how's that sort of practically worked over the years in terms of the sorts of things that NAEP's been involved in or initiatives that they've done or things that they've campaigned for?

Well, we receive a lot of support from parents and increasingly in recent years, organizations of parents. I'll return to that a little later on.

The difficulty, of course, and I'm not in any way seeming to be critical of parents as a body, but their overwhelming interest in school for their children occurs when the children are actually inside their primary schools as pupils.

When they grow beyond that and they enter secondary education and then higher education or further education, they have an equal pressing concern, but they leave primary behind. That means that the parental contribution to naep's work has always been ephemeral. For a few years, it's very strong.

We've had very strong people in our organization over the years we've been going, but in time they've all moved on. And I think we have to recognize that it's part of life. We can't help it happening.

But increasingly, we're getting a lot of support from groups of parents coming together nationally because they're so concerned about actions on the part of government, not one particular government, but successive governments over, say, the last 30 years, which seem to have had the impact of denying their children their childhood. The rich time, the fulfilling time of being a child, right and acceptable in its own right.

When you're seven, when you're eight, when you're nine, when you're four, you will never have that time of life again. You have it just once. All of us have it just once. And that's why we have to live to the full at that time.

And parents have come together in recent years to form organizations like Let Our Kids Be Kids, for example, More than a score, which is an organization of parents very active, which looks at primary education as much more than the standard assessment tasks with which government confronts the children at the age of 10 or 11.

And NAEP as an organization, while it may only have one or two parents involved at national level, nonetheless it strongly welcomes the advice, will always be welcoming to hear from parents about their concerns, their interests and their wishes. We want to retain that essential character as an organization of being parents and teachers in partnership.

And have you actually experienced, or have you got an example of a school or a local area where that's really worked in a way that you could almost, if you could have it as a blueprint and move it around the country that you could actually share with us?

I wish I could be more positive in answering you, Mark. Now, it's no one's fault except government, I'm afraid.

Government actions, as I said just a moment ago, in the last 30 years or so, have had the purpose, unintended purpose, but the real purpose, the effective purpose of putting parents and teachers in opposition to each other.

Because the overriding principle at work behind the actions of the state, through successive governments has been that the parent is a consumer of education and not, as NAEP will have it, a partner in education. Now, if you're a consumer, you want quality checks, you want an appeals procedure.

If you're not sold the right product, you want checks and balances, you say, here is my child. Deliver education to that child.

If you don't, I'll be critical of you and we'll sack you and we'll find another school or we'll convert your school to an academy. We will take action against you.

And so the political actions which have characterized the last 30 years have driven a wedge between teachers and parents. Now, when I talk to teachers, I was in school last week, they deplore this.

They deplore it, but nonetheless they have to deal with, with the reality of it, that parents will see themselves, they are conditioned to see themselves as consumers of a product and not as partners.

So the way forward, and I strongly believe that if we choose this way forward, if we can persuade others in government to choose this way forward, if we can really establish a partnership of trust and confidence between parents and teachers so that the parent sees how important they are in education, not that they should necessarily accept all the teachers said is gospel, they have right to be critical and the teachers have a right to be critical of the parents. If the relationship is right, well, then it can stand criticism on both sides.

But effectively we have to change from the consumer view to the partnership view. If we can do that, then we will move forward and primary education will be able to achieve much more than it's achieving at the present time.

And I find that position really interesting because as a parent of myself, you know, I've had three children going through the education system and now from a sick form age to someone taking GCSEs, to someone who's just been through the SATs in primary going into secondary.

Do.

You feel that the teachers are, like you said, a little bit between a rock and a hard place?

In as much as they're having to deliver what they're told because of the government policies and the way that education is set up at the moment, but at the same time, like you said, parents who are sort of campaigning almost for like the more.

More than a score in terms of wanting a more rich, diverse curriculum or experiences for their children, the teachers sometimes find it hard to be able to deliver that because of what they. They think they have to deliver because of Ofsted or the way that they're actually inspected.

Or do you believe that actually there's a little Bit more, a little bit more thought needed than that.

Because actually there are schools out there that while they still have to deliver the types of policies that obviously are required of them, they're actually.

Their understanding and their breadth of knowledge and understanding that they want to bring to their children is such that they are actually still able to bring as wide an experience and diverse curriculum as they can without, without stopping that policy that's needed, but actually in some ways enhancing that despite whatever those policies may well be.

Yes, there's no doubt at all that a majority, and I measure my words, a majority of primary schools establish very good and effective relationships with the parents. But I return to my previous words. They are doing so in the face of adverse pressures from the state.

We must not underestimate, ever underestimate, the current pressures upon the teaching body in this country, the tenure of teachers, how well they can trust that they'll remain in work next year, next week, next month. That tenure is a lot more risky than ever it was.

The accountability pressures in this country are very great, perhaps even greater at the secondary stage than at the primary stage because you have the great gods of the GCSE O level and A levels and all the rest with which the parents have a right to measure the work of a secondary school. But equally the pressure is on primary schools as they look at the sets of the 11 year old, the 10 year old tests which children have to take.

So acknowledging the pressures on the teachers, and they're very great indeed, the majority of primary teachers, a majority, certainly a majority, I would say 80% of them, 80% of those that I meet do their level best to establish a productive relationship with teachers, with parents.

But it has to be said it is a form of recovery from the poor situation which government has engendered by making parents into consumers of education instead of partners. The partnership is at its richest most productive in the early years in nurseries and in preschool classes. That's very close.

Unfortunately, as the children get older, the shades of the prison house begin to close in.

And as they approach sats, then of course the emphasis goes onto the examination and we have, and it's right to say again, I choose my words carefully, we have a test directed curriculum in primary schools. In too many schools we have to change course, we have to establish a partnership.

Parents have an enormous amount to give and teachers must draw upon it.

And I certainly had some of these conversations when my daughter was going through SATs recently. We had a couple of examples of PE being cut because they were needing to improve Their English and all of the, the fun things.

All the things which, like we said, a fantastic part of primary school, like residential trips and things like that all get put right to the end of the year after the import or the, the not important SATs, as they're told, happen, but everything happens after that when those things have been resolved.

And I think a really important part of some of the message that we get across to our children is that the difference between what we actually tell them, the reality of what they experience, and I think that's quite an important thing in terms of their overall well being as they grow up.

I certainly as a parent felt that it's very difficult to be able to say to children we have to do the SATs because it's something we have to do, but they're not important.

It's much more about your learning, but then at the same time doing nothing but past papers and actually not having a rich curriculum for almost an entire year, because that's what the focus has been on.

And I think actually the leading by example and actually being able to put into place the kind of environment you want despite having these sats that obviously have to be done in year six. It's probably a difficult thing to do, but there are schools out there that are managing it well.

That's very powerful testimony. Mark. You've had personal experience of the effects, the impact of SATs on the curriculum of primary schools and it's absolutely true.

Again, in a majority of schools, the really challenging things, the visits, the use of the environment outside school, the broadening curriculum to include, for example, music, which has been a casualty of the current curriculum climate that so often has had to be postponed until after the tests in May. I personally think there is an opportunity for us to improve matters if we look again at homework.

Now, homework can be considered by the school and by parents too, and by the private tutors which so often are employed to help children get a higher SAT score. It can be seen as practicing the skills, say long division or whatever it is in school which have been taught there.

I want to see homework in a different way.

I want to see a partnership between parents and teachers so that teachers get across the idea that parents can enrich their child's experience by taking them to places, by letting them meet other people, by giving them experiences which schools these days have no time to provide. A great deal can be done. Leave the teaching of the basic skills to the schools that will be most effective.

But look at homework, look at reading, look at membership of libraries, look at making books, newspapers, any piece of writing you can do, look at it as enrichment. That's what every child should be doing through their family.

And that really takes us almost full circle back to the idea that we're working in collaboration, we're working in partnership, and the most important person is the child.

And from there, like you say, then you feel like no matter what the school does or what the school has to do, as a parent, you have some real control about their education, not just in terms of their family life, but the sorts of experiences you'd like them to do.

And you know, whether you say we're going to visit this place or we're going to do some experiences of X, Y or Z, whatever that happens to be taking them to a concert, you know, going to a library, or even watching something which is something different than they might normally watch on, on, on the Internet or on television these days. And it is that interaction, it's being part of everybody's life.

And as you said, if you're not then feeling like you're having to teach your child as well, because that's certainly been an experience of mine, sometimes that some homework has come home but they've not actually to do, and we've sort of been scrabbling around trying to work it out.

And then, and then you have an interesting conversation and I think very powerful conversations that we've had with our children in terms of just because you're told to do something isn't necessarily a reason for you to actually do it.

You know, if you have a question and you don't understand it, then you should feel like you can go back to the school and say, I wasn't able to do it because I didn't understand it. Could you help me? Could we do something else on it? That's a really, really important thing, I feel.

And it's something which I think all of our children have struggled with because they don't want to get into trouble, they want to be good, they want to be praised, they want to feel like they're doing well.

And the whole sense of learning in terms of the ebb and flow of conversations between grown ups and children, the whole idea of being able to fail and then be able to learn through that failure and be able to then move on as something which is part and parcel of how you grow and how you learn seems to have gone, I think, somewhat because it's how well I'm doing on the test, for example, or the fact that you should be able to do it even before you've learned it.

And I think that's what puts a lot of pressure on children these days, and also parents in terms of feeling like there's some competitive element, which I guess is always going to be the case when the exams are going to be the focus.

You've touched upon another adverse effect of the emphasis on tests. You see, the children pick these things up. They are aware how important the tests are not for themselves.

Very often parents like you, Mark, and teachers of your child will say, it's not all that important. Do your best, and that's good enough. But the children know only too well how important SATs results are to their teachers and indeed to their school.

So the impact of that has been that they must not never fail. They must move from success to success to success without once doubting or questioning or learning from their mistakes.

And yet learning from one's mistakes are one of the most important ways of learning.

So the impact of the sats has been to constrain education, to limit it to a search for success, and to deny the natural failure which will come to all of us at some time in our life. We have to contrive somehow by softening the.

The assessment system, by making it more realistic, by making it more a partnership between parents and teachers. Of course we want to assess what's happening at 11, of course we do.

And we should sit down with parents and look at the child and talk to the child and understand that child in order to prepare them best for the future. But we must change the impact always on success. It is having a very damaging effect on the quality of education as it is at the moment.

And I think while.

And we've talked about this already on the NAEP podcast, in terms of, as a national association, you know, we do have the ability to speak to ministers, to put our message across, to write papers that can really strongly say how we feel and what we believe. But there are things that we can all do.

And one of the things I asked almost every parents evening that I went to with our children was, you've talked a lot about maths and English. Can I ask you how they're doing in pe? How are they doing in music? How are they doing in the other subjects?

And either they sometimes didn't know because they weren't actually teaching those subjects at all, or actually there wasn't time because the focus was on. I can tell you exactly how they are on the subjects which are being assessed.

And I think sometimes as parents or people around young children just asking a different Question or just sort of opening that door actually just changes everything, literally from the ground up, because it makes people think in a different way and invites them really to see things from someone else's perspective.

The effect of the SETS has been to narrow the curriculum, you're quite right. And to confine the more challenging, the richer elements of the curriculum to.

After the Teffs in the last year of primary school, that's been the impact of it.

Perhaps mathematics can be seen, at least partly, as standing alone in the curriculum, and of course, it is very much emphasized in the assessment of progress. But the narrowness of the curriculum has impacted on the teaching of English, of speaking, of reading, of writing.

The children learn specifically about those in English sessions and they learn about them in preparing for their tests.

But the curriculum should be rich and rounded and broad, so that the children, every moment they're in school, every moment, whatever they're talking, yes, even in the music lesson, even in the PE lesson, they will be learning English, they will be commanding their language. And this has been an impact of the SATs, that it's narrowed the teaching of the basic skills to set times in the day. We should see.

And certainly English is the key to primary learning. Children learn it all the time, everywhere to every minute they spend in school.

So I think one of the things that comes across a lot in our meetings is the fact that, as you just said there, we'd like the curriculum to be broader. We'd like to encourage the arts and PE to be in more integral parts of everything that's going on.

One of the things that's been successful over the years at Nap Stone has been the Festival of Voices, which obviously is a singing event which has had very different guises over the years.

Can you talk a little bit about the history of that and some of the successes of that and the amount of children that would have actually benefited from that initiative?

Well, it certainly is a very exciting element of naep's work, mainly at the moment confined to one or two regions, Oxfordshire, primarily. It began years ago through a music advisor, as they then were before music hubs.

And they had the idea that groups of children, they would call themselves choirs, of course, would come from a group of schools, maybe 10 or 12 schools.

In those schools, in the months before the festival, they would use a shared song sheet to learn the songs and, of course, learn the words, because you don't get the best singing if the children are bent over the song sheet and then suitably prepared and practiced.

They would come together, the children, for a day and would have a rehearsal and for the first time they would be singing a favorite song, not only, not only in their own choir, but sharing with several hundred other children and of course a very powerful occasion. And very often work of high musical quality would be drawn out of the children led by a gifted conductor.

And such occasions in the afternoon the parents would come in and the hall, wherever it was being held, would be filled with parents and teachers and the children singing together for the first time as a huge choir. And this would be the festival.

And certainly it's been one of the best examples of parent teacher partnership which NAEP has engaged in over the years.

Going forward as an association, I think the expansion of those ideas, the sort of the leading by example in terms of being able to set up events or expand existing events where we're able to show exactly what that's like.

And the great thing about music in the arts, of course, is that it's a very emotional, it's a very tangible thing that we can actually all experience and share at one, at one moment in time.

You know, of course, over the course of an academic year or over the actual primary school years of children, that there's work and there's day to day life that goes on around it.

But I think these memorable moments of really emotionally connecting experiences which can, as you said earlier on, in terms of the partnerships between everybody and the community of everyone involved.

Because of course you're not just within a school, you're either out in the community, at a venue, outside of a school, or it's certainly an experience that one school can't put on on its own. That's a real gift that NAEP is able to offer, I think.

Yes.

Another impact of the emphasis on examinations has been the refusal of the state through its policies to see the strengths which can come from the local community.

What has happened over the last 30 years has been a massive shift of responsibility from the local, the local education authority, as once they were, to the national, the Department for Education or the Ministry of Education and its agencies like Ofsted, the inspections of schools.

Now, I spent some time, as I said right at the beginning, working for the local authority, first in Yorkshire in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and then for 16 years in Oxfordshire. And I can say with as much strength as I can summon that the local emphasis is the emphasis which gets things done. You draw upon people's motivation.

It is their school which they are involved in, it's their children. They should be more in touch with decisions as day to day issues present themselves.

The move to the centralization of education, the centralization of power in education, placing it in government's hands, has not been to the advantage of schools. The government's answer to this is that, ah, yes, but we put a lot of responsibility in each individual school.

We've set up a new kind of school called an academy, which is largely free from the local authority. And yes, we promise you, it's even free from government.

Of course, it's not directly funded by government and controlled by government ultimately through the management structures that they have.

But the rhetoric, the political rhetoric has been, and it's not a party political point that I'm making, it has been true of a New Labour government as it has been true of a Conservative government. The rhetoric is that schools are free, autonomous, they can make the decisions. But this is a lie. This is a black lie.

Because the control of schools through the inspection of schools, through Ofsted, through the National Assessment of Standards, and it occurs in primary schools much more than simply at the end of the primary school life, it's occurring almost continually through a series of tests. Right from the beginning, the control the government has, central government has over schools is complete.

And it is a lie, it is a deception to actually say that the schools are autonomous and can take decisions at local level themselves. Government are taking the decisions.

And so what do you see? Naep's strength going forward? How can we bring everybody together?

Because really, it's that following, you know, a membership of people that actually can make as much difference as we possibly can, just in terms of getting this message out there, just in terms of sharing these ideas, which I think, as you said, parents and teachers would all wholeheartedly agree with, because that's how often they see education and the learning of young people.

So what is it that NAEP can do specifically, or in terms of more generally, to sort of support people, to actually be involved, whether it's to become a member or to actively support the children in terms of what they can say directly to schools, if you're a parent or from schools, if they're teachers or heads.

Well, our experience as a voluntary association of parents and teachers has been similar to most other voluntary associations in whatever field you might like to mention. I'm afraid, in my view, the days of the membership, the paper membership of associations is almost over.

What we have now is the Internet and we have means of communication which didn't exist 50 years ago. And of course the Internet, the social structures via the Internet, are infinitely preferred by the majority of younger people. And Their parents.

We have to recognize this. We can call a conference, we can lower the fee for the conference till it's laughably small.

We can provide the best speakers and still we find it hard to assemble more than 20 or 30 people in a room. The means of communication, the involvement is through the web, is through the social organization set up through the web.

We have to move in that direction, which is why so much of the future mark of NAEP depends upon people like you. Well versed in this new skill. I'm afraid my days are coming to an end, much to my regret.

Oh yes, I write articles and I publish and I write books and so on, but I don't know, very often I'm talking to people like me, I'm not Talking to the 22 year old father, the 23 year old mother of this child. They are looking elsewhere for communication and involvement. And thus the future is the Internet. I am perfectly sure of it.

And that really has been the driver for setting up this podcast.

You know, the ability for everybody to be able to hear naep's voice, to understand what it's about and bring everybody together under one banner, really. And I think it's a really exciting time from that point of view.

I think the ability, as you said with the Internet, for in terms of us getting our message out is really important, which is the reason that I'm speaking to lots of the council members to get their experience and their history.

And as for those of you listening to actually hear exactly what we believe and what we're trying to do and how we're trying to support you, but it is also a two way street. We're also really keen to hear from you, what is it that you need?

And as we go forward, it's really important for us to know your struggles, the things that you need help with, the things that we can support you with. Because what we're able to do is do this on multiple levels, which is what's very difficult as an individual.

As we've said, we are able to speak to ministers, we are able to have consultations with people who do make decisions, but at the same time we can also talk to you individually.

We can also support you with creating something which will help you solve a problem, whether that's, how do you, as we talked about homework and how do you go about that, you know, how do you see your life as a parent in the overall scheme of your child's education, if you're a teacher, how do you get over that struggle of feeling like you don't want to just be teaching the maths and English and be assessed and be judged on that. You want it to be broader. But how do you do that?

Well, we're starting to bring together schools and teachers and parents and educators as a community so that we can share with you the good practice that's happening that we believe is actually can make a difference as long as you're able to make a difference and support it overall. And so that's an exciting thing to do.

It's challenging and it's going to be working a very different way, and we'll continue to work on all of those levels. But I think, as John quite rightly said, it probably is the future and it is a way for us to communicate.

And we're always open for you to get in touch and actually share your thoughts and your opinions and also your experiences, because it's only hearing what's happening at every level that we can really understand and move forward. So, John, thank you very much for chatting to me today.

Well, I've been delighted to take part in the podcast. I still think I have a contribution to make and will keep on making it until I can no longer manage that.

But my contribution will have to be in influencing national policies. I think naep's strength has to come back to the locals. I think local associations are important, and I think the podcast is tremendously important.

My own contribution will be to try and influence government that I always tried to do and that I will continue to do until I die.

Thank you so much for sharing your time today.